“Now we’re talking” he said.

“What are we talking about?” Tunger said as he came into the room with a small dustpan and broom and began sweeping up.

“What are you doing?”

“Keeping things orderly, sir.”

“Right,” Rogers said, turning back to the command pad and pressing the orange . . . unlocking the worthless piece of shit with his god-damn keycard and pressing the orange button.

“March!”

“For commands to be executed at a later date, please specify the day and year as well.”

“No,” Rogers cried, “not March the month; march forward!”

Vibrations coursed through the floor of the training room as the entire formation of droids ran into the wall that was six feet in front of them. As they collided with the wall, they kept moving forward, their legs pumping up and down, though they seemed to be doing little enough damage to each other in the process. Perhaps it was a benefit of their made-for-combat metal alloy or whatever.

“Stop!” Rogers shouted. “Why are you doing that?”

“We are responding to the command given,” Oh One said, though the voice was muffled by his speech transmitter being smashed up against the wall.

“Oh for the love of . . . march backward, will you?”

“Affirmative.”

The formation marched backward until they were in the middle of the room again, at which point Rogers shouted for them to stop. They didn’t stop. Looking down at the control pad, he noticed that it was probably because it was locked. Rogers took it in his hand, about to throw it at Tunger’s broom, but was distracted by the clattering of a formation of droids hitting the opposite wall.

“Stop!” Rogers shouted at the command pad once he’d unlocked it again.

The formation of droids stopped abruptly, the sudden silence almost as startling as the symphony of metal had been moments earlier.

“Dear god,” Rogers said. “What use is this?”

“We are used to neutralize the current threat by utilizing the best—”

“Shut up!” Rogers said.

He took a deep breath. Okay, so moving them wasn’t as easy as he thought. He definitely wasn’t ready to try anything with weapons yet, that was for sure, not that he really wanted to. Maybe he could march them down the hallway and “accidentally” vent the room to open space, or something. No, too obvious. God, he wanted a drink.

“Everyone stand still and do nothing,” he said.

Everyone stood still and did nothing, and he counted this as a minor victory.

Perhaps simply changing formation types would work; if they were supposed to go to combat, surely they knew things like wedges, columns, staggered lines, and all that, right? At least, that’s what they did in the movies. Rogers wasn’t exactly a resident expert on combat.

“Alright,” he said. “Alright. Let’s see.”

Swiping his keycard—he was going to have a copy made and permanently glued to this damn machine—he pressed the command button. What were all those other little green squares for?