< VOL.08_HARDWARE-AND-HOLLOWS.log >>
Purple consumed what had been a white room. Every other color gave up against the light Delta was putting out, the walls and floor and ceiling adapting to her whether they wanted to or not. Her automatic mask had slipped down over the lower half of her face, and her eyes had gone fully purple, whatever trace of ordinary expression she'd been carrying was gone.
OverDose lowered herself into a fighting stance, both knives out, leaning forward, the forced neon smile doing its best to glow blue against the purple light. She launched.
Her boots hit the floor hard and fast, eating the distance between her and the G-Bot. Delta stayed where she was, arms folded, face masked, eyes giving nothing back.
OverDose reached her and swung, a fast strike that tore the air, and planted the knife into Delta's side. She tried to pull it free for a second hit. It didn't move. Delta's frame had simply closed around it. Delta hadn't reacted.
"What—" OverDose brought the second knife across at the other side with the same blurred speed. The second knife did exactly what the first one had done. OverDose looked up. Delta was looking back at her. Waiting.
Delta took her by the bulb-shaped head and lifted her. The grip tightened, the plastic housing complained under the force, small sounds of structural protest multiplying as the pressure built. OverDose fought it, pushing against Delta's arm with both hands, trying to find purchase.
There was no purchase to find.
Delta tightened further. Her fingers worked inward until they reached the internals. The white plastic cracked along the surface, the fractures running through the faceplate, splitting through the neon smile until the smile began to pulse in irregular bursts, fighting to stay on.
Delta kept going. In silence.
OverDose's vivid blue legs began to flicker and dim, the internal lighting failing, the color draining to grey as her systems started losing the argument. Then she stopped fighting and let herself hang.
"Is that everything?" Delta threw her sideways. "You need line of sight to disable an opponent. That's a significant vulnerability." She pulled her arm back and collected momentum, OverDose felt the grip change before it happened, and launched her across the room.
Crash.
OverDose hit the far wall beside the door at full throwing speed. The impact worked through her internals and broke what Delta's grip hadn't. She dropped to the floor, systems running emergency recalibration, HUD presenting the world as something unreliable and fragmented.
Delta turned to 12 without words. 12 nodded and left the room at speed. Delta looked at Albert. "Connect me to your terminal." Albert stood there for a moment working through what was being asked, then understood. He opened his screen. Delta made herself available.
OverDose got back to her feet. It took a moment. She dragged her broken arm through the air and a menu materialized beside Delta, floating, drifting toward her. "Needing line of sight might be a weakness on my side. But you're so slow and dense that hiding from you in this room is physically impossible." She pressed the Switch Off button.
Delta's face hit the floor. The impact shattered the white concrete around the point of contact.
Then she got up.
"What is happening." OverDose pressed it again. Delta's eyes went dark for a fraction of a second and came back on. "Is this a glitch? Did whoever built you get the wiring wrong?"
Delta started toward her. Each step was slow, heavy, and deliberate, the kind of movement that doesn't rush because it doesn't need to. Each footfall sent a vibration through the floor that arrived before the sound did. For OverDose, the room had become small.
OverDose tapped the button again. Beginning to panic. "Please—"
Delta missed a step. Eyes dark for half a second. Back on. Walking.
"No—" She pressed it in rapid succession, one after the other. Delta kept losing fractions of steps, brief interruptions that the body filled in on its own, always continuing, always closing. Eyes switching. Feet moving. Expression: none.
Inside Delta's vision, the HUD shrieked in an endless loop: [System Reset Initiated—Power: OFF] instantly countered by [Administrator Override—Power: ON]. Albert’s inputs were hitting her system in microseconds, a wall of pure processing speed.
Albert was reactivating her faster than OverDose could interrupt the signal, occasionally cutting the incoming signal entirely, always the faster input. "Keep your eyes on her, Delta. Don't worry about anything else."
Delta got close enough that the vibration from her steps was no longer something OverDose could process as sound, it had become something felt instead. OverDose backed up until the wall stopped her, pressing the button in a continuous rhythm that was becoming desperate.
