E-UNIT: The Blue Angels of Death.

< VOL.08_HARDWARE-AND-HOLLOWS.log >>

The rain came down gently across Bijou, washing the streets clean with the patience of something that has nowhere else to be. People moved through it without much concern, being late to work was a more immediate threat than getting wet, and the human mind prioritized its fears.

The E-Police HQ was not calm despite having fewer active members than usual. Four of the unit's leadership were suspended in boot loops, unaware of anything, unable to become aware. The revival room held its white quiet, the tubes humming along the walls and waiting for the next arrival.

Delta was still on the floor where she'd been since her conversation with 24. She hadn't found a reason to move yet. The words were still cycling in her head, and the floor was apparently worth looking at.

"—I couldn't reach their terminal to interrupt the execution of the reset. That's what produced the boot loop across all of them, same result on each one." Dave's voice arrived from the corridor before he did, nearly out of breath. He appeared at the doorway and pointed at the frozen E-UNITs. "I couldn't revoke Eve's access and now I'm locked out of their terminal entirely."

Albert came through the door a beat later. He was breathing harder than the distance should have required. "I miss a few days of work and this is what I come back to?" He went straight to 05 and began examining her exterior. "I've seen something like this before. It reminds me of when Nick revoked E-UNIT 00's access after she attempted to delete 02."

Delta's head turned slowly toward him. "What did you just say?"

"Oh! Delta. Good morning. I didn't see you there." He didn't look away from 05. "I can't pull my attention from this."

Delta stood and moved to stand beside him. "That story about 02 and 00, I want to hear all of it later. But right now, can they be fixed? I can't properly process any of this because I don't know if they're alive or not."

"They're alive. Don't carry that particular concern." Albert opened his screen and pressed a sequence of buttons. Small screens materialized beside each of the boot-looped E-UNITs. "Dave, start copying their system files. Even the corrupted ones. We need to preserve their memory data before we move to the next step."

"On it." Dave moved to the screen beside 03. "How do we actually fix it though? I told you, I can't reach the operation terminal."

"Of course we can't." Albert didn't look up from his typing, which was proceeding at a pace his running speed had no part in. "The system recognizes a single owner and a single administrator, a security design of Nick's. The owner is us: the ultimate authority. E.V.E. revoked your ownership and assigned it to herself. The only exception is the Omega link."

"But she could only reset their memories." Dave raised an eyebrow without stopping his own work. "I thought the owner was the highest authority in the system."

"The system had never recognized her as an owner before, so it revoked most of her access immediately on assignment. She got through with very little." Albert shook his head. "I'm still genuinely impressed she got through as much as she did. Disappointed in Nick's owner-identification logic, honestly."

"What about the administrator level? Who holds that?" Delta watched Albert's fingers on the screen.

"The E-UNITs themselves." He held up one hand before she could speak again. "Before your next question, yes, the E-UNITs are distinct from the system they live inside. They're super users of it. They exist within the system and alongside it simultaneously. That's what the HUD is for, without that access layer, they'd have to manually enter a command every time they wanted to take a step."

Delta stepped closer. "What about me? Am I a system? A crystal? What exactly am I inside?"

Albert stopped typing for a few seconds. He resumed. "I genuinely don't know. I've read Nick's documentation on the G-Bots and on how the crystals function, three times now… and I still don't have a satisfying explanation for how a colored rock can be alive and carry memories."

"He created us. He must have documented how."

"That's precisely what he didn't do." Albert shook his head. "He never stated directly how he made you or how the crystals work. My theory is that he was frightened, the same thing that happened with nuclear energy, a solution becoming a weapon. He didn't want to hand anyone the blueprint."

He turned to her for a moment before looking back at the screen.

Delta went still. She looked down at her hands, white and purple, the usual, as if they were new. "I always forget that we're essentially a collection of very articulate weapons." She smiled at nothing in particular. It was a weak smile, sad at the edges. "Weapons that happened to develop opinions about things."

Albert moved to 04's screen and tapped Delta's head on the way past.

"Don't frame it that way." His glasses reflected blue from the screen. "I spent years thinking of myself as a weapon designer, someone who built things to kill people, regardless of whether those people deserved it. I coped by telling myself I only made the tool. I wasn't the one pulling the trigger." He paused. "But I handed it to someone who was."

"That's the worse position." Dave said it from across the room, not looking up. "Building the weapon is creating the devil and hoping he points himself in the right direction."

"Correct." Albert turned to her again. "But what Nick made is different from that. He removed the human element from the judgment entirely. Now the weapon decides who deserves to be on the receiving end of its fists. I don't know if that's the correct solution—" He let a small smile through. "—but the fact that I'm standing next to it and it hasn't harmed me for existing here tells me about what it actually is."

Delta folded her arms and arranged her expression into displeasure. "Stop calling me 'it.' That's dehumanizing."

"The irony," Dave said, flat, from across the room.

"Done." Albert produced a small towel from his coat pocket and addressed the sweat that had been accumulating at his forehead since the run over. His reflection sat sharp in the white floor beneath him. "Now the difficult part."

"Which is?" Dave finished with 07 and settled against the wall.

"Bring E.V.E. here." Albert said it simply. "We need to remove her access, or at minimum use it ourselves. I can work around her system if she's physically present."

