E-UNIT: The Blue Angels of Death.

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

// data corrupted — recompiling //

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The rain outside started falling and decided to stay. November had been dry long enough that the clouds appeared to have taken the situation personally. Veridians were already carrying umbrellas, not because of sentiment, but because loving rain and wanting to be soaked by it are different things entirely. The same weather had reached the E-Police station.

The revival room held its quiet. Four E-UNITs stood dormant in boot loop states, stuck between alive and not, their bodies present and their people somewhere unreachable. Most of the unit had avoided the room since it happened, no one wanted the image of their closest sisters frozen mid-existence as a permanent memory file.

Dave had shut himself in his office for the past day working through recovery options, and 19's absence from her usual position beside him communicated her state of mind more clearly than anything she might have said.

24 entered with careful steps and stood looking at them.

05 was standing in a perfect mannequin pose, as still and composed in shutdown as she was in operation. 03 was sitting on the floor with her back resting against the revival tube, as if she'd simply decided to sit down and stopped there. 04 was laid flat with the carelessness of someone who had stopped caring about the impression. 07 was bent forward in her seat, posture folded inward, as if even the body's dormant state had retained something of her personality.

24 sat down beside 03 and wrapped an arm around the unresponsive shoulders. She looked at the LED lights in the ceiling, focusing on them rather than the eyes in front of her.

"I hate every second of this." She smiled at nothing in particular, a strange smile, the kind that arrives when the other expressions aren't available. "I was saving up everything from Elysium to tell you. I wanted to put it somewhere outside my own head, and you seemed like the right place." She laughed quietly at her own joke. "I can't imagine why you're not available."

She brought 03 a little closer.

"The first time I went into service, the captain trained me personally. She said I had potential." 24 looked at the ceiling. "We're the same hardware. Why am I different from the others? I kept asking that. Then I look at the five of you, the original E-UNITs, and I understand exactly what she meant."

She looked at 07. "She's the one who gets genuinely happy when criminals happen to die. I still don't know the full scale of her gore collection or where she keeps it, but since you like it too, 03, I'm going to estimate that its value is beyond measurement. Knowing 07, she'd have it on the walls already if the captain ever said yes."

She turned toward 05. "I respect her in a way that I don't always understand. The SSD-reading, the monitoring, the way she treats everyone like a documented subject, it should be more unsettling than it is. But it's her, so I trust the intent. She's the one I go to when my system stops responding the way it should."

She looked at 04. "Sisters briefed me on what happened. I still don't believe parts of it. I would have asked 07 to show me her point-of-view footage of the fight, but the data is gone. I still like 04. She says the right thing at the right moment without seeming to calculate it. When something pulls me down, I go to 04 first."

She brushed 03's hair back lightly.

"And you. The most genuinely unpredictable E-UNIT ever built. Quantum processing would fail trying to model your next move. You are chaotic but the most consistent sniper on the team. You are emotional but somehow the one who holds the team's emotional temperature stable. You love 02 more than most of us will ever love anything, and then you died in front of her face, knowing how much she hates that."

24 leaned back against the tube, and the smile went away.

"I think I'm going to need to deactivate my emotional driver the way 04 did. I'm not built to carry all of this. Neither are the others, the hallway outside hasn't had anyone in it for a full day. No one can bring themselves to come near this room. I woke up from one horrible experience and landed inside another one."

She took 03's unresponsive hand and turned it over in her lap.

"Are we cursed? I asked that a long time ago and no one could answer it. I hate what things are and where they're going. Reaper and his circle are living in a castle by the sea while we lose the people closest to us in someone else's city. Are we in the wrong? That's the same question that made me defect the first time. I never got an answer that held."

She stood carefully, steadying 03's body as she moved away from it.

"I thought when the captain came back, things would shift. It became worse. People say children pay for their parents' failures. Father built Reaper, and twenty million people paid for it, and now he's gone and we're still paying."

Heavy steps came from the hallway and stopped right next to the door.

24 didn't turn around. "Trying to mask your presence is like hiding a freight train in a coat pocket. The weight doesn't fit."

"But my presence didn't stop you from the monologue." Delta's voice came from the doorway. She was leaning against the frame. "Though I might disagree with some of it."

"I don't care anymore. Listen or don't. Go ahead and plant microphones in me, turn me into one of 05's surveillance projects." 24 lowered her head, her voice dropping. "It won't change a thing. At this point, I'd almost prefer the spying. At least it would mean someone cared enough to watch me."

"I might have too." Delta stepped in and sat facing 24, doing her best not to make the floor regret it. "I was in the hallway. You knew I was there and chose to speak anyway. That's not a monologue, that's a very long sentence addressed to the wrong people."

"Then why did you come in and interrupt it?"

"Because you went too far." Delta crossed her arms. "Losing faith in the captain is something I can't sit with. Not for religious reasons, the way 01 approaches it, but because every decision she makes is for the team. She doesn't allocate a second to herself. And here you are treating her absence as evidence against her."

"Has anything improved because she thinks about all of us?" 24 looked at her steadily. "You're describing certainty without results. That's the same thing 01 does, and you said it wasn't religious."

"That's why it's called faith." Delta held the eye contact. "It means believing before the proof arrives. If the outcome were guaranteed, no one would need to choose a side. The choice is the whole point."

24 smiled, faint, not unkind. "You're new to this. I mean that without contempt. I was in Elysium. I worked under them. I was close enough to draw one clear conclusion: we are not winning."

She walked toward the door. Delta looked at 03's eyes for a moment, the faint cycling between states, the small interval of blue-white that came and went.

"So we surrender? We let him keep taking? Because if you think he stops at Altea, you're not reading him correctly."

"I never said surrender." 24 paused at the threshold and looked back once. "But the distance between where we are and winning is not as small as you want it to be."

She left.

Delta remained sitting, facing the four dormant bodies, the rain hitting the windows in steady irregular patterns.

Then, a new sound cut through the quiet.

Heavy, synchronized metallic footsteps echoed down the main corridor, approaching the revival bay at an unyielding pace. Delta recognized the rhythm. It was the sound of an entire squad moving in perfect, forced unison. She stood up slowly, her fists clenching.

<< end_of_file : E-UNIT >>

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