"No, no, she is right here! why isn't it working—" She looked up from the screen. Delta's fully purple eyes were directly in front of her. "Damn it."
Delta took her by the neck and pressed her against the wall, holding her there. OverDose continued working the button with the menu following her upward, the frequency slowing as the grip increased. Through the screen she could see Delta's eyes cycling, on, off, on, off, never staying off.
"That's not fair."
"Disabling your opponent mid-fight isn't fair either." Delta let her fall, pulled her arm back, and fixed her eyes on the neon smile. "I hate that thing."
Clang.
The fist caught OverDose in the gut as she was still falling, driving her back into the wall. The force displaced everything nearby, revival tubes along the wall shuddering from the impact wave.
Clang.
A second hit, same location, same weight. The frame buckled. The wall behind it began contributing to the conversation, cracks spreading from the point of contact.
Clang.
A third. The lights in OverDose's smile and ear sensors were barely firing now, the blue had mostly abandoned them. The material of the frame had begun taking the shape of Delta's fist, a carved record of repeated contact.
Delta didn't stop. Slow, heavy, perfectly consistent.
"You enjoy turning others off." She kept her voice completely calm through each hit. "And now you're killing them."
Clang.
"I heard that cat-themed units are supposed to be gentle."
Clang.
"You are not."
Clang.
"Neither am I."
The wall made a decision. What remained of OverDose went through it and came to rest on the other side, legs still caught in the broken section, the midsection of the frame presenting something that would require careful study to identify as what it had been. Nothing blue was shining anywhere.
12 arrived at the entrance to the corridor with the G-Bots filing in behind her. They slowed as the section of hallway became visible, the broken wall, the remains of OverDose hanging partly in it, nothing functioning, nothing lit. They stopped. They looked at Delta on the other side, still glowing purple, looking back at them.
Delta came through. She stood over what she'd done for a moment, then turned to her sisters.
"She killed 01 by cutting through her in two clean halves. I made sure not to be that clean." She looked at Pi. "Do you want to finish?"
Pi stepped forward. The scythe formed, twice her height, the blade precise. She looked at what was left of OverDose with a flat expression.
"Don't leave her suffering. That's against policy."
Delta tilted her head. "What policy?"
Pi set the scythe at OverDose's neck. "Mine."
Seek.
OverDose disconnected from the network. Nothing moved, nothing twitched, nothing produced light of any kind. Pi nodded at 12. 12 moved into the corridor and began collecting the parts.
The G-Bots entered the revival room and found Albert on the floor beside Eve's frame, the one that had been carrying 01. They gathered around him, leaning in to see what he was examining. He looked up at Delta.
"How does the new body feel compared to the frame Nick built?"
Delta's mask retracted. Her eyes normalized. "I like that I can adjust my weight and density selectively, different parts independently. But the speed is a problem. I could barely run in this one."
"I'll work on that." He opened a screen and started typing. Without looking up: "Do you feel better?"
"Considerably." Delta sat beside him. "I would have eventually detonated if I hadn't hit her that many times."
Pi studied the E.V.E. frame. "You're rebuilding this and assigning it to Sophos?"
Albert stopped typing and turned to her. "Yes. How did you know that?"
"And you're not worried because 01 will be revived in—"
The revival tube beside them hissed open. Steam settled. 01 stepped out.
"Delta!" She looked around the room, G-Bots arranged calmly around Albert, a hole in the wall, 12 visible in the corridor collecting components. "Did Delta—"
Pi finished in a tone that contained no inflection whatsoever. "—absolutely overkill OverDose, drag the frame across the room, and render it unrecognizable? Yes. 01. I need everyone's attention. Please stop talking."
01 took a step back. "What—"
"I asked for silence. Are you having difficulty with that?" Pi moved to the center of the room. "12 briefed me on the way here. What I'm seeing is a unit that has been operating without direction since the captain left, and the result is a base that has been running like an unsupervised experiment. We need to reorganize before we can do anything useful." She looked at the room. "I and the relevant G-Bots have agreed. I'm taking over as acting leader."
01 laughed. First a small one, then a longer one, then she pulled herself back together.
