Tanya had spent a great deal of her own life, prior to the invasion, locked in the eternal struggle between researcher and administration. There was something about bureaucracy, regardless of where it existed, that simply hated curiosity. A tireless machine of conservatism and moderation, even under the best circumstances, her superiors always ensured she never got the resources she wanted. Tanya was not so egocentric as to use the word ‘deserved’, but there was always that lasting question in her mind that if the people running those organizations did not want to probe the esoteric questions of theoretical physics, perhaps it was a silly decision to have hired a theoretical physicist.

She did not voice this aloud, at least not to anyone that would have disliked hearing it. She did eventually come to understand, as did all her colleagues, that the point was to have a preeminent genius at your organization to brag about and trot out when those accolades were expedient, rather than provide the resources and space necessary to allow them to actually do anything.

Any irritation that Tanya felt for her old life dissolved as she began the process of probing into that of Otto Maton. A stroll through the fledgling Earth internet turned up little. There was plenty about Droid. There was more than enough, including several questionable speculators who sat at the web’s fringe newsgroups and passed between themselves rumor and adoration. There was precious little about before Droid. No one cared, or at least no one cared in a place that existed digitally, for Drake One’s search to find.

What she did eventually uncover, after hours of scouring, was a community college tucked between Palm Springs and Joshua Tree. The reception desk picked up its phone after the seventh ring. The woman at the other end sounded annoyed to have answered at all, and the annoyance only grew when Tanya asked about the name on their faculty roster.

“Oh my god for the last time it was one semester he never showed up to class no interviews stop calling,” spoken as one unbroken sentence, and then a click as the line cut off.

Tanya stared at the handset for a long moment, confused, before hitting redial. It went to a voice mail box, once, twice, and on the third time the woman finally picked up again.

“I… I just, he left his dry cleaning here?” Tanya lied.

“Lady, we have caller ID,” the voice said.

“Well, then you know I’m not looking for an interview,” Tanya said.

“I’m going to call the cops if you don’t mind your own business,” the voice concluded, and the line cut again.

Wildwing took pity on Tanya and intervened, skipping the middle step of trying to reason with a receptionist, and called Klegghorn directly.

Tanya slumped in her chair as she waited, relieved she did not have to keep trying.

Her relief lasted until the receiver blared back in Wildwing’s ear “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Klegghorn pointed them instead to the last known address already on file, six blocks from the school. The landlady was a round woman well into her sixties, who eyed the four ducks with suspicion, but silently passed Wildwing a set of spare keys in exchange for a box of signed team merchandise. There was a story, told unconvincingly, that her grandchildren were large fans, though it was explicitly stated that the children’s names should not be in the dedications. It would have been difficult to include them anyway, as their names changed in each emphatic telling of their devotion.

Perhaps the sort of person that would turn over a tenant’s keys to a bunch of strangers in return for a box of jerseys and photos was not going to be the most upstanding citizen and they should not question it.

“You’re still renting it to him even though he’s been missing for months?” Wildwing said, halting the woman as she scuttled away with her prizes.

She shrugged, disinterested. “He can have it so long as he keeps the payments on autodraft and doesn’t bother me about the AC.” She loaded the box into the passenger seat of her car, and left without another word.

Tanya blinked at the receding car. “Isn’t… I mean, how do we give the keys back?”

Wildwing made a noise of irritation and turned to the house, a small white box of stucco sitting in the center of a tiny, brown lawn. The sun was beginning to lower in the west, but there was no indication of lights inside. The street and front walk radiated the day’s heat up at them as they approached. The remaining shreds of yellow police tape clung to the dead weeds at the perimeter.

Wildwing paused at the door, hesitating for a moment of indecision, and knocked. There was a tension that settled in between them as they waited, but nothing changed, inside or out.

Mallory stood behind him on the front step, scowling. “What exactly is your plan if he answers? Ask politely if he’s trying to kill us?”

“Ask him to stop,” Winterwing suggested from the rear.

“First time for everything,” Wildwing said, and unlocked the door, slowly. He pushed it open with a hand, avoiding crossing the threshold himself. “Be careful. Assume everything electronic is a potential threat.”

They followed him inward. The house was silent, except for creaking floorboards, and the hum of the aforementioned air conditioner unit, somewhere out of sight.

“I’m not sure what I was expecting but this feels like less,” Winterwing said.

“The local authority came through here months ago,” Mallory said, a shrug of the shoulder indicating the tape outside. “There’s a reason Klegghorn already had the address. There isn’t going to be anything spectacular that they didn’t already find.”

“What Tanya’s describing is parts,” Wildwing said. “They’re hard to get parts but they wouldn’t look like anything to a person that doesn’t know how to use them. Maybe we can at least find where they came from.” He took a cautious step out of the entry, into the adjoining living room, and began a casual investigation of the dust-covered surfaces. Mallory took out her blaster and moved down the hallway, toward the sound of the air conditioner.

