InsaneWolf

Since joining the MD fandom, especially the shipping and fan kid side of it, I’ve seen many interesting theories on how the drones reproduce. And so, I wanted to take a crack at it! Here’s what I came up with and what I will be abiding by in my aus and such: 

The way DDs and WDs reproduce is almost exactly the same. 

When two drones decide they want to have a child, they pick one parent to be the carrier of the ai and one parent to donate some code. The carrier will house the developing ai within thier cpu for several months until it is ready to go into a pill baby. 

Here’s a doodle on V and J demonstrating how that works:

Once the ai is fully developed the carrier has about 24 hours to move the ai over into a pill baby. If they for whatever reason can’t, the ai is absorbed into the carriers code and no longer viable to exist outside of the carriers body. 

This will cause the carrier to inherit some personality traits of the new ai, but other than that the side effects arnt that drastic. 

Still, preferably drones don’t want this to happen. Pill babies are supplied by the colony to parents housing ai, and typically the carrier will carry the pill baby shell around with them towards the end of thier “pregnancy” to ensure that they will be ready to transfer the ai as soon as possible. 

The pill baby will allow the ai to grow inside a safe shell- think of it as an egg, except the baby can see outside of the egg and interact with the world while still unhatcged.  

Here’s a really simple doodle of a pill baby. The code inserted into the pill baby will act as dna- instructing the pill baby what to do with the nutrients, that will be fed through the food hatch thing, in order to create a tiny drone body. 

After about a year the baby drone will hatch break through the outer casing, revealing a little baby drone! After this they grow pretty much the same as humans. 

Also baby drones have huge heads relative to thier bodies. Not important, just wanted to point it out. 

dissismply drones work exactly the same up until the pill baby part. Since the only connection they have is thier squad, DDs don’t have a colony to supply pill babies to them. Instead, they rely on a material they have in no short supply: dead workers! 

To insert thier code they need a worker who has a core still somewhat intact- as well as a head. They can be missing limbs or be stabbed- they just need those main systems to be working to house the new ai. 

The carrier directly plugs the new ai into the dead workers core. Once inside, the code will begin to give the body orders- first among those being to repear any damages previously inflicted upon the worker and build a fleshy core. 

Image of this process: 

Once they have an organic core, the drone will boot up. Don’t get this confused with reincarnation- the drone who owned the body previously is dead. Instead, the mixed ai from both parents creates an interlay new drone. 

Over the next month the drone will continue to change- losing limbs, growing wings, getting a hunger for oil etc. until it becomes a fully fledged murder machine. Think of this process sort of like what solver drones go through. 

The new DD will stay with its birth squad for the rest of the year- growing more mentally and physically as it learns what it needs to know to survive on copper nine. 

Once it hits the one year mark, the drone will leave the squad to find a squad of its own. They grow rabidly in thier first year of life- being mentally 16 once it is over. After that year they grow at a regular pace. (Though, if the code is placed in a pill baby the disassembly drone will grow at the same pace as a worker.)

The DDs work a lot like lions or wolves- young drones from different squads try and find other lone DDs to form a squad with. Sometimes they’ll form big bands to try and get more territory before splitting off into the standard three member squad. 

DD’s typically “mate” once every few years to ensure the survival of the species. With so many dying from the cabin fever labs, hunger, other DDs or the other dangers of the planet, it’s important that thier are plenty of young drones around to replace those that have fallen. 

Workers typically mate just to start a family rather than the survival of their species- though as their numbers got fewer multi children house holds skyrocketed in popularity in a desperate attempt to regain their dwindling population.