9.15 – Frozen Beauty

Night finally settled over Theria, the day having dragged itself out far longer than it usually did, as if even daylight wanted a taste of what the city had become. The wide capital streets thinned out toward evening. Most robots had taken up the human habit of using the night to recharge and rest, despite having no actual requirement to do either.

Except at the city center.

A vast open square had been cleared for the celebration. Robots moved through it wearing Reaper's face as a mask, some had gone further and tattooed his name across their back panels.

Small white tents lined both sides of the wide sidewalks, robots wandering between them admiring whatever creative liberties the tent owners had taken. Some tents sold custom parts pushed past any reasonable functional limit. Some served energy drinks, entirely new formulations, the first time most robots present had ever tasted anything through their nano-receptors. Some held full-scale moving Reaper statues for photographs.

Everything in the square, regardless of the booth, shared one number printed somewhere on it.

1

One year of existing as a country. One year free of human authority. One year of proof that robots could build a functioning society—together, and separately, and on their own terms.

Across the city, the courthouse castle sat at the edge of the shoreline, built from Omega's energy and Reaper's force control working in tandem. The windows ran dim tonight, only a few faint shadows of mechs passing unhurried through the corridors inside. The celebration's hum reaching the castle from a distance.

Reaper walked the hallway toward Shelly's room. Confident, wide, heavy steps, made no attempt to be quiet this time, the person he was visiting had no capacity to react to anything regardless of volume. Shelly remained exactly where she'd been left, frozen in place.

He stopped at the doorway.

A familiar voice carried out into the hall, calm, with something sad threading underneath it. Reaper looked through the gap and found Esoptron seated in a chair he'd pulled to face Shelly directly, talking to her. Or talking near her, there was no telling whether anything was getting through.

"—but I couldn't even drink the energy drink Infinity won't stop talking about. Realized that after I bought it, actually. No mouth to drink it with." Esoptron's head dropped briefly. "Strange that we even have the concept of mouths at all. Lord Reaper doesn't have one. Chrome doesn't. Behemoth, Obsidian—none of them, and they communicate better than half the units that do."

He looked up at her unmoving green eyes.

"I'm glad most days of the sentence is nearly over, at least. I've watched Lord Reaper come to this room every single day and say nothing while he's here, and somehow I understand it now. The way you understand the hero in a film who has to sacrifice a side character to save someone else." His eyes stayed on hers. "I hope he's realized you were never a side character."

Esoptron's sensors registered the movement behind him before he turned. He raised his head until he found Reaper's eyes in the doorway, and rose immediately, bowing deeply.

"Welcome back, Lord Reaper. I thought today might be the day you skipped."

"I keep my promises." Reaper looked at Shelly for a moment. "Has she responded to you at all?"

"No." Esoptron looked back at her. "Her eyes only started tracking movement once you arrived. I'll leave the two of you, I know you have things to say to her, and I know she wants to hear them, even like this." He moved to the door and paused there. "Lord Reaper?"

"Hm."

"She's young. Reckless. She has more energy than she knows what to do with most days." He held the pause. "Please don't punish her for being exactly that."

He left in light, careful steps. The automatic door closed behind him.

Reaper pulled the chair Esoptron had left into position and sat facing her directly. Her green eyes were locked on him, head lowered, posture gone slack in the only way it could.

"You have no idea how difficult this has been to watch. Removing your right to move freely through the world while you're fully aware and fully capable the entire time." He hesitated. "You'd make a remarkably attractive statue at the castle entrance."

Her eyes dimmed and went flat.

"No need to glare. It was a joke."

She rolled her eyes, but they came right back to him immediately after.

"I've been occupied this past week handling everything. Let me give you the actual update." He crossed one leg over the other. "First, the anniversary. I underestimated how much of my attention an event like this would require. No one around me has organized one before, none of them have ever attended one, let alone built one. It came together better than I expected, in the end."

Shelly's eyes narrowed slightly, the shape they took when she was smiling without a mouth to do it.

"In a version of this where I hadn't punished you, the organization would have gone to you entirely. I know exactly what that would have meant, every street covered in posters of me, statues on every corner. And honestly, I wouldn't have minded it coming from you. It would have been expected. In the good sense." His head turned slowly, taking in the posters on her own walls that hadn't been updated since the punishment began.