Winterwing looked to Tanya for guidance. “So, what do you do when you’re looking through a guy’s house? This is sort of new to me.”

Tanya looked in the opposite direction from Wildwing’s path, into a dining area with table of dark wood and two mismatched chairs. One was tucked under the table, the other propped out halfway, as if a person had left it strategically placed so as not to ever need to move it out to sit or tuck it in to walk around. The window in the room looked directly at the wall of the adjoining house, and a telephone pole between the two.

“It’s so small,” Tanya said, at last.

“What?”

“I… I mean he, he’s probably one of the most br-br-brilliant minds of his species,” Tanya said, looking up at Winterwing. “This is what that gets you?”

The community college he was supposed to be instructing at looked like a thing on the very edge of credible. The house was small and dark, with a dead yard and permanent stains on the walls. For all the irritation that her own institutions had brought Tanya, they were at least places with prestige and recognition. One of the smartest humans to have existed appeared to have struggled in human society.

It was almost no wonder he had grown resentful of it.

Winterwing followed her gaze, and scowled as he did so. “What is that smell?” He moved for the dining room, and the doorway at the far side, which lead into the kitchen. She felt some trepidation following, as a room full of appliances was a potential threat, but nothing came to life as they entered. It was a tiny space as well, just enough for all the essentials and one person to comfortably stand. Another doorway, left open, lead to a laundry room with a pile of unwashed clothing.

Winterwing gingerly hooked a finger through the handle of the refrigerator, waited for her to move out of the way, and pulled it open. It was empty, aside from a few used bottles of condiments. He opened the freezer after it, which was just as empty.

He looked over his shoulder at her, “Are… we sure we’re in the right place?”

Tanya frowned, closing both doors so she could maneuver, and back through the dining room, saying aloud, “Smell’s worse back this way.”

Wildwing was at the stage of pulling apart the soft furniture in the living room when they passed. The second doorway was where they found Mallory. It was likely a bedroom, but it had been converted into a workshop. Nothing struck Tanya as especially advanced or unusual—her own lab was three times the size and ten times as useful. This was much more primitive. A soldering station, a safety locker of solvents, a wall of screws, a rack of gauges of wire. Things that were meant for tinkering, not for building. Not for inventing.

Winterwing went further down the hallway, checking the final doors, and Mallory left Tanya to follow him. Tanya frowned at the tiny room, it’s tiny window, its tiny closet full of old amplitude monitors, and stood, baffled. It was as Winterwing said, this did not seem like it could have been the right place. She halfheartedly looked through bins, under the worktable, and began rummaging behind the equipment in the closet, when Wildwing poked his head in.

“Anything?”

“This is-this is all garbage,” she said, exasperated, wiping the dust on her hands on her pantleg. “I don’t understand. You?”

“Nothing. I’m not sure anyone ever even used that room. No scratches on the coffee table, no broken spines on any of the books, no dings in the furniture, nothing.”

“Back here!” Mallory called.

They followed the hallway, past a tiny bathroom, to the second bedroom, which appeared to have actually been used as such. It was smaller, its window painted black with sloppy strokes that let in pinpricks of light, the offending air conditioner sitting in its open maw, and the smell that Winterwing had called out was stronger. The bed had not been made, and the sheets were yellowed with age. Mallory pointed out scratches on the floor, under the bed’s legs.

Wildwing gave a single laugh. “I was starting to worry he was normal.”

The two drakes pushed the bed horizontally up against the wall, and Mallory’s boot came down on the wooden flooring under where it had sat, revealing a hollow sound. They found the handle, and, given that he had the armor, Wildwing was tasked with being the one that opened the trap door. He did so carefully, with the three of them lined up behind, and the hinge it swung upward on was perfectly silent. They all peered around his shoulders into the dark hole, and the smell that had been just a hint in the air before now came at them full force.

“The cops didn’t notice that?” Mallory exclaimed.

Tanya found the flashlight function on her omnitool, and swung its beam into the hole, revealing a ladder down into the dark, perhaps thirty feet, to a concrete floor below. As it traveled around, the light finally touched the things that she had been expecting all along. Power supplies, a steel platform that looked suspiciously like a medical bed. Tubes, tanks full of murky water, tools, needles, monitors, textbooks, piles of papers, drawings, disassembled prostheses.

On the steel bed, sitting in a pool of black putrefaction, was a corpse. It had bloated and burst, the entrails mingling with the wires and cables underneath, and then the entire mess had mummified in the dry California air, forgotten. The skull was misshapen, unrecognizable, and it appeared that a third of its mass was smeared on the wall behind it.

“Hmm,” Winterwing said. “I think I’m glad he didn’t answer the door.”