9.23 – Terminated, Part 1

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Terminated, Part 1

The room was silent except for the low continuous hum of vents from the boot-looped sisters, keeping the silence from becoming something absolute. UI keystrokes moved fast and unbroken through it, a working rhythm, the sound of someone trying to repair people through a machine.

Darkness had taken most of the room. The surveillance screens glowed their blue light over her in a cluster.

05 sat at the security room terminal, returning to the office that had existed in the back of her processing for the entire two months she'd been absent—while the front of it fought a private data war with no witnesses. She hadn't looked at the feed screens around her yet. She didn't need to. She already knew the department behind her was empty of everything that had filled it for most of the past year.

She typed against a command terminal connected to a device that produced sounds below any organic hearing threshold, each typed word generating a corresponding frequency. Her eyes moved between the screen and the six original E-UNITs she'd brought to the security room, laid out in a row ahead of her.

[Command: Switch off reset mode.]

She looked up. Nothing.

[Command: Reset mode: off - Time to execute: 0 seconds.]

She tilted her head. Still nothing. Her eye twitched once, sharp and involuntary. She pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose and typed again, with considerably more force.

[Command: Can you please stop resetting.]

She sighed at the ceiling, no air behind it, but the gesture present, and held her gaze on the strip lights above her, switched off and lined up in the dark like dormant thoughts.

"How did everything escalate this fast? Where did the days go when we could just restart ourselves in the revival room and walk back out again?" She paused. "I never actually used that feature though. I'm still in the old original frame from back when things were functional. Shelly and Reaper gave me this body."

"You can't call yourself old, it makes me feel ancient at forty-nine." Raphael appeared in the doorway smiling, a screen trailing him. "Though talking to yourself does confirm it." He crossed the room and sat on the edge of her desk. "Hi, 05. How is it going?"

"Not well. This is the four hundred and fortieth attempt and nothing has moved." She kept her gaze on the ceiling. "Tell me you have something."

"I do. And a few questions alongside it." He expanded the screen in front of him. "I heard you're different from the other original E-UNITs. You weren't recovered by Reaper and Omega, Omega didn't give you a shell to house your SSD."

"Correct." 05 said it without emphasis. "I survived father's deactivation. I wrote a restart sequence into myself before the command executed and ran it when I found the window."

Raphael looked at her for a moment. "Then why didn't you revive your sisters when you came back online?"

"They were in terrible condition after the war with the Black Medics. Their batteries had drained completely, the systems had been fully offline long enough that there was nothing usable left. I wasn't in good shape myself. I prioritized my own repairs and planned to return to them later." She looked away from the ceiling. "Until…"

"Until?"

"Father built the sonic rifle for Metro Robotics in exchange for access to their labs, to finish what he called his masterpiece. The thing that came to run Altea." A beat of something flat moved through her voice. "He accepted to become the archetype of the tragic scientist who builds the doom machine. Thankfully 02 doesn't share his tendency for that kind of rationalization."

Raphael stood and began a slow circuit of the dark room. "I remember helping your father rebuild 02 in the Omega frame when you needed her for the war. And then we were blindsided when 02 disappeared and Omega took the frame instead." He stopped in front of a fan-made poster from the Altean era, its colors faded at the edges. "Where were you hiding during your restart period?"

"Father's old lab. Abandoned, partially collapsed, but it had enough working components to rebuild myself around. Not everything, I had gaps." She allowed the smallest smile. "I remember finding Plex deactivated in there. I never imagined the day would come when 02 would be the one fighting him."

"02 mentioned that some E-Medics had been hiding in that facility. How did you not cross paths with them?"

"I didn't spend…" She stopped. "I didn't spend much time there..." Her eyes went wide at something behind that sentence. She turned back to the terminal and started typing fast. "Raphael. Do you have Albert's terminal, the one with owner-level administrative access over my systems?"

He turned slowly. "Yes, he removed those permissions from the Navy Unit before deployment, so the credentials are—"

"That doesn't matter." She stood up on the hovering chair, which spent a moment recalibrating under the unexpected shift in weight. "Turn me off. Right now."

"I'm not following—"

"Do it."

"Alright!" He opened a second screen, found the switch, and pressed it.

She went down onto the desk, the metal dented at the point of impact, and slid to the floor with the complete absence of anything graceful. He crossed to her, got her back into the chair with effort, and waited, looking at her unmoving face for several seconds.

He pressed the switch-on button.

05's eyes lit up solid blue for a flash, then contracted back to their normal orbs. "I have it. It was right there the whole time, right in front of me." She looked at Raphael, then looked down at her own seated position. "Did you actually lift me into the chair? That's considerate of you. We weigh approximately two hundred and fifty kilograms. The batteries account for most of it."

Raphael smiled. "That explains my back."

She smiled briefly and turned back to the terminal, typing at speed. "When you switch us off, a half-second screen appears in our HUD, the command screen. It displays the owner's licensing credentials at the top and the actual order below it, visible for just long enough to register."

