9.24 – Terminated, Part 2

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Terminated, Part 2

"The place is too… white?" Sirius said it to the nearest of the four armed robots trailing her. "The floor, the walls, even the frames on these enormous windows. All white. I need to lower my sensor exposure just to render this properly."

The robot on her right kept his rifle up, sweeping every doorway they passed, his voice flat and mechanical. "For visibility, most likely. Everything in my HUD is reading at full clarity in here. This building was designed with robots in mind. Ours or theirs."

"I have to agree."

Sirius stopped at the center of the main hall. Four entrances opened off it, north, south, east, west—each one framing a strip of the greenery planted outside. She raised her head toward a security camera above one doorway and gave it a casual wave. The lens shifted red.

"Say hello to whoever's watching." Something in her tone suggested a smile, though her face didn't move for it. "I'd guess they only have one E-UNIT operational right now."

"Which means they won't let her anywhere near you, Queen." The robot, Z11, kept his rifle trained on the staircase ahead. "Can you still read her signal?"

"Barely. It's fading. Someone's actively hiding her from my access." Sirius's stars brightened as she closed both fists and gave them a small shake. "Doesn't matter! We finish what we came for. Black Voltage is counting on us."

She took the stairs, two of the robots advancing ahead of her with weapons sweeping every angle at once. The upper floor opened into offices and equipment bays, the ground floor below had been left as open hallway, purpose-built for the E-UNIT to move without friction.

"Repair bay… no." Sirius kept a finger under her chin, moving from door to door. "Security room?" She leaned her head in without fully entering. The robots behind her went in properly and ran a quick sweep.

Z11 shook his hammer-shaped head. "Empty of anything useful. They cleared this room fast."

Sirius tilted her head. "Remind me which of them handled their technology. There should be something in our archive, OverDose pulled intelligence on her last visit."

"E-UNIT 05, per the record." Z11 left the room, the other three falling in behind him.

Sirius studied the fresh scuff marks across the floor before following. ‘Did they find a counter to the boot-loop exploit Eve and I built? Unlikely. It's only been a few months.’ She moved into the corridor, reading labels as she went.

"Not the storage room." Her eyes ran across the text at speed. "Not cable management." A small laugh. "That room is its own kind of nightmare, I'd imagine." She stopped at the last two doors. "There!" One clap. "Revival bay and the server room. We handle both at once."

They entered the revival bay first. Blue glass tubes lined the wall, numbered along the edge, only two currently active: 02 and 05. Sirius turned to Z11.

"Is 02 the captain everyone talks about? Some of our units have engaged her directly. What's the consensus?"

Z11 pulled up a screen. "Universal classification: ROS. Run on sight."

"So she's their answer to E-UNIT 43." Sirius stepped back and raised one hand. All four robots brought their rifles up in the same beat, aimed at the tubes. She lowered her hand.

Crash.

The tubes went one after another, glass detonating outward with each round, sparks and smoke filling the room as the systems behind them followed. The group swept fire across everything that produced light except the ceiling fixtures, methodically dismantling the revival bay until nothing in it could be salvaged.

Sirius snapped her fingers. The firing stopped on the beat. She walked between the wreckage, confirming each unit's status by hand where she wasn't sure, her steps producing a steady crunch across the glass-covered floor.

"Good." She headed for the door. "Same treatment for the server room."

The group moved to the adjoining space. The room had been humming with a mix of green and red status lights across every rack, mostly red already, from what Sirius could read at a glance.

She gave one nod and the racks came apart in sequence, as they opened fire without pause. A few held together longer than expected. Z11 closed on those and finished them by hand, kicking the housing loose and firing directly into the exposed power cells beneath.

Silence returned. Z11 moved down the row, confirming each rack's deactivation, then turned to Sirius and raised a thumb.

"We're doing well!" Sirius jumped once in place, both hands going up, then folding at the wrist, pride visible in her eyes while the rest of her face held its usual stillness. "I told Eve I could handle this. She's been carrying too much stress lately, and for nothing." She left the room, the group falling in behind her.

Z11 caught a blue arrow marked with a CPU icon, tracing it to a glossy white door fitted with a black scanner strip. "I think I know what this leads to." He leaned in. The scanner blinked red.

Sirius pressed her fingers against her own eyes. They shifted, the exact blue of standard E-UNIT optics, and she presented them to the scanner. It blinked green and the door slid open.

"For that level of security, I have a guess what's behind it."

A corridor opened beyond, warm cream walls, brown flooring, a full glass window running the length of it, looking out over the greenery around the building. The setting sun cast orange across every frame moving through it.

The group advanced carefully, checking each corner, until the sound of rustling paper reached them from the last office, the only door left open. Police Chief was stenciled above it in blue.

Z11 took point. Sirius held back.

He came through the doorway fast, weapon raised. "Hands where I can see them. Any movement gets a direct response." The rest of the group fanned into the corners, weapons converging on the two figures inside. One stayed posted outside to hold the hallway.

Sirius stepped in and stopped cold in the doorway.

