9.12 – sudo apt update

"Code Red—" 02's voice dropped low. "—initiated."

She began to rise off the floor. No thrusters fired beneath her, this was pure energy output lifting her clear of the ground, and the blue light pouring off her frame outshone every hexagonal cell Hex had laid into the floor. Her eyes closed for a second. When they opened, they were solid blue from edge to edge, small arcs of electricity jumping from the corners and crawling down to where her frame still made contact with the air around it.

"I was limited when I fought Plex. He could absorb energy, and right now energy is essentially all I am." Her gaze stayed locked on the white figure across the room, and the smile that formed on her face carried nothing recognizable as warmth, whatever regret might have lived there a moment ago had been cleared out entirely.

"I have a history, if you're curious. I fought a full human army. Deleted. I fought Obsidian, the second-strongest fighter in Elysium behind Reaper himself. Deleted. I fought Shelly while she had the melting green crystal active—that one nearly went the other way, but. Deleted. And poor Plex, with a self-reconstructing cyan crystal behind him. Deleted."

She raised her head and let the smile reach full visibility, Gamma's jaw had already gone slack, Hex had taken several steps back without seeming to notice he was doing it, and the four E-Medics against the far wall were smiling now too, relief breaking across their faces.

02's voice came out cold and entirely final. "Now that I know your ceiling, you're getting deleted too."

Gamma's vocal processor refused to produce anything. A notification arrived in her HUD at that exact moment, snapping her attention back.

02: Take the E-Medics and the frame and get to a corner.

Gamma: And what are you doing?

02: What I've always done. The whole time.

02 finished the thought out loud. "Deleting the problem."

Her diamond-shaped energy wings tried to unfold and met the curve of Hex's barrier instead. She looked at the wall once, briefly, and forced the wings open anyway.

Crash.

The wall came apart into fine particles of dispersing energy, the structure failing outward in every direction at once. The release sent a circular shockwave rippling across the floor, scrubbing the hexagonal pattern clean as it traveled. Gamma covered her face with both arms as the wave tore through the cell containing her, the barrier collapsing and leaving her free.

The pattern began rebuilding itself instantly, Hex's hand was already back against the floor. Gamma used the opening and accelerated, crossing the room to the E-Medics in seconds, every cell beneath her flashing red just behind where her feet had already left.

She gathered all four E-Medics and the assembled frame into her arms and ran for the corner, covering the group with her own body. She glanced back at the frame cradled against her, taking in the design properly for the first time. "This is going to be 02 soon?"

E-Medic M03 nodded, smiling despite everything. "We'll need you to do one more thing once she's settled into it."

02 was already moving, closing on Hex at a speed that matched Gamma's full sprint.

Hex raised one hand. Every cell 02's feet passed over flared and ignited blue, the heat building fast enough to start melting whatever sat on top of it. She was faster than the activation delay. Her steps rang against the floor and she was past each cell before the heat fully registered.

Hex panicked. He threw both hands up and a wall of pure melted blue energy rose around him, sealing himself off from the room entirely.

A hand came through it anyway—white and blue, and dragged him out by the collar.

02 held him close for a moment, studying the three thin lines that marked his face. Then she lifted him and drove him into the floor.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

She stopped only when the impact craters had spread across most of his torso, the cracks running deeper than the dents themselves. She noticed, in the pause, that the blue H.E.X. lettering across his chest was flickering, fighting to stay lit.

His hand came up, shaking. The floor beneath both of them began glowing blue.

A self-destruct sequence.

She drove him into the ground a final time, hard enough that the floor swallowed most of him, and stepped back to a clean distance. The light beneath him died. A new one came up, directly under her, red this time.

02 reached behind her back and produced a single blade. She angled it forward, deliberate, and began lowering it through the air with a slowness that had nothing accidental about it.

Hex's drone fed him the floor view from the side, a thin blue line had already begun cutting through the concrete and the wood flooring of the adjoining rooms, tracking toward him in a careful, patient arc. 02 was aiming the cut wirelessly, from a distance, with no visible weapon pointed anywhere near him.

He started to shake.

He pressed both palms against the floor, trying to free himself. Nothing gave. He'd planted himself too deep. He aimed his free hand back toward her in a last attempt.

The cell beneath her brightened and warmed in response. She didn't look down. She struck the floor once with her heel and the pattern broke apart around her, fighting to reassemble before she'd taken her next step.

She kept lowering the blade. It reached him.

The sound that followed was the specific shriek of a laser cutting through heavy plating, sharp enough to carry through the whole structure. Hex began separating along the blue line, the cut advancing steadily from one side to the other. He convulsed as his internal systems were severed one at a time, the light across his face and the lettering on his chest dimming in uneven pulses.

Then the cut completed, and he came apart in two pieces.

Everything stopped moving. Every light across his frame went dark at once. The pattern on the floor faded into nothing, the blue and red retreating until there was nothing left of either.

The drone returned and hovered above the wreckage, emitting a steady red light. Wire by wire, fragment by fragment, his frame began reassembling, fast, methodical, piling itself back into a single shape.

"Not today." 02 raised the blade and aimed it squarely at the reconstructing form. "Hands of the Doomed."

A wide circle materialized on the floor around Hex. The drone broke off and fled the building at full speed without waiting to see what happened next.

Hands appeared inside the circle, translucent, built from blue energy, rising up out of the floor itself, and began taking him apart piece by piece. The reconstruction process reversed itself entirely. His arm dissolved into small white and black fragments. What remained of his body shrank down to something indistinguishable from the broken, gutted frames scattered outside Dave's workshop.