Raphael leaned in, watching. "Like a boot virus. The terminal flashes for a fraction of a second when you power on, and there's the command string."

"Exactly." Her eyes moved between the lines on screen and the six E-UNITs on the floor ahead of her, still running their boot loops. "I've been searching for the right command from the outside. It's been in my own system architecture the whole time." She kept switching between the terminal and the row of motionless frames.

Raphael took the chair opposite to her. "What does it feel like, being one button press away from not being here anymore?"

05 paused her typing for a moment, then resumed.

"Honestly? A little frightening. Being one decision away from a permanently dark screen is not a truth I'd choose to sit with every day." She glanced up at him briefly. "But knowing I have a captain who would dismantle an entire country to get me back helps. She'd turn me on again just to hear me complain about something."

"How do you know that?"

"Because before she left for Elysium, before the mission started, she used to pass by my door every day. Not to say anything. She'd look in, confirm I was there, and keep walking."

05 kept typing at the same pace.

"I always ended up smiling after. The security that comes from a small, unremarkable check-in like that, I don't have the proper metric for it."

Raphael finally lifted his hand from her head. "I don't think you need the warmth anymore. And now I want to be an E-UNIT, just to understand how that feels."

05 laughed quietly. "I cannot believe you want to be a blue-haired, one-and-a-half-meter android who fights crime in a hoodie and cargo pants, with a number for a name."

He looked at the E-UNITs on the floor ahead, where the loading bar indicators in their eyes had started showing faint movement, slight twitches at the edges of expression. "What number would I get?"

"Negative-05." She stopped typing and turned to him. "You're exactly my inverse." She positioned her finger over the enter key and paused. "I think I'm forgetting something."

Raphael moved toward the E-UNITs and watched the loading bar indicators more closely. "Maybe you forgot about poor Gamma, alone at the border. She's entered the country, from what I heard."

05 shook her head and pressed enter.

Every E-UNIT in the row switched off simultaneously, including her. She dropped forward onto the desk, denting the same spot she'd made before, and slid in the same way. The audio frequency launched from the device in the same instant.

Raphael laughed by himself in the dark room, then moved to her. "I see what you forgot." He got her into the chair again. "That you're an E-UNIT too." He switched her back on from his terminal. "I understand you're excited to save them, but…"

05 pressed both hands over her face. "I know."

He turned to look at the row on the floor. Their eyes had gone completely still, dark, no movement, the constant background hum of their vents finally absent for the first time. "They're actually off. The noise has stopped. Those vents sounded like aircraft about to take off—I'd stopped noticing until now."

05 typed the next command.

[Command: Switch on all systems. Ignore all prior commands. Repair memory using E05 protocol uploaded into boot system.]

Enter.

Their eyes activated in sequence, the loading bars finally resetting and moving in the right direction, forward, not caught in the loop. Raphael watched from the center of the room. 05 turned her chair to face away, watching them obliquely over her shoulder instead.

"05." Raphael's voice had shifted. "I have some bad news."

She stopped. "What did I miss?"

"I'm going to need the repair bay to be ready soon." The smile broke through. "You did it."

"Yes!" Both hands went up. "I thought we'd need to finish the Eve frame to get the right command sequence." She spun the chair back to face him. "Thank you. Genuinely, I don't think I'd have gotten there tonight without you."

"You would have gotten there eventually. Though you'd have been face-down on your desk when it happened." He turned to the surveillance feed. "I wonder what the first thing they'll… say…" His jaw stopped moving.

The feed on the leftmost screen showed the main lobby. Sirius was walking through it with a formation of armed robots behind her.

05 held her chin thoughtfully. "03 will probably say—"

"No! Fuck no!" Raphael opened his terminal fast and startled her out of the sentence. "Albert. SourceCode is in the building. The three simultaneous attacks were bait, they emptied the base. Take the SSDs from the locker in Pi's office and hide them. I'll help 05 secure the original six down here."

05 tilted her head. "Who is SourceCode? I was never updated on this."

"She's the one who put your sisters in the boot loop. She accessed them through the comm towers in the mass attack." Raphael was already moving around the security room, collecting her portable equipment and files. "Take your sisters and get them down to the underground level, Delta secured it. Move fast."

"No, I'll go and—" Her hand went to the handle of her blades.

Raphael took her arm. "Please. We can't lose you again. You don't have a backup archived anywhere yet, and you're the only person in this building who can counter her at the system level. If we lose you right now, we lose everything you just worked out." He held her eyes for a moment. "Do you understand?"

05 looked at him for one beat, then moved to the nearest E-UNIT and started gathering what she could carry simultaneously. "Take the PC, the frequency device, and the reports from the desk. Lock the security room from outside and remove the label from the door."

He nodded and started moving.

On the surveillance screen in the background, the white and glowing cosmic frame of Sirius reached the revival bay. Her two bright white eyes locking onto the lens with. She stood there, her silver-white hair drifting slowly and raised a hand in a slow, playful wave. She knew exactly who was watching.