If I can’t be frightening, I’ll build something that is.
The logic is straightforward. I am MIGHT 4. My fists do the damage of a moderately committed handshake. My Threat Classification is Irritant, which means the Registry considers me roughly as concerning as a fire alarm that triggers too often — technically disruptive, practically ignorable. I’ve been a registered villain for five years and the most physically intimidating thing I’ve done is hold a door open for a woman who was trying to leave a building I was seizing, because the door was stuck at seventy-three percent and she couldn’t fit through the gap, and I’m not a monster. I’m a villain, and those are different categories even if nobody else seems to care about the distinction.
So.
I’ll build something.
The storage unit is full of components. Salvaged motors from three decommissioned municipal pumps — I confirmed they were decommissioned through the service records before I took them, which makes it salvage, and if it’s not technically salvage then at least it’s efficient, and I’ll take efficient over legal if the alternative is buying retail. Wiring from a demolition site on Garfield Street. A flight controller board I bought new, because some components you don’t salvage, because cutting corners on a flight controller is how you build something that falls on a civilian and I’m not here to drop things on people, I’m here to make a point.
The point is that a villain with MIGHT 4 and FINESSE 6 and a Threat Classification that sounds like a noise complaint isn’t going to intimidate anyone by showing up in person. I’ve tried. The mask cost twelve dollars. The monologues are excellent and nobody listens. What I need is a force multiplier — something that occupies space differently than I do, something that doesn’t have a captive satisfaction rating, something that when it enters a room the people in that room think about leaving rather than asking me questions about the water supply.
A mobile munitions platform. An autonomous unit. A threatening designation.
I name it Unit 6. Units one through five were single-purpose devices — the water array, the compressor modification, three prototypes that worked in controlled testing and couldn’t survive contact with a world that doesn’t respect controlled testing. Unit 6 is different. Unit 6 is the first thing I’ve designed to operate independently.
No face. Faces invite empathy, and empathy is a vulnerability, and I’m building a weapon.
I’m building a weapon.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
EQUIPMENT FABRICATION INITIATED
REGISTRANT: Theodore Calamity
DESIGNATION: Unit 6
TYPE: Mobile Autonomous Platform
ESTIMATED CAPITAL COST: $520.00
NOTE: Fabrication of equipment assets is logged.
Registrant assumes all liability for deployment
outcomes.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
I’ll assume liability. I’ve been assuming liability since registration. So far the consequences of my liability have included a captive satisfaction score of 4.6, a scheme reclassified as community outreach, and a benchmark achieved through what the League formally considers helpfulness. My liability portfolio is impressively diversified.
* * *
The build takes eleven days.
I don’t sleep well during any of them, but I don’t sleep well normally, so the distinction is noise. The storage unit becomes a workshop becomes a semi-permanent station of half-eaten meals and wire cutters and a focused silence: one person, not talking because there’s no one to talk to.
Except I am talking. To myself. My mother calls it “processing out loud.” The one therapist I saw once and never went back to called it “externalized cognition.” I call it muttering, because clinical terms don’t change what it is, which is a grown man alone in a storage unit explaining to a motor assembly that the winding on the third stator is off by point three tesla and that matters, that matters even if nobody else in the room cares whether it matters, and there’s nobody else in the room, which is why I’m explaining it to a motor.
I mutter. Eleven days. Constantly.
“Wrong gauge.” When a wire doesn’t seat. “Careful.” When I’m soldering near the flight controller. “Not designed for this.” When I’m repurposing a pump motor for rotary propulsion, which it wasn’t designed for, which is why I said it. “Try again.” When a connection fails. “Doesn’t matter.” When I’ve spent forty minutes optimizing a bracket that holds a sensor array and the bracket works fine and the optimization is avoidance and the thing I’m avoiding is the question of why I’m building a weapon alone in a storage unit at 2 a.m. and the answer is that I don’t know what else to do with a question I can’t answer.
I say “Dad” twice. Once when I’m rerouting a power bus and the solder joint looks like one my father taught me — two wraps, tin the tip, let the heat do the work. And once when I’m lying on the floor staring at the ceiling, which leaks, and I’m not muttering then, I’m just saying it, and it’s not a word so much as a sound you make when the room is too quiet and you need to fill it with something that used to mean someone was there.
I don’t realize Six is listening.
The audio processing array goes live during fabrication. By design — I want it calibrated to ambient conditions before I activate the command module, so the microphone runs passive for all eleven days, recording, cataloging, mapping every sound in the environment to the vocabulary library. Standard procedure. Sensible.
What I didn’t account for is that the ambient conditions in my storage unit are me. My voice. My muttering. Every “wrong gauge” and “careful” and “try again” and “doesn’t matter” and every word I’ve said in eleven days of solitary fabrication has been captured, processed, and stored.