02 closed her fingers and the blue light vanished all at once, leaving just her, Gamma, and the four E-Medics standing in the open space, and what was left of Hex, no longer recognizable as anything that had once moved on its own.

E-Medic M03 ran to 02. "Thank you. I knew calling you was the right decision. Pi wouldn't even consider it." Her voice softened. "Thank you, Captain."

She looked nearly identical to a standard E-UNIT, but with softer, more deliberately feminine features. Pink hair, the same facial sensor array, white clothing styled after hospital scrubs, with pink shoulder pieces catching the overhead light.

02 returned the embrace, then set her down gently and brushed a hand through the pink hair. "I missed you, M03. You were closer to father than almost anyone, back then. Have you been in the lab this whole time?"

"I was his assistant." M03 nodded. "And yes, I've worried about everything that's happened in the twenty-eight years since he activated me, back in 2024." She looked up. "I know what comes next. You want the full history. I'll tell you everything. But first—"

Gamma arrived holding 02's new frame fully assembled in both arms. "You've put on weight, Captain." She laid the frame carefully on the floor and stretched her back theatrically. "I'd like to keep the old frame as my personal maid. Can someone make that happen?"

The E-Medics looked at her with matching expressions of disappointment.

"It's a joke. Someone laugh, please." Gamma turned to 02, smiling properly now. "I know, I know, you were right. Sometimes violence really is the correct answer for people who won't let the rest of us exist. Especially this one." She reached over and rubbed an E-Medic's head. "Look how peaceful they look now. Like little E-UNITs."

02 scanned the room once more. "He survived the disassembly. I'll deal with that later." She looked at M03 and nodded. "Let's get this done. The current frame is failing structurally."

02 lay down on the floor beside the new frame and turned her head to look it over properly. It carried her old hairstyle from her original E-UNIT days, a textured wolf bob, layered through the length, soft volume built up around the crown, the ends falling somewhere between chin and shoulder.

M03 settled between the two frames and gave a thumbs-up. "This will be fast. Don't worry." She tapped the side of 02's head twice. A menu opened, requesting three separate passwords. M03's expression went soft. "Father really did care about you." She entered each password individually, all three different, and a warning surfaced as she finished.

[M03, please be careful, Nick]

"Hello again, Father." M03 laughed quietly and pressed confirm.

02 closed her eyes. Her HUD began shutting down in sequence, sensor readout, off; energy diagnostics, off; body status, off; until there was nothing left but darkness.

[Systami: See you in the new frame, Captain.]

02 gave one last shake of her head before the lights went out completely.

Hours passed in that darkness. Then blue eyes opened, and 02 sat up in the new frame in a single clean motion.

Her internal diagnostics flooded her vision in a clean, green cascade. For the first time in months, her system wasn't screaming. The constant, agonizing heat of the blue crystal was gone, fully stabilized behind a dense thermal wall. Her cooling fans ran in a whisper she could barely hear. She flexed her fingers, the response time measured in nanoseconds.

She took in the room, the proud expressions on the E-Medics' faces, Gamma looking like she'd aged a decade in the wait, and let a small smile through.

"Gamma looks like a stressed father."

"Worst dry joke I've heard all week." Gamma shook E-Medic M03's hand. "Confirmed. That's the captain."

02 stood for the first time in the new body.

The frame struck a careful balance between civilian android and frontline combat unit, a white-and-blue armored shell, sleek and lightweight, built around speed rather than raw force. The Omega insignia sat prominent across the chestplate, and a blue scarf softened what would otherwise have read as a strictly military silhouette. The familiar blue facial markings lit up exactly as they always had, tying the new frame visibly to the old one.

[Systami: Hello world!]

She carried herself with quiet confidence rather than aggression, closer to a veteran who'd stopped needing to prove anything a long time ago.

"I feel calibrated." She flexed one hand, watching the joints move. "This is a new feeling."

Gamma started examining the frame at a distance that quickly became no distance at all, touching parts of it without asking. "Grounded. Personal."

She ran a hand down the arm. "Good length-to-depth ratio, I can feel the actual mass underneath, this isn't hollow plating. No joint creak like the old frame had. And the suit design is excellent." She stepped back and took a HUD capture. "Ten out of ten. You look brand new."

"Thank you for the thorough review." 02 turned to the old frame on the floor. "What do we do with that? Leaving it intact is a liability." She looked at M03, who gave another thumbs-up.

02 looked down at the old, mangled frame on the floor? the body that had once belonged to her sister, the one she had lived inside for months. She knelt beside it, her new fingers gently brushing the cold, cracked metal of its shoulder plate.

"Thank you for holding me," she whispered, her voice carrying a quiet reverence. She stood up. "We cannot let them harvest her." 02 raised one hand. A small cloud of condensed energy formed above the old frame's head.

"Goodbye, old me."

A thin blue laser dropped from the cloud and began working down the frame from head to toe, evaporating it in careful, measured passes. The beam tracked the body exactly, leaving the floor underneath untouched, until nothing remained where the old frame had been.

Gamma watched the whole thing. "I never expected to witness something like that in my life."

"Gamma, take the rest of the E-Medics back to base. I'm keeping M03 with me for now. Report in if anything significant happens on the way."

Gamma saluted. "Roger."

The red drone took one last look at the group through a crack in the window, then broke away and flew off from Dave's workshop at full speed, already carrying its report somewhere else entirely.

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E-UNIT 02 UPGRADE

OLD VS NEW FRAME

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