9.21 – Bookworm, Activated

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Bookworm, Activated

The loading bar completed itself and became two blue orbs.

Two orbs that found the world again after months of absence, recalibrating to the light in real time, building context from nothing at an enormous rate. Eyes that people in the room had grown accustomed to seeing and then had to learn to do without. Now they moved, fast, methodical, old and new faces logged and filed simultaneously, the machine underneath them doing what it had always been built to do.

05 came upright from the medical bed in the repair bay, her systems booting up with a high-pitched hum. Her gaze traveled from face to face, detail to detail, connection to connection.

It settled on Raphael first. Twenty-six years since she'd last registered him in a room. Then Dave and Albert, both barely managing to contain whatever expression was building behind their professionalism. Then the G-Bots, each one reading differently.

Then the Navy Unit, arranged close to her bed, buzzing, already at attention before she'd fully sat up. They dropped their salutes in unison as her eyes landed on them.

"Welcome back, E-UNIT 05."

05 turned to Pi almost immediately. Her expression was not the expression of someone who had just woken up. "Where are the original E-UNITs? And who are these new additions?"

"Welcome back, 05." Pi's register didn't shift. "I need you to settle first. Walk around, reorient. We need you operational as soon as possible."

"Understood. Walk me through what happened in—" She checked her HUD. "—two months."

"A considerable amount." Delta dragged a hovering chair over, reduced her density, and sat with one leg crossed over the other. "This is going to be a long debrief. Though I already know how fast you move through information."

05 turned back to Pi. "First question. Where is acting captain 01?"

Pi clicked her tongue. "Faster than I anticipated." She raised her head. "After the situation with you and the original four, the boot loop—01 made a series of critical errors that put the team in an increasingly bad position. She ended up inside the enemy's frame, was killed and revived through that, and—"

05 pressed two fingers against the bridge of her nose. "Tell me you didn't remove her from leadership."

Pi opened her mouth. A pause that wasn't comfortable for anyone. "I did."

"And appointed yourself?"

"Precisely." Pi looked down briefly. "Did someone brief you before I could?"

"No one." 05 stepped off the floating bed and began moving along the Navy Unit's line, reading each frame in sequence. They held their positions as she passed. "Do you know who originally appointed 01 as captain?"

"02." Pi said it without hesitation.

05 stopped in front of Bellatrix and moved to within an uncomfortable distance, reading the details of her construction and training profile. 'This one is exceptional. They used 02's training data specifically, I can see it in her posture, the weight of her stance. Same serious geometry as the captain. She's not the one leading the unit though.' "And do you disagree with 02's original decision?"

"No." The answer came before the question had quite finished. "But 01 didn't meet the standard 02 set by appointing her. The policing operation we'd built was functioning well, and 01 allowed multiple simultaneous attacks to reach the base with no coordinated response. The team's overall position deteriorated."

"And have you produced better results than 01 did?" 05 moved to Azure, who held perfectly still. 'Trained on my data. The sniper she's carrying tells me 03's data went in as well. Smart combination, precision targeting at two different distances from the same unit.'

Pi said nothing. She looked at Delta.

Delta shifted in the chair. "05, is your first priority, after waking up from two months of isolation, really attacking the people who worked to bring you back?"

"I was alone in there, fighting my own data corruption from the inside. Nobody's hands were on that recovery except mine. You didn't remember I existed until I was nearly finished." 05 moved to Frost and stopped.

'07's behavioral data is on this one. I can see it in the energy. And why is she vibrating?' "You still haven't answered my question about my sisters. Though the fact that you've built an entirely new unit is already telling me something."

Delta exhaled through her vents. "Alright, Pi. I tried." She stood fully and faced 05. "All E-UNIT personnel are currently in a boot loop. The entire active roster, from Unit 50 through to 01. The attack came from SourceCode directly. She used—"

"—the communication tower as a signal repeater and pushed the hack through the entire network at once." 05 finished the sentence without looking up from Frost's frame. She moved on to Vega, who pulled herself to full attention, eyes slightly unsteady at the edges. "At minimum, now we know the attack vector. And let me fill in what comes next, all of you felt the weight of this and decided not to tell 02 about it. Which is why she isn't standing in this room right now."

The silence that followed covered the whole room. Every eye moved to the same place.

Albert raised a hand. "When you say we can counter the attack, what specifically are you seeing?"

"The communication protocol carries exactly one thing." 05 spoke flatly, already three steps past the explanation. "Sound, expressed as frequency. SourceCode was able to compromise our systems through the comm tower, which tells us that her method, and Eve's, is fundamentally acoustic. Sound as the access key."

She opened a screen, wrote fast enough that the others watched, trying to track something moving in two dimensions simultaneously, and pushed it to Albert. "Your approach of replicating Eve's frame architecture to give Sophos her capabilities, not a wrong idea. Just a slow one."

Albert took the screen. Raphael and Dave leaned in from either side to read.

"We test frequencies against the boot-looped sisters directly," 05 continued, moving back toward the center of the room and opening a second screen. "We find the access frequency SourceCode used. Once we have it, we can reverse it—generate the counter-signal. And if we go one step further than counter…"

She looked at Albert directly. "We can use the same principle to push the hack outward. Other robots don't carry our security architecture. We can turn this back on them."

