9.3 – The Assassin, The Spy, and the Captain

E-UNIT · VOLUME 9 · GUESTS AND GHOSTS

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CHAPTER 218

The royal plane touched down at Theria's national airport. A red carpet had been extended along the runway exit, a handful of mechs holding back the surrounding robots and directing them toward the correct gates.

The group came off the plane and found themselves at the carpet's beginning. A white and grey helicopter, new model, clean lines, was waiting to the left. An E-PHONEUS stood beside it, waving at the king of the robot nation. 02 watched her and couldn't stop the thought that followed. ‘Another sister, maybe, one day.’

"We separate here." Reaper kept his voice at its usual temperature, Omega floating beside him on gravity control. "I need to build a new frame for Omega at Metro Robotics, and I have a long conversation with Shelly before the day ends." His green eye shifted to red. "I don't tolerate being lied to. What I tolerate even less is someone touching people I've committed to protecting." He looked at 02 directly. "We'll meet again."

Omega waved at the trio, the movement slow, the sound of concrete against concrete coming from her arm. "We'll have our own private talk, 02. You apparently don't know your own past as well as you think you do." The concrete face carried no expression, but the warmth reached anyway. "Stay safe."

02 waved back and turned to Infinity. "Where's 11? She was on the plane and I haven't seen her since I woke up."

"The SKOTIA suit draws on the red crystal to power its capabilities, but it can't feed the user directly. She ran out of charge, there was nothing to connect to out there." Infinity pointed toward the plane's door at the top of the escalators. Two E-PHONEUS were assisting 11 out, each one holding an arm. She was upright but not quite by her own effort.

As they reached 02, she placed a hand on the nearest E-PHONEUS's shoulder and extended her palm toward 11. The blue began moving into 11's frame, present even through the dominant red of the suit and crystal. A notification appeared in both Infinity's and 02's HUDs simultaneously.

[New Omega guest connected. Welcome, E-UNIT 11.]

11 activated immediately. She stood upright, looked at her hands, and turned them over. "What is this feeling?" She walked toward 02, and saw the text hovering above 02's head.

The Omega.

"Welcome to the Omega link." 02 smiled at her. "Stay as long as you'd like." She looked between the two of them. "So. Training for the war, or do we walk around and catch up first?"

11 went rigid. Her eyes found 02's blue ones and her internal processors threw up a fraction of a second of warning, the last time those eyes had been this close, she'd been on the wrong end of them. She pushed the response down. Her vents ran one quiet cycle. "I'll take the charge," She said. Her voice carried just enough of its usual coldness to cover the hesitation underneath it. "Don't expect gratitude."

11 was still looking at her hands, the energy flowing into her at a rate she hadn't experienced before.

"Let her get used to it." Infinity laughed quietly. "I know that feeling from the inside." She was already facing toward the runway exit. "Let's walk through Theria. The culture here will surprise you, people tend to underestimate what robots develop when no one's telling them what to be."

She glanced back at 11. "And the best part of being connected to the link is that you can hand full control to 02 and do absolutely nothing."

"Really?" 11 turned sharply to 02. "Do it."

02 looked at Infinity with an expression that held a specific type of blame. "Infinity."

"What?" Infinity tilted her head. "I enjoy the feature." She was already walking. "Come on, there's a store at the Corniche that runs out of the energy drink I like if we arrive too late."

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The city core was dense with activity. Every sidewalk ran full, robots of every type, proportion, and form moving through the streets together. They had leaned heavily into gendered presentation despite having no functional need for it. Their coloring had drifted far from the chrome and industrial grey of their original manufacture into individual palettes, combinations that nobody had assigned them.

02 scanned every robot in range. No one walked into her the way humans always did. No collisions, no last-second corrections. Everyone had already solved the problem before arriving at it. They talked with each other using human expressions and human gestures, some of them with floating screens that converted thoughts to words so they didn't need to speak at all.

The architecture had grown beyond the human scale entirely. The buildings were towers now, wide enough and tall enough that the original city grid felt like an afterthought. Most of the residential towers were orange and white. Bridges connected them at multiple heights, robots crossing between buildings in enclosed corridors, transported without lifting a foot.

Some structures were plain white with no windows at all, just large numbers printed on the faces and horizontal plating lines, commercial blocks, going by the floating advertisements that covered them. Everything advertised was free. Holograms of custom robot parts rotated above the pedestrian level, rotating slowly in the outdoor air.

The green spaces had clearly been added after the initial construction, floating parks bracketed between towers, trees at altitude, the whole arrangement suggesting that the robot architects had finished the city and then realized they'd forgotten to include nature anywhere. Compromise had followed in the form of elevated greenery.

Nothing in the streets sat empty. Ready-to-install robot parts hung on wall fixtures and custom racks between the road and the sidewalk, available to anyone walking past, no transaction required.