Her eyes followed his gaze around the room, already composing whatever poster would come next.

"Second update. Black Voltage." His tone didn't shift at all. "They've turned against us, and at the worst possible time to do it. They're operating under some new senior leadership we haven't identified yet, though the situation 02 walked into in Lukewarm points directly at someone specific. The faction is now actively targeting us, and the E-UNIT alongside us."

Shelly's eyes dropped, running through something.

"I know what you're calculating." Reaper nodded slowly. "Remidica could use this against us directly. I told Chrome at the time that keeping a working relationship with a group like that, this close to our border, would create exactly this problem eventually. Under a year later, and I was right. I take no satisfaction in that being true."

Shelly closed her eyes for a second, then opened them and found him again.

"I know. I should have shut it down back then. But I liked watching the Golden Circle operate independently, actually forming their own position instead of just reflecting mine back at me."

He reached over and brushed a strand of white hair from her face. "That's exactly why being around you matters to me. You represent that better than anyone else in the castle. Doing whatever you decide to do, even when it makes my circuits boil."

She looked down at the floor for a moment. Then her eyes went wide.

"What do you mean, can I get angry. Of course I can." A small, dry note entered his voice. "You have a remarkable gift for making the people around you angry without expending any visible effort on it. What you said to Omega wasn't incorrect. And what you did to father… I respect that. I don't think I could have done it myself. But the way you said it—to someone who spent years dormant because of you—"

Her eyes sharpened. She didn't look away.

"Still no regret." Reaper exhaled through his vents. "I didn't tell her the rest of it for a reason, I wanted her prepared first. But the fact that she's never once asked about him is its own kind of answer. I think she understood it the moment she saw Elysium for what it was. She just couldn't fully accept it until you said it out loud."

Shelly turned her eyes toward the window, the dark sea beyond it, light rain beginning to fall against the glass.

"I understand. I won't bring her up again near you." He looked at the same view she was looking at. "I see it now."

He opened his terminal, entered a sequence of passwords, and released her.

She nearly pitched forward, Reaper caught her before she went down. She looked at her own hands, turning them, testing the movement. Looked down at her feet, capable of carrying her anywhere again. Then her eyes locked onto Reaper's, wide and completely still, as if the freedom itself had frozen her in place this time.

Reaper laughed, dry and brief. "I finally release you and you choose to stay frozen anyway—"

Clang.

She hit him at full speed, both arms locked around him, refusing any distance at all. He tried to ease her back. The grip only tightened.

"Why…"

He returned the embrace. "Quite the opening word."

"Why are you listening to her? Do you have any idea what these past days have done to my processing? Do you understand what it's like standing frozen, fully aware, knowing you're out there somewhere alone with all of them?" She held him tighter still. "Why does someone who just arrived at this castle outweigh the one who's been here the entire time, with you, through all of it!"

Her voice lost its edge.

"You know I can't actually hate you. Why do you keep using that against me?"

"Because I'm the one running this country, and I can't show favoritism toward one person over another. Misbehave, and you stand in front of the court like anyone else would." He took her by the arm and held her at a small distance, studying her face. "There it is. I missed having an expression to look at, that frozen one was unbearable."

"Then why freeze me at all?"

"To make a point."

"We have social media for that. I'm not a delivery mechanism."

Reaper studied her for a moment. "Do you want to see the event? The crowd out there is more invested than you are, somehow, they built a full moving statue collection of me. I couldn't ask for a more accurate likeness."

"Yessss!" She was already moving, dropped to the floor and pulled a backpack from under the bed, rolled posters already inside it. She emptied it onto the mattress and wore it back on, standing to face him. "Let's go. I want all of it."

He laughed, a full, genuine minute of it, and put an arm around her shoulder, steering her toward the door. "There's a tent running a full simulation where you can play as me. I have never seen anything render that accurately."

"Don't ruin it. I want to find everything myself." She followed him out, bouncing slightly with each step. "I want one of the statues—"

The room fell silent as their footsteps faded down the corridor, leaving only the dark and the steady rhythm of the rain outside.

On the empty floating desk, the ancient smartphone she'd left behind suddenly vibrated against the metal. The screen lit up, casting a cold, blue-white light across the empty room, cutting through the shadows.

A single, unread notification popped up on the display:

Albert: Nick?! Your phone is on? How—