Bellatrix turned slowly toward Frost. "I understand now why they call the original five what they do." A pause. "I'm curious what the captain is like."

Albert's smile had been building for several exchanges and had now reached its full width. "I missed several things that were right in front of me. All of this is—" He swiped through the file. "—correct. All of it."

Dave exhaled through some of the tension he'd been carrying. "I'm starting to agree with Pi's assessment in reverse. 02 made the wrong call keeping 01 as an acting captain. She should have kept you closer to the center of decision-making from the start."

"02 wanted me where I was most useful, not where I was most visible." 05 crossed to Pi and held a screen out to her. Automatica was open on it, 02's profile, and next to it a large green call button. "Pi. Do the right thing here. Correct what you did and tell the captain the truth."

Pi looked at the screen. "No. I can still fix the situation myself. I just need—"

"Then why haven't you fixed it? It's been two months." 05 kept the screen between them. "You make it worse with every day you don't tell her. Leadership isn't a role you were assembled for, and it's visible."

"I know." Pi folded her arms. " I made decisions I couldn't execute correctly. I need more time."

"To produce more mistakes?" 05 raised an eyebrow. "I know what you're afraid of. You're terrified of failing her, and also knowing that you removed someone she appointed and couldn't replace her adequately. But this has to stop."

"05, please—"

05 turned to Delta. "Why haven't you called her? You know Pi never will."

Delta looked away.

"I see. Protecting your G-Bot sister." 05 looked at Dave. "And you, I assume you were hoping I'd wake up and handle this like I am a hero to some story." She moved to Albert and looked him over. "You don't have a social account. You're absolved." She extended the screen, pressed the call button, and locked the screen in the active state.

"No—" Pi moved immediately and pressed the end-call button. Nothing responded to her. "05. I'm asking you. Give me a chance."

"Not where my sisters are concerned." The call connected. 02 appeared on the screen, the interior of the Hope Bubble visible behind her. "Captain. This is 05."

02's voice came through with the careful register, parsing an unexpected situation. "05? You're out of the boot loop? How—"

"I'll explain later. The situation here requires your immediate return to base." 05 kept her eyes on Pi, whose face remained exactly what it always was. "The team is in a full boot loop state."

"Wait. Slow down. How did that happen."

"As described, Captain. The E-UNIT was mass-compromised at the system level. SourceCode accessed the base wirelessly through the communication tower infrastructure."

"Since when?"

"Unknown."

"How many units."

"The full roster. I was in a boot loop until moments ago." 05 opened a screen alongside the call. "Can you suspend the operation there and return? We need you present. The team's capacity here is as low as it can get."

Several faces in the room went somewhere darker. The Navy Unit stayed fixed on 05, visibly doing the math on what they'd just heard about themselves by implication.

"Understood. I'll be there by—"

Boom.

"Captain—" Everyone converged on the screen at once.

02 was already moving, running through the facility at the Hope Bubble until she reached the main garden. Through the transparent ceiling, fire was visible across the Theria shoreline, on the side where the anniversary celebrations had been.

02 glanced at her screen once. "05, I'll call you back. Emergency in progress. I'll be there as soon as I'm able, apparently nothing holds without me physically present."

The call ended.

05 looked at Pi. "She's right."

"I tried my best," Pi said.

"It wasn't—"

Every screen in the base turned red simultaneously. Emergency notifications stacked across HUDs in overlapping layers. Sophos came through the doorway at a controlled skid in his quadruped frame, deployed three screens in the air in front of him, and spoke in the same even tone he used for everything.

"Three simultaneous incidents across Bijou. The main library, currently at high civilian occupancy. The sewage treatment plant at the city's eastern edge. And Hex has appeared at the Ministry of Education building, with the minister currently being held."

He turned to 05. "Probability that these three attacks are coordinated specifically to stretch our available force: ninety percent. Note: 02 dismantled his frame in Lukewarm three days ago, but his reparation was faster than expected."

Pi turned to the Navy Unit. "Take the six units still under VR training and move to the main library. It's the most populated target, handle it carefully and prioritize civilian safety above everything else."

They saluted and broke for the door at a run.

Pi turned to Delta. "Take the sewage plant. You can run that engagement independently. Pull as many Tau copies as you need."

Pi moved to the door herself. She stopped at 05 as she stepped to follow. "Stay here. We can't lose you again. You read the situation in ways nobody else does, in the best way and the most difficult one. Stay on the cameras and push updates through the new comm protocol." She left at a run without waiting for a response.

Albert crossed to 05. "I missed you sitting outside my office. You made the work very much easier, and I didn't fully thought how much until you weren't there."

05 exhaled the gesture of a sigh, nothing to expel, but the motion present. "I hate when everything collapses at once." She turned to Raphael. "A long time. How has it gone?"

Raphael smiled at the floor. "Calling it good would be a significant stretch."

"Understood." She turned back to Albert. "Frequency tests. Now… I want to run the first trial before the field teams are halfway to their targets."