Honestly I didn’t expect us to go so far. Like, we were just doing some dumb (well, rather kinky) research on drones, which we (or I guess I) never expected to go anywhere. She was a mousy researcher, smart, knew her ways around paywalled papers; whilst I… I was kinda shy myself, but I wanted to get shit done so I pushed through it. Maybe my contribution then was being versatile enough to help a little with whatever was needed.

Given how I began this note you can probably imagine things went well, really well (I’m not being sarcastic). One day I walked into the “lab” and almost stumbled into her because she had been waiting for me right at the door. She was looking at me with pleading eyes, shrunken by the big lenses of her round-rimmed glasses, and I knew exactly what that meant.

She wanted to test the now, supposedly functioning, prototype (“trust me this time!”). It did, in fact, function and it looked incredibly hot, but as a prototype it was far from the best. And god did she let me know. After removing the bodysuit she went on a tirade about her vision, on how we were cheaping out, that we needed pure latex, that the visors needed to be better and, most of all, that it should be its own procedure and not something you could walk out of (honestly I’m not going to put in the effort to recall all her complaints, just know she was VERY passionate about it). 

In a way seeing it was possible made it all seem a bit more impossible.

We pushed through anyways, I’ve never been sure where she got her money from (does it matter considering what we’re doing already?), but she started putting more of it into the project and her vision soon started to concretize: a huge tube, some theatrical control panels, and a scrapped thinkpad working as a server for now. She got onto the chamber wearing the visor, the liquid latex rained onto her, and after a while she walked out of the chamber and up to me.

If I had to guess she was smiling behind that dark reflective glass, she made a point to say it wasn’t perfect yet but it was good enough to build upon. We had discussed the matter of naming drones before and we agreed to not enforce a standard (which ended up being a pain in the ass later as one of the drones chose the name ✡︎⚐︎🕆︎❄︎🕆︎📬︎👌︎☜︎📭︎♎︎✈︎⬥︎🗐︎⬥︎🖲︎🕈︎♑︎✠︎♍︎✈︎, which meant we had to do a little software update to accommodate it). Either way she settled for the basics and picked Drone-001, even though she hadn’t been fully assimilated yet: we still lacked the hardware, software, and better knowledge on hypnosis and brainwashing.

Can I tell you a dirty little secret? I mean, not that this all isn’t one big dirty secret but, we started this all with vibecoding… BUT, after some software devs tried to sneak in we punished them with rewriting everything from the ground up, no harm done, right? We are even considering making it open source now.

Right, sneaking into where, I still haven’t talked about the place. Well, it was her basement at the start, but after the chamber trial, Drone-001 insisted we should move to somewhere more fit to our purposes. Her proposal? An abandoned factory right in the center of the city. I tried to argue that renting a warehouse would be better as we’d have much more privacy and peace, and money had already proven not to be a problem. She just insisted on it, claiming that it was a necessity, that it is how they all do it (?), and that I should just trust her once more.

Well, fuck me backwards because she’d been right once again. Rumors started to circulate, as they were bound to, and all sorts of people started appearing and getting themselves trapped in the machinery somehow. 001 was really happy with that and I was freaking out, worried about everything coming crashing down; she just started converting them and adding to our man- dronepower.

After a while I did start to understand that these urban explorers, journalists, detectives, all came here equally unprepared and under different pretenses but shared our interest. And then the job of greeting the intruders and pretending to be an evildoer fell into my lap, as I was the only human around and was kind of pushed into being a leader? I just know that I started loving that job a lot.

I mean, who wouldn’t love having people completely at their mercy (besides the people who chose to be at someone’s mercy), being able to monologue, infodump, and them just being there, trying to keep that façade, pretending that they hate this so much. We both know the truth. And I love breaking character, stopping my spiel just to steal a kiss, being oh so loving and tender just to see them melt into confusion, faces redder than the lipstick some of them wear.

In a way this was always kind of a horny job interview, though without the unnecessary waits and ghostings. Slipped into a chamber? Consider yourself hired! Just tell me a bit about yourself first. I love learning about them, seeing all that individuality, all that potential before it's hidden beneath the latex and then unveiled by this ultimate freedom. (Honestly I just wrote this paragraph to gush about a guy, well, now a thing, that told me it liked baking… You have no idea how fucking good its cakes are, probably our best acquisition.)

Though I guess it also helps a bit with loneliness. It's a bit harsh being surrounded by only drones all day and being plain old me. I mean, I love them, they’re awesome, but sometimes I do miss that human contact, seeing marks or scars on their skin, brushing against them, feeling the smooth, the harsh, the stubby. And as much as I love seeing those rounded out plain bulges, I do love to see them come undone, showing the real thing(s), each one so distinct from the other, the flesh bearing so many details beneath that glistening sheen.

I worry that I may be crossing that dangerous point between reality and fantasy. I mean, we all want this (sort of), at which point does my role as a villain simply turns into villainy? Did I let my fantasies seep into reality? Or… did they… Maybe I just have to accept it's a compromise between me and the drones. I just hate it when real life brings these unnecessary questions up. Since when does morality even matter???

I guess that the purpose of this letter may be getting clearer as I get along. I love all of this but at the same time I have some discontentments. I never intended to be a leader, but when it kind of happened I wanted to see how it would be to actually rule. But it turns out when all your subjects are perfectly obedient (though sometimes they get a bit bratty just to rile me up) there is not any point in enforcing said rules. You just set the rules and they’ll be followed.

I feel like I’ve been lacking more and more recently, growing lazy, losing that passion I had at the beginning. It’s hard being the odd one out among such perfect dedication. 

So I’ve been experimenting, letting them push me around, leaning more into my subby side. That reminds me, last week (I guess it won’t have been last week when you’re reading this), I asked 001 and E5B849 (that’s the cake one) to take me for a spin. Honestly I don’t remember much, they put me in one of the best trances I’ve ever been in, but, when I was coming back up, still a bit groggy and all, I noticed one of them was displaying a Subway Surfers gameplay to me with its visor; I imagine the goal was to see how long it would take for me to notice. I almost sent them back to work with some well deserved kicks.

Fuck, I need to stop getting lost in tangets. See, the reason I’m writing this is because I’m going to join them. I don’t see much purpose in staying around as is, I’m not exactly skilled as I stated before, but I’ve come to realize that my role here was more one of cohesion, guiding this uniform mass into the right direction. But now I think we’re set on the right path, and that merging with them would do me- Us a big favour.

So I’ve asked my dear Drone-001 to do to me what I did to her in the very beginning, ✡︎⚐︎🕆︎❄︎🕆︎📬︎👌︎☜︎📭︎♎︎✈︎⬥︎🗐︎⬥︎🖲︎🕈︎♑︎✠︎♍︎✈︎ (it insists I write out it’s full name, but we’ve agreed on just calling it Star for simplicity’s sake) will be accompanying us too. I’m… Shaking a bit, I’m anxious about the possibility of finally joining them, being part of the collective instead of being something else bossing from the sidelines.

So pardon me for what is about to follow, I don’t know if this will mean we will let go of the handbrakes and start seeking more and more drones, or if we'll stay in this little heaven of our own. What I do know is the reason why you’re here. I know that once you finish reading and leave this room I’ll be waiting for you. Or you can simply stare at the screen in front of you.

With love, soon to be 000 <3.