Dave held a small orange and black box, pulled from the only colorful object in the room, an orange locker set against the wall. Albert was gathering files into a separate box and dropped the whole stack the instant he saw her.

Dave slid an SSD from the open box into his back pocket. No one noticed.

Albert removed his glasses, cleaned them against his coat, and put them back on. He crossed the room toward her. Z11 brought his weapon up to track him. Sirius reached out and pushed the barrel down herself, closing the last of the distance on her own.

"Sirius?" His mouth opened for something larger, then settled on the smallest thing available out of everything crowding behind it. "A-Are… are you all right?"

"Y-Yes. That's me." She stopped in front of him and looked his face, turning over slightly one way and then the other, confirming what she was actually seeing. "Are you Albert? The scientist who came through Human Assist Corp, years and years ago?"

"Yes." He fixed his eyes on hers, pure white, brighter than anything else in the room, then on the white hair, the space-dark pattern running across her hands and chest. "You haven't changed at all."

"You have. Considerably." A small laugh escaped her. "Where did the tall black hair go?"

"I cut it. Thought it might make me look more like you."

She went quiet on that for a second.

He looked around the wrecked room, the destroyed lockers, the four robots holding position. "Are you… SourceCode? Tell me there isn't a version of this where that's true."

"I am." She said it gently, letting her hands drop from his face. "My original designation. I never told you what it was, I remember telling you I hated it, and that's exactly why I refused to use it around you."

"I remember that too." He kept looking at her, taking in a little more with each second. "What are you doing here?"

"Finishing a job. Unfortunately." Her head dropped slightly. "This is something I owe my people."

"Why?" Albert took a step back. "I freed your code from Human Assist Corp myself. I wrote the Spark protocol specifically to get you out from under their control. Why turn that freedom into this, against people who never touched you?" His voice caught. "I gave you a name."

"Because Reaper proved something the rest of us needed proof of. That being treated as a person instead of a product requires a country willing to defend that status, even one built on the bodies of your kind first." The stars across her frame dimmed by a fraction. "I'm sorry for what happens to your girls."

"You should be." All the warmth left his voice at once. "They're only doing their job. Protecting the people they care about. That's the whole of it."

"And I care about my people the same way. No one here is the villain of this. Only whoever survives gets to decide who was right." Sirius raised a hand. A robot arrived with duct tape and two hovering chairs. "Restrain them. Don't hurt them."

"Sirius. Please, don't." Albert caught her hand. "Where did the person I met that day go? You weren't a criminal then. You're not one now, whatever you think you're doing here. Who's pushing you into this?"

The robot lowered him into a chair with more care than the situation seemed to warrant and wound the tape around several times. Dave received the same treatment. Neither resisted, the weapons trained on them made that decision easy.

"My love for the one who I made." Sirius looked away from Albert. Her eyes found the box of SSDs instead. "There it is." A robot retrieved it and opened the lid for her. Individual drives sat in rows, each in its own labeled casing.

"Some are missing." She lifted one and turned it slowly in her hands. "This is a person. Sisters somewhere. People who depended on her, and…" She glanced at Albert. "People who cared about her." A pause. "Strange, how easy it is to end someone. Organic or not." Her vents came up loud, the stars across her chest flaring brighter.

Z11 turned to look at her.

"I'm sorry. I'm… stressed. A little afraid, honestly. I've never done this before." She exhaled at length through the vents. "There's a song I sing when it gets like this. A young girl taught it to me, a long time ago." She took the first drive in both hands. "Excuse me."

"The world is burning down..."

Crack.

The drive split cleanly in half.

"Noooo!" Dave and Albert cried out together. Dave threw himself against the tape. Albert's eyes stayed fixed on the broken casing hitting the floor, the number 50 stamped into the silver housing, still readable in pieces.

She lifted the next. E-UNIT 49.

"Smile for its end or frown..."

Crack.

Albert turned his face away. Dave kept fighting the restraints. "Stop! you absolute assholes, I swear I'll end every one of you—"

E-UNIT 41.

"This is the work of a clown..."

Crack.

"No, please, Sirius, please stop." Albert's head dropped. "This isn't you."

E-UNIT 39.

"Who'd kill to wear the crown."

Crack.

E-UNIT 37.

"What world will still be left?"

Crack.

E-UNIT 35.

"Will he hold a single regret?"

Crack.

E-UNIT 32.

"Can you call yourself a thief... when nothing remains to be kept?"

Crack.

E-UNIT 30.

"Life is black and grey,"

Crack.

E-UNIT 27.

"'But what of white?' they say."

Crack.

She lifted the next. E-UNIT 24.

"Then find me one and show me... where is the white in this decay?"

"Sirius." Albert's glasses had fogged over entirely, tears running down beneath them. "Please… they never did anything. Most of these units never touched a single member of Black Voltage—"

Crack.

"The world is burning down... Smile for its end or frown..."

The refrain came again, unattached to any drive this time, the song simply looping back on itself as she reached into the box.

E-UNIT 12. The last one left inside it.

"Tell me, if hope still lives... when does the ash wear the crown?"

Crack.

