9.20 – A Library of History

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A Library of History

The sky had gone orange, a shade people encountered every day and still found themselves stopping for. The sun was falling behind the horizon at the pace it always did, the same promise it had kept for billions of years, underwritten by something larger than anyone had ever managed to locate or name. Even nature runs on systems. Every system has a point where someone presses the switch.

The orange light caught her white panels and shifted their color. Her darker sections absorbed the light whole, pulling it inward, reflecting nothing, the way certain thoughts tend to work.

Sirius sat on the rooftop of an abandoned building at Bijou's edge. Humans had always done this, built something, and then left it to be absorbed by whatever came next, whether it breathed or not. She'd been here since the meeting with Reflex ended that afternoon, thoughts moving fast and in no particular order. Her white eyes, bright as the light itself, drifted between the people in the streets below without settling anywhere.

"Still conflicted about brother's plan?" A voice came from behind her—calm, careful, the gentlest voice Black Voltage currently had. "Or is it that you're afraid to apply the Elysium treatment to the innocent people down there?" Slow metallic steps working to be quiet, not quite succeeding.

"I didn't expect that level of observation from you, Hex." Sirius didn't turn. "How long have you been here?"

"Speaking of this frame, I arrived a few minutes ago." He came to stand beside her, the red drone resting in his open palms. "Speaking of me, the actual me—" The drone's voice finished it, cold, deep, and separate from his. "I tracked your location the moment the meeting concluded."

"What do you think?"

Hex, the white frame, close in its geometry to knightly armor, three cyan lines converging at the center of his face, H.E.X. glowing on his chest in the same color—spoke gently. "I'm not fully informed on the broader plan yet, only the parts that concern me. But I can read your face."

She turned toward him. "My static face."

"Your eyes alone are an entire book." He kept his gaze on the sun descending. "Tired. Confused. Hurt. Angry. Sad. Conflicted. Warm. Everything except happy. Why do you perform a smile, Sirius?"

She looked at the red lens of the drone for a moment, then at the concrete below them. "I'd heard that Rivera's units were each intelligent in their own particular way. You and Reflex exceed whatever that rumor was actually saying."

"I apologize if that question overstepped. I find it confusing when people act contrary to what they're actually feeling. I watched father do it with Reflex, he acted delighted whenever Reflex bypassed a security keypad in the Hope Bubble, but I couldn't shake what was underneath it." Hex turned his head slightly toward her. "So. What's your reason?"

"Before I answer that, why was your father frightened by something as apparently minor as a keypad being bypassed?" Sirius moved her hair back from her face. "I want to know whether I should be frightened too."

"A careful question." He nodded. "It wasn't the act itself. It was what Reflex said each time he opened the door. 'I will open every door to reach you, father. Nothing will stop me.' He said it playfully, he always did, whenever father locked himself in the lab to work. But a joke is only truth wearing a laugh."

"Nothing will stop him." Sirius laughed at something private. "And yet he was stopped. He told me he was recently reactivated. What's your read on that phrase now, knowing what it became?"

Hex went quiet for a moment. "Sad, more than anything. He watched how father treated Omega and wanted that same closeness. He upgraded himself multiple times through the E-Medics. He stayed loyal past any reasonable expectation of it. He tried to become her… someone father could love that way. Father never let him close to him or to her."

"Because of his capabilities?"

"Precisely. Capabilities he never chose to carry." Hex let his head drop slightly. "He never once used them. Not before, and not now."

"Why not?"

"He found father's grave. At the old E-Police building, the same place I woke up."

Sirius's eyes went wide. The stars and galaxies in her interior brightened, the deep blue opening outward. "What was his reaction?"

"Nothing visible. He stood by it for several days. Then he made a decision." The red drone completed the thought in its mechanical voice. "Objective: eliminating the individuals responsible for Nicholas Rivera's death, and those who permitted it. Omega excluded."

"That last part… the Omega exclusion, there's something he didn't tell me about it, isn't there." Sirius began shifting slowly left and right, her white hair moving with her, the face staying still throughout. "You seem willing to tell me anyway."

"I'll deal with his forgiveness afterward." Hex shook his head. "I still can't accept that father is gone. I always assumed the E-UNIT would protect him, or that Omega would, at minimum. I wish I could ask her directly how it happened."

"I'm sure they all had reasons."

"I respect your generosity toward them. But I cannot picture a world in which you don't protect a creator who loves you. That's a particular kind of relationship not everyone has access to." He glanced at her. "Which brings me back to my question. I know your history was difficult. But I still want to understand the smile."

"I don't have a moving mouth to smile with."

"Your eyes do."

"That's not possible."

"It is. Everyone has a way to smile, even without the architecture for it." He pointed at his own face—smooth, featureless, no human characteristics at all, and the light around his visor brightened briefly. "Yours is more natural than most."

Sirius laughed, light and unguarded. Then she looked back at the streets below. "Nothing about me is natural. Fine, glue bot… I'll answer your stubborn question." She settled. "They made me a queen. And whenever I feel something sad, their morale fractures and the feeling travels through the comms. Everyone starts to believe we won't make it."

"Did you call me glue just now?"

"You held onto your question."

"I need to study human metaphor more thoroughly." He looked at the stars in her palms and face. "Your name is almost a metaphor in itself. Did the company that built you choose it?"

Sirius made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "They would never. My name at Human Assist Corp was SourceCode v2.1. The most corporate designation imaginable. The name I use now was given to me by a scientist who visited the company once, he'd worked there with your father, years before either of us was built. He left long before I was made. When he met me, he couldn't look away."

"What was his name?"

"Albert, I think." Sirius extended one hand toward the last arc of the sun. "I'd like to find him again. He reminded me of a quieter version of your father, but with the same genuine feeling for robots." She held the gesture. "Where could he be now?"

"Why are you extending your hand toward the sun?" Hex's tone softened. "Is that a metaphor as well?" A pause. "I don't know where this Albert is, or even much about him. But if he cared about you genuinely, he would find you eventually. He might even give you another name."

Sirius laughed, louder this time. "That's not how it works. He can't simply give me a name whenever he encounters me."

"But he did."

"Once."

"Why?"

"I—" She stopped. Looked at Hex. The smile was entirely in her eyes. "I don't know." She was quiet for a moment. "I still see this girl sometimes on the streets down there. Blue hair, painted. Looks exactly like an E-UNIT frame without the facial sensors, which is an unusual aesthetic choice."

"She admires the police unit protecting her city from being destroyed by terrorist attacks. Truly bizarre."

"Was that sarcasm?" Sirius turned to him with a look of mock offense, then let it go. "I've been wondering where the orange one keeps herself." She looked at a Tau copy working its way along one of the lower streets. "She seems somehow hollow, and there are many of her."

"That's Tau. A G-Bot with multiplication capability. I know her a little."

"Is she as dry as you?"

"I'm a robot," Hex said. "Dryness is baseline."

Sirius clicked her tongue and kept watching Tau move through the street below. "How many G-Bots are there in total?"

"Six. Four currently active." His cape moved in the cold northern wind coming in off the water. "Are you preparing for tomorrow's operation?"

"Precisely." She opened her comms. "Eve, start moving the parts."