The problem with trying to investigate the factory where Droid had previously lured them was there was not much left of it to investigate.

Whatever had ultimately happened to it, the assembly line had long been halted, the inventory cleared away, and what remained now was a hole where the structure had been, square and unnatural and maybe two stories deep, as if the entire thing had been lifted out and carried away. There was a flimsy chain link fence around the site now, with a large sign and artist's rendition of the combined shops and apartments set to go into the space. The painting looked far more cheerful than was warranted.

The team stood on the pavement in the broad daylight, peering as best they could over the edge of the precipice.

"Well, I'm out of ideas," Nosedive said with forced cheer. He tossed a chunk of loose cement over the fence, and it fell into the hole, landing with a plop after several long seconds.

“It might have been unjustified optimism to assume we’d catch him in the same place a third time,” Wildwing mused.

"Just because it looks like a hole doesn't mean nothing is there," Tanya said, turning on her heels and returning to the Migrator.

It was not the first time, nor the last, that Wildwing would internally lament the loss of the Mask.

"You’re all pathetic," Duke scoffed, before giving a section of the modular fence a gentle kick, letting it fall inward, and walking over it. A couple eyes glanced towards Wildwing for permission to follow.

"He's got a point," Wildwing admitted. Nosedive and Mallory gingerly stepped across the downed fence. Grin stood back with him and the two newbies.

Tanya reappeared, with BRAWN’s head in her hands. He had been wary of bringing the robot along with them, but ultimately had to agree to his participation. As a hunter tasked with tracking down Dragaunus, even with most of his body gone, BRAWN was outfitted with scanning capabilities that were not quite as powerful as the Mask, but were still miles ahead of the naked eye or anything else Tanya had in her own arsenal. It made no sense, with their limited choices, to leave him behind.

She held up the head at shoulder height, and let it survey the area.

“I can’t say I care for the location,” BRAWN said, after a moment.

Wildwing pushed down a sliver of irritation. “Anything noteworthy?” He prompted, watching the three figures of Mallory, Nosedive, and Duke turning the far corner of the square hole as they made their own sweep.

“Very empty. There is a large amount of cabling under the ground, though I would not describe it as significantly different than anything below the structures around us. Water, electric.”

“No active power sources, and nothing like the tech Tanya showed you?” Wildwing pushed.

“Nothing that matches those specifications, no,” the head agreed.

The three figures had gathered on the far side of the hole, inspecting the heavy equipment for moving earth that had been left at the worksite. If anything here was in Droid’s employ, it would be those, and Wildwing half-anticipated that they would begin moving. None did, and the others did not beep him with their communicators to indicate that they had found anything, either.

Throughout this conversation, Winterwing had also crossed the threshold of the downed fence, and stood a couple feet from the hole, cautiously looking over its edge, into the pit below.

“Can I request a more picturesque locale, next time I get to go on a jaunt?” the head asked, breaking the silence.

Wildwing was in the middle of formulating a diplomatic answer, when Winterwing cut him off.

“Where does that personality come from?”

They all looked at him, confused, but it was BRAWN himself that answered. “Come from?”

“It’s not his default setting,” Tanya said.

“But it wasn’t your doing,” Winterwing clarified.

“I...wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

“So, it came programmed already.”

“Yes,” BRAWN himself chimed in. “I was given a number of possible settings for the likelihood of interfacing with life that did not communicate through electromagnetic signal.”

“Where did it come from?” Winterwing repeated.

“It’s a program,” Tanya said.

“Is it?”

“I mean, it must be, it runs on hardware.”

Wildwing interjected. “What are you getting at?”

“The Artificers are supposed to be a totally artificial society, right?” Winterwing gestured at the head. “So, did they go to the trouble of programming that or did they just have a spare someone to load into it?”

There was a curious pause, and the head responded, “You’re not authorized to have that information.”

“I’m not sure I understand the relevance, either,” Tanya said.

“No one else has ever managed to do that, have they? Uploading a person?” Winterwing said.

“Not, not for lack of trying,” Tanya grimaced.

“Would you?”

“No,” which she said with such forcefulness that Wildwing found himself surprised. Tanya was not exactly what he would have called a ‘mad’ scientist, she had a clear sense of morality, but it was odd that she was so immediately dismissive of what he would have thought a fascinating field of research.

“Why not?” Winterwing asked.

“Consciousness is em-emergent,” she said, and realized, after glancing at their puzzled faces, that no one else understood. “People have dissected every part of the brain and mapped its functions, but it’s more than the sum of its parts. No one knows how it becomes self aware. It seems to happen out of nothing that should give rise to it. If you split the fibers connecting it, the pieces are identifiable and d-d-distinct but they can’t ever be put back together into a whole.”

Wildwing thought he might understand where the line of questioning was leading. “Then how do brain implants work?”

“That’s a whole field that has a hard time getting consistent results. Sometimes it can restore function in a damaged area, sometimes it can’t. Some people have entire personality shifts that never revert, some never manage to integrate it at all. It’s an important medical tool but it is an incomplete one,” she shook her head. “That’s-that’s not the problem though.”

“What is, then?” Winterwing asked.

“If you were able to c-c-completely copy every neuron and recreate it in a digital mind and prove it was conscious, that isn’t you, that’s just a robot running a simulation of you,” she made a gesture at her head. “A perfect simulation, maybe. That doesn’t change if the eq-eq-equipment is installed in your head. File transfer is not picking something up and putting it down somewhere else. It’s sending data from one spot to another, the receiving end copying it, and then the sending side deleting the original, for the appearance of the physical act of moving information. It’s only ever a c-c-copy and the original ceases to exist. No one’s ever been able to fix that problem. Maybe the Artificers did, or maybe they were okay that post-biology also meant the p-p-pro-progenitor species never enjoyed the benefits of the technology directly.”

“You said some people have tried,” Winterwing reminded.

“Sure. There’s been at least three incidents where someone’s b-brain was meticulously replaced, piece by piece. They all end the same way, autonomic functions like breathing and swallowing and digestion continue. Higher function ceases. At different times for each, but irr-irrecoverable, despite what appears to be perfect mapping. It never reproduced consciousness.”

“That’s awful,” Emily blurted, and then shrank under the gazes her outburst had earned.

“It’s… not technically a legal procedure on Puckworld.”

“So, no one outside of the most advanced civilization ever known has maybe cracked it, but somehow we think your guy Droid did? With Earth’s tech?” Winterwing said.

Tanya considered this, looking down at BRAWN in her hands, for a long moment. “Well, Droid must have done something if all he is is a head. We’ve seen the head. It was very loud.”

“Maybe we need to go back further,” Wildwing said, as the remaining three finished their circuit and approached. “Look into the person before the machine.”