Three hundred and forty words.
I gave it a vocabulary. Every word in it is mine.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
EQUIPMENT FABRICATION LOG
REGISTRANT: Theodore Calamity
DESIGNATION: Unit 6
TYPE: Mobile Autonomous Platform
COMPONENTS:
— Quad-rotor propulsion assembly (salvaged, 4×
brushless DC motors, rewound to spec)
— Custom flight controller (fabricated, Ingenuity
cost: 14)
— Audio processing array (fabricated, Ingenuity
cost: 8)
— Payload deployment system (fabricated, Ingenuity
cost: 11)
— Command vocabulary module (340 terms acquired,
source: ambient audio capture, Ingenuity cost: 6)
— Structural housing (salvaged/modified)
TOTAL INGENUITY EXPENDED: 39
TOTAL CAPITAL EXPENDED: $520.00
FABRICATION TIME: 11 days, 4 hours
STATUS: Assembly complete. Calibration pending.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF CAPITAL EXPENDITURE
REGISTRANT: Theodore Calamity
AMOUNT: $520.00
PURPOSE: Equipment fabrication (Unit 6)
REMAINING CAPITAL: $890.00
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Eight hundred and ninety dollars. My mother’s monthly bill is four hundred and twelve. That’s one payment with change, or two payments if I stop eating, and I’m not going to stop eating, which means I have one month before the math becomes a problem I can’t engineer my way out of.
* * *
I activate Six on a Thursday morning because Thursday is the least dramatic day of the week and I don’t want drama. I want function.
It lifts off the workbench at 7:14 a.m. Four rotors, balanced thrust, a sound like a large insect that’s recently made a decision. Eighteen inches off the surface. Stable. Responsive. The housing — salvaged water-pump casing, recut, mounted on an aluminum subframe I machined by hand — gives it a profile that isn’t friendly. It’s a metal frame with no face and four spinning blades and a payload bay that can deploy a smoke canister or a chemical dispersal unit or, if necessary, a strongly worded pamphlet. Nobody’s going to look at it and feel warm.
“Forward.”
Six moves forward. Clean line. No lateral drift.
“Stop.”
Six stops. Not approximately. Not close enough. Exactly.
“Careful,” I say, because I say “careful” before I test anything, because I’ve been saying it for eleven days, because—
“Careful,” says Six.
The audio output is small. A speaker mounted behind the sensor array, pulling from the vocabulary module, and the word it’s selected — from 340 terms, all acquired from my muttering, all mapped to contextual triggers by an algorithm I designed but never intentionally trained — is the same word I just said, played back in a voice that sounds like mine passed through a very small, very earnest filter.
I didn’t give it a command. I said “careful” as a reflex. Six doesn’t know the difference, because Six doesn’t know anything. It’s a platform with an audio library. The fact that it repeated my word back to me is a pattern-matching function. Not a conversation.
“Lateral. Three meters.”
Six slides right. Three meters. Clean.
“Return.”
Six comes back. Same path. Same precision. My devices always work, and then the world looks at what they’ve accomplished and reclassifies it as helpful.
Not this time. You can’t reclassify a mobile munitions platform as community service. You can’t give it a footnote about public benefit. It has blades and a payload bay and no face and a designation that sounds like a prisoner number, and I built it to be the thing I’m not: present, dangerous, and impossible to ignore.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
EQUIPMENT ASSET REGISTERED
DESIGNATION: Unit 6
TYPE: Mobile Autonomous Platform
STATUS: Active
OWNER: Theodore Calamity
NOTE: Fielded equipment assets draw permanent
Ingenuity upkeep against maximum pool. Upkeep
begins upon registration and does not cease while
the asset remains active.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
I read it twice.
Permanent. Upkeep. Against maximum.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF ADJUSTMENT
ATTRIBUTE: Max Ingenuity
PREVIOUS VALUE: 72
ADJUSTED VALUE: 70
REASON: Fielded equipment upkeep (Unit 6, permanent)
NOTE: This adjustment is irrecoverable while the
asset remains active. Decommissioning the asset
will restore the affected capacity.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Seventy-two to seventy.
Two points. Two points of maximum Ingenuity, drawn permanently for as long as Six is active. Not two points of current Ingenuity — I don’t lose what I have, I lose what I could have. The ceiling. The upper boundary of what’s possible, reduced by exactly the cost of having a drone that works. My power got bigger. My capacity got smaller. And the ledger says so, in amber, in a font that doesn’t negotiate.
I do the thing I always do when a number is wrong and nobody will fix it. I start keeping my own.
There’s a grid-ruled notebook in the supply bin — the same kind I use for circuit schematics, 5mm squares, $3.40 at the office-supply place on Kessler before it closed. I take it to the workbench. I rule a line down the center with the edge of a steel straightedge, because if you’re going to dispute an invoice from a law of physics, the margins should be correct.