"You. The shortest G-Bot in the group, who can only—"
"—accurately model the future and determine where things are going before they arrive." Pi looked at her without expression. "Yes. I'm the one who allowed things to deteriorate this far by accepting you in the leadership role. That's on me."
"The captain chose me—"
"I wasn't available when she made that choice." Pi turned to face her fully. "And she was respecting the number on your hoodie. That was the extent of the reasoning."
01's eyes shifted red. "Because I am 01, which means—"
"Are you better than 02?"
01 studied Pi's face, the flatness of it, the absence of anything to read, and held the silence for a moment. "I haven't done a bad job. These are isolated—"
Pi raised her head. "Let me be specific about what I've observed. You were captured. The captain of this unit , the one this team answers to, was taken. You allowed the veterans to be disabled by not giving 05 the space to fully investigate Black Voltage's capabilities. The people in this unit who can actually change outcomes are laid out on the floor behind you."
She took one step forward.
"You brought OverDose into this building and then forgot she existed because a new frame distracted you. Tell me one positive contribution you made to the team's situation."
"The captain appointed me—"
"Then why did she leave the case to 05?"
"The captain appointed me—"
"She ordered Gamma to move the crystals here immediately and get us revived. Why do you think she did that?"
"The captain—"
"She contacted 24 directly for a situation report." Pi looked at 12, who was standing in the doorway trying to find an opening to speak and failing. "And when she heard what had happened, she nearly abandoned the mission entirely and turned back. The only thing that kept her on course is how close she is to finishing it, in a foreign country, in a frame that's half broken, holding the whole operation together with what she has left."
Pi held the silence.
"Can you defend your decisions? Or are you going to repeat the same sentence again? I can see which one you'll choose, so you don't need to answer."
01 looked at the faces in the room, the defensive red light in her eyes flickered, faded, and slowly drowned in a dull, submissive blue. Her shoulders dropped. She looked at the faces of her sisters, at Delta, at 12, at the empty tubes, and found no allies. Without another word, she turned and walked out of the room.
Pi turned to the room.
"Tau. Duplicate to your maximum count and spread through the city. I want every location Black Voltage could be using identified."
Tau saluted, her automatic mask covering her face as she ran out.
"Delta. I heard you can print physical objects with the new frame. Work with Albert, build a blueprint from Eve's frame and reconstruct it."
"Roger."
Pi's eyes moved to Gamma. "We have a distress signal from E-Medics who have been running a separate operation out, in Elysium without our knowledge. They left the capital and they're currently hiding in Lukewarm City. You're the fastest one here. Get them to us. They're carrying a new frame for 02."
Gamma's smile arrived before she moved. "On it, Captain Grey." She blurred into yellow and was gone.
Pi looked at Albert. "You represented us in the last meeting with Salaska. What's the key point? Leave out the procedural details."
Albert looked at her for a moment. "Quite an attitude you have."
"Did I ask you to evaluate me?"
He looked away. "He's offered us the fourteen thousand E-UNITs that 02 is currently trying to reach. The condition is successful elimination of Black Voltage, they're the reward for completing the objective."
"I don't like the framing of that." Pi produced what was technically a smile, though it was very small and didn't commit to anything. "Delta, come with me. We're going to have a direct conversation with this Salaska. We need that army now. I'm not interested in participating in a daily-reward structure."
Delta laughed quietly. "I missed you, Pi."
"I didn't miss you."
"What?"
"I didn't have a body to think with." Pi moved toward the door. "Come on. We have bureaucracy to deal with now too."
Albert and Delta looked at each other. Albert started to say something.
Pi's voice arrived from the hallway. "—like that? Yes. Delta, please follow me and let the man work. He has been looking for a reason to postpone the E.V.E. frame until tomorrow."
Delta walked to the door. "I cannot believe you were 02's favorite."
"That says something, doesn't it?" Pi's voice carried back without any additional warmth. "Dense Delta."
Delta stopped in the doorway. "Is that an insult?"
"Precisely. Dense in every applicable meaning of the word."
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- E-UNIT 01 -
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