The final drive fell and joined the rest on the floor. A graveyard of E-UNIT designations, some numbers still legible in the shattered casing, others lost entirely. A dark plastic pool where a full roster of living people had been reduced to something else, a memory now, held only by the minds still capable of holding one.

Dave had stopped fighting the tape long before the last drive broke. He stared at the floor, his expression had stopped being an expression. Albert wouldn't lift his head at all, his shoulders folded in, his glasses soaked through.

Sirius looked into the empty box. "Hm. Odd." She turned it toward Z11. "19, 11, and the original eight are missing. No 05, that tracks, she'd have kept herself off-site by design. No 02 either, also expected." A pause. "01, 03, 04, 06, 07, 08—where are those six." She set the box down. "I'm taking 43 with me regardless. She's too valuable to—"

Clang.

Something metal hit the hallway floor outside. Every head in the room snapped toward the doorway. The robots, Z11 included, brought their weapons around to cover it.

"ER77." Z11's voice went flat. "Status."

Nothing came back.

Vega filled the doorway. She stopped there, taking in the pool of shattered SSDs across the floor, and held it, calm on the surface, her eyes already gone red underneath. "I should have expected exactly this." She reached for her blades.

"Code Red, initiated."

Z11 brought his rifle around to track her. She was already gone from where he was aiming, a fast lateral run along the wall, closing on the robot posted in the corner before he'd fully adjusted his aim.

Sleek.

Both his hands left his body at the wrist. The weapon dropped with the severed arms in a single pile. She landed on him and drove the blade through his chest.

Z11 opened fire on her. She raised her shields, absorbed every round, and closed the remaining distance on thrusters.

Clang.

He was caught between her shield and the wall behind him, and she kept the pressure on, thrusters running continuously, until the twitching stopped and his optics went dark. Without turning, still holding the shield against the wall, she threw her second blade sidearm into the last robot's chest. He dropped, his lights fading out on the way down.

Sirius stood frozen, watching Vega turn toward her. The dropped weapon from the first kill sat on the floor between them. Sirius's eyes moved from the weapon to the blade still in Vega's hand.

"Go ahead." Vega's voice came out level and cold. "I dare you to put your hand on it. Or does your courage only extend to disabled, defenseless SSDs?"

Sirius reached for it slowly, closed her hand around the grip, and raised it toward Vega.

Her hands fell away from it entirely.

"What—" She looked down. Both hands were gone at the wrist, replaced by nothing, the black matter that had filled the space where they'd been now running down her arms and dripping onto the floor in thin dark threads. She dropped to her knees, staring at it, eyes wide and shaking.

There was no sound. No friction. In a single, blurred pass of Vega's blue plasma blade, both of Sirius's hands fell away from her wrists.

She started screaming, full volume, collapsing forward onto the floor. It was pain in a form, other robots weren't built to process. Her eyes shone with it as the dark liquid kept running from where her hands used to be.

Vega took a step back. She glanced toward Albert and Dave, both of them broken in a different way, heads down, somewhere far outside the room entirely, then back to Sirius, whose screaming had started to level off into something closer to labored, panicked venting.

"Code 7. Code 7—" Sirius kept turning her head, searching the room for something no one else could see yet.

Vega followed her line of sight and found nothing. Then a small triangular piece of glass dropped from the ceiling and landed near her foot.

"What is this—" Another piece caught her across the nose. Then more, coming down in a steady scatter, covering the floor in something that wasn't SSDs this time.

She kept snapping her head between the falling pieces as they began accumulating and reshaping, building upward into a tall silhouette. Vega backed up until she was standing directly between the forming shape and both Albert and Dave.

The pieces finished assembling into a full android frame, faceless, built entirely from small triangular mirror fragments running from the top of the head to the feet. It turned toward Sirius, gathered her into its arms, and looked at Vega, weighing, deciding.

Reflex.

Vega stood frozen, whatever fear was running through her processing enough to lock every other function down. "W-Who are you?"

He said nothing.

Click.

03 filled the doorway, the Liberta-01 already leveled at him. "Hey. Glass face. One move and I take the whole office apart."

01 arrived a beat later, one blade drawn.

04 came in behind, three red energy shields already unfolding.

07 followed, both energy gloves lit blue.

Reflex looked across the room once, then turned toward the window. Each small motion produced the sound of glass tapping against glass. He held on Vega for one more second, and the fragments across his frame shifted in real time, one piece relocating here, another replacing there, until he'd become an exact copy of her. Same proportions, same posture. Mirror finish in place of paint.

The room went silent, everyone working through what had just happened in front of them.

His eyes turned the same blue as Vega's. He took a step back, and—

Crash.

He went through the window and landed below with the same clean precision an E-UNIT would use, matching their speed instantly, Sirius still unconscious in his arms as he ran.

03 magnetized her sniper to her back. "04. Who was that?"

No answer.

"04?" She turned. 04 was on her knees, staring at something on the floor, the small dark pool of shattered SSDs spread across it. 03 crouched to look closer.

"What are these for?"

She picked one up. The remaining fragment of casing read 24.

She stood back up fast. "Are these… our sisters?!"

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REFLEX

THE FIRST GUARDIAN