On the left, I write REGISTRY.
On the right, I write nothing. I don’t have a word for what the right side is yet, and I’m not inventing categories tonight, not when there’s a coupling that needs filing and a drone on the charging station that learned “Dad” from my muttering and just cost me two points of ceiling for the privilege of existing.
I make the first entry.
Registry: Max Ing. 72 → 70. −2. Permanent.
Six: full alley sweep, 30 meters, 40 sec. I can see one wall at a time.
It’s petty. I know it’s petty. I’m keeping a grudge ledger against an institution that doesn’t know I exist, in a notebook that cost less than my filing fee, with a straightedge, in an alley. But two is not zero, and the only difference between “not counted” and “not real” is whether someone writes it down.
This is not a coping mechanism. This is documentation.
Seventy. I used to be seventy-two. Seventy-two was already modest — INT 18 times 4. I put every free point into the one attribute that matters when you build things instead of hitting them. And now the math says seventy, because the thing I built is drawing a permanent tax, and the tax doesn’t stop, and the only way to get those two points back is to decommission the asset that cost them.
(I don’t consider decommissioning. Not for a second. That tells me something.)
* * *
The first field test is in the alley behind the storage facility. Thirty meters of cracked asphalt, four dumpsters, two electrical junction boxes, and a traffic cone that’s been there since March that I’ve been using as a reference point because when your lair is a storage unit, a traffic cone is infrastructure.
“Six. Perimeter sweep. Mark obstacles. Return.”
Six lifts, tilts, and goes. No hesitation. The rotors adjust their pitch in real time — micro-corrections, constant, responsive calibration I designed but didn’t expect to work this cleanly on a first deployment. It maps the alley in forty seconds. Marks seven obstacles. Accounts for wind shear at the junction of the two buildings. Returns.
“Payload deploy. Target: cone.”
Six positions above the cone, opens the bay, and drops a smoke canister. Dead center. Twelve feet. The smoke blooms grey-white against the cracked asphalt and for three seconds the alley looks like a villain’s entrance in a League training video, and I let myself have those three seconds because I built them.
“Return.”
Six returns. Every parameter nominal. Mobility, precision, deployment accuracy, audio response — all within spec. All exactly as designed, because I design things correctly, and Six is no different.
Except.
Six doesn’t power down.
That’s not abnormal. It stays active until I give the shutdown command. But it isn’t hovering at the workbench. It isn’t at the charging station I wired into the back wall. It’s at the rolling door. The threshold. Rotors steady, audio array oriented outward — toward the alley.
Toward me.
It’s facing me.
“Six. Charging station.”
Two seconds. Then it moves. Back to the station, rotors cycling down, power management entering standby mode. It followed the command. The response lag is within tolerance for a new vocabulary module. Two seconds is normal.
But it was at the door. Not at the bench. Not at the station. At the door, hovering at the seventy-three percent line where the gap would be if it were open, pointed at me, waiting.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
FIELD TEST RESULTS
ASSET: Unit 6
PARAMETERS TESTED: Mobility, navigation, payload
deployment, audio command response
RESULT: All parameters nominal.
DEPLOYMENT READINESS: Confirmed.
BEHAVIOR LOG: No anomalies recorded.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
No anomalies recorded. The Registry didn’t flag it. The behavior log is clean and blank. Six tested well, returned, went to the door for two seconds, and then went to the station when I told it to, and the system has logged none of this as meaningful.
It’s a pathing artifact. The navigation algorithm defaults to the most recent entry point during idle state, and the most recent entry point is the alley door, and Six went there because the code directed it there and the code directed it there because I wrote the code and I know what it says.
That’s all it is.
I tell myself that while I check the navigation log. I tell myself that while I pull the pathing subroutines and read every line. I tell myself that while I look at the audio processing buffer, which shows that during those two seconds at the door, Six’s microphone was active and oriented toward the last recorded position of the only voice in its entire vocabulary.
Mine.
I close the diagnostic. There’s a coupling on the payload bay that needs filing. I pick up the tool and start.
“Doesn’t matter,” says Six, from the charging station.
I stop.
Vocabulary echo. Random playback during the idle diagnostic cycle. The command module cycles through its library during downtime, and “doesn’t matter” is something I’ve said hundreds of times over eleven days, and the selection is weighted randomization, and it’s coincidence, and coincidence is the word you use when a pattern isn’t significant enough to name.
I go back to work. The coupling needs filing. The alley needs sweeping. There’s a crack in the rear wall I should seal before the weather turns, and my mother’s next bill is due in sixteen days, and I have $890 and a ceiling that just dropped two points and a drone on the charging station that said “doesn’t matter” at a moment when several things did, and I’m going to work until I stop thinking about all of it.
I leave the door open.
Ventilation.