Dave and Delta looked at each other. Delta spoke first. "That's not a realistic request. Bringing her into this facility puts every E-UNIT here at risk, and we still don't know if she can access the G-Bots."

"You're saying she can't access you?" Albert moved close to Delta's face. "There's no possible way you don't have a system managing your hardware, you'd have no mechanism for functioning at all." He studied her eyes. "I can sense something working behind those, but I can't read what it is."

Delta turned toward the doorway. "Something is coming."

19 and 12 came through first, and then, just behind them, the frame that had been Eve's, now moving entirely differently, inhabited by someone else entirely. All three were venting hard, cooling systems audible from across the room. Delta dropped into a fighting crouch the moment she registered the frame.

19 and 12 moved past her as if she weren't there, heading straight for Albert.

"Doctor!" 19 had Albert by the coat before he'd turned around. "01 is somehow inside the E.V.E. frame. I think she tried to force a hack and it transferred her, or triggered something that shifted her across. And since she's in there, maybe she can do something about the sisters!"

Albert raised both hands. "Slow down, that sentence had too many maybes in it."

He looked at the frame. Then his expression changed. "Actually, this is so convenient I'm questioning whether to trust it." He turned to 01. "Are you genuinely 01? I need you to prove it before I hand you any access to the E-UNITs. Confirm first, fix second, and then I study how this happened."

"Of course!" The response came out in Eve's elegant voice, which immediately worked against it. "07 has a significant gore collection that she maintains with care. 05 has been secretly monitoring everyone from a room she added to the building recently without telling anyone. 04 had her emotional driver disabled for years. And the captain is on mission to retrieve the fourteen thousand E-UNITs."

"That last one has an update, I'll give you that information separately." Albert nodded. "But the rest is too specific to be fabricated. That's 01." He dragged 05 from her position to stand beside the frame, then straightened and pressed a hand to his lower back. "Remind myself not to do that again. Now, since 05 is technically still online, a menu should be visible next to her."

"It's there." 01 was already looking at it. “How did you know?”

"I've worked with Eve's systems before." Albert stood close to both of them. "Find the button that's partially colored and labeled 'reset.'"

"Found it."

"Press it."

The group contracted without discussion, 19, 12, Delta, and Dave closing in until they'd formed a loose ring around 01 and 05, everyone trying to see the same thing at once.

"A menu appeared." 01's voice carried the particular focus of someone actively reading. "'Finish the reset operation, dated five days ago.' Do I confirm?"

"Yes. The date means the system stored the operation state before E.V.E. interrupted it. That's exactly what we needed." Albert leaned in close to 05's eyes. "What do you see now?"

"The loading bar, it was grey before. Now it's blue and moving fast." 01 turned to Albert. "I think it's working."

"It is." Albert stepped back and clapped once. "Repeat it immediately for 03, 04, and 07. Those three should take less time than 05, she records more data than anyone else in the unit."

"Done. The bars are already completing." 01 scanned them. "07 is coming back first."

07's frame released its rigid posture all at once. The eyes went dark, the blue that always shone from the E-UNIT's frame simply switched off. Then 03 did the same. 04 followed. And then 05's frame went rigid and fell forward.

Delta caught it.

"Easy." She lowered 05 to the floor with care. "I still can't believe this worked cleanly."

Albert grabbed 01 by both shoulders. "The fact that you're in that frame is the only reason we could do this in an afternoon. Without it, Dave and I would have been reconstructing their memories manually for months. We still need you though."

Dave had both hands over his face. "I need to sleep. I haven't slept in four days."

19 took his arm and began directing him toward the door. "You did everything, king. Your royal bed is waiting—"

"I still won't authorize you to work on your sisters' systems." His voice faded as the footsteps did.

12 let herself fall directly backward onto the floor with a sound that suggested she'd given up on landing gracefully. She lay flat and stared at the ceiling. "I feel like we've forgotten something."

Seek.

A knife blade appeared through 01's midsection, entering through the back, the tip visible from the front. 01 stood completely still.

Albert took several fast steps backward. Delta and 12 were in position before the sound of the impact finished.

01 looked down at the blade. Then back over her shoulder.

"It's… OverDose."

"I'm sorry, Eve." Overdose’s voice had broken through its usual register into something raw. "I need you to come back. I need you beside me."

She began dragging the knife upward. Slowly, deliberately, with a precision that made it worse, the cut moving through the frame's exterior panels, wires severing, the lights across 01's eyes and chest flickering in sequence as the blade progressed. The sound of metal being separated from metal filled the revival room and traveled down the corridor.

OverDose stopped with the blade centimeters from the core. She knew exactly where it was.

"Why are you making me do this to her?" She exhaled at length through the vents beneath her helmet. Her permanent neon smile had stayed on through all of it. "I'll join you soon enough. They'll finish me for this."

She paused. Then drove the blade the final distance.

Slack.

The core split in a single clean movement. 01's frame went dark and fell forward.

OverDose looked up at the faces in the room, Albert pressed against the far wall, 12 on her feet, Delta already changed.

"But I'm not going down without a fight first." The smile on her faceplate brightened.

Delta was glowing. Deep, violent purple building from somewhere inside the frame outward, the floor cracking in a spreading web beneath her feet as her density increased, the air around her gaining the specific quality it only acquired when something very heavy was about to move very fast. Her eyes went red.

"Code Red, initiated."

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- DR. ALBERT -

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