02 pointed at a pattern she'd been seeing. "Why are so many robots wearing that angular green helmet? There's text on them too."

Infinity took one from a street fixture, they were hanging freely, available for use. "Trending fashion apparently." She pulled up a screen and held it toward 02. "Lots of sharing happening on public profiles about it." She held the helmet out. "Try it. Each color does something different."

02 put it on and stopped walking. She turned her head slowly. "I can see three hundred and sixty degrees. How, I can see 11 being dragged behind me and making no effort to contribute." She turned further. "I can zoom. And why is everyone green?"

"Settings menu. Tap the gear icon." 11 offered helpfully, continuing not to walk of her own accord.

02 resumed moving and let her eyes run across the street. Robots had holographic name tags floating above their heads, a feature apparently taken with varying degrees of seriousness. The tags read like a cross-section of something:

Tony-B44. Don't Talk To Me. Not Elliot. Current Mood: Fully Charged. I Hate Work. Barely Human—Barely Robot. Error 404: Too Cool. 0b100000000100…

02 pulled the helmet off. The names were real, they existed without the lens.

"I have one myself." 11 activated hers. "Look."

02 put the helmet back on.

11 > 02.

She turned to face 11. "Out of everything available. That's what you went with."

"Is it incorrect?" 11's visor opened. The smug behind it was operating at full capacity. "Is the number eleven smaller than two, or larger? You can't argue with mathematics, Captain."

"We both understand that's not the meaning being expressed and you know it." 02 looked at her. "You could have written just the number two."

"Could I have? Is it wrong the way I have it?" 11 looked up at her own floating text. "Let me increase the size. Maybe you're misreading."

02 shook her head and kept moving.

Some of the larger robots had small magnetic wheels attached to their frames, their systems rolling them smoothly along the orange and white pavement while their bodies simply stood upright, carried without effort. They passed through the street with the complete ease of something that had decided locomotion was someone else's problem.

02 recorded the whole thing carefully in her HUD. 'Finding these the moment I'm alone.'

"You've seen nothing." Infinity picked up two small antenna-style accessories from a storefront display and put one on, then handed the other to 02. They sat above the head like floating crowns, slight, precise. "These connect to a social network only accessible to crown wearers. It accesses your HUD and shares moments from it directly. It's called Royalty Life."

02 put it on. A profile generated for her before she'd had any input.

"Already? What's my handle? What's my profile image?"

"It pulls everything from your system automatically. No setup required. That's their whole marketing approach."

02 kept scanning as they walked. They reached a less populated section, wider walls, quieter, the graffiti changing in character here. Robot precision had replaced human handwriting entirely. The fonts were chosen and respected. The color work was considered. It read less like graffiti and more like commissioned signage.

Imagine being a human.

02 moved on.

I Miss ER474 Model C.

"I know who wrote that." 11 pointed at it without breaking her carried posture. "Early in the independence period. The humans working in the industrial zones that produced robots began deleting certain models as protest against the revolution. ER474C was one of them."

Everyone Loves Free Charge But No One Gives It.

"That was before Elysium made everything free." Infinity kept one eye on her Automatica feed. "Now the infrastructure actively encourages you to get charged. There are different station types for different preferences."

TOUCH SCREEN.EXE

02 looked at the roads running parallel to them. No accidents. No congestion. No road rage sitting just below the surface of every interaction. Cars floated and ran silent, no friction, no exhaust, the only sounds on the streets being voices and footsteps. A driver at a red light accelerated the instant it shifted green, clean and immediate, no hesitation behind it.

"The dream of every human who ever sat at a red light," 02 said.

The streets opened into an area without towers, wide, unstructured, smooth elevated platforms where robots sat or swapped components. Most of the part connections were magnetic for fast exchange. The fashion here had a shorter half-life than in the denser blocks.

"Who makes them?" 02 looked at Infinity without turning her head, the 360 view had started to feel natural.

"The custom parts?" Infinity picked up a piece from the nearest platform. "There was a robot working as a fashion designer in Elyndor, a country east of Kasparia, considered the fashion center of the human world. He left the country and came here with the concept of custom robot part fashion lines. Shelly accepted the proposal during her time as Prime Minister and named the company E-MODA."

"They borrowed our naming format." 02 looked at 11. "You did the same thing with your unit. E-PHONEUS?"

"Yes. You can meet them properly later." 11 was still letting 02's link carry her forward, arms loose, body leaning back at a comfortable angle. "I trained them the same way I trained the thirty-series sisters. I miss those girls."

‘She thinks I don't know her death squad is currently watching me. The Omega link makes that kind of thing obvious, I know their signal signatures from the previous connection. Nice try 11.’ 02 checked her screen briefly, scrolling.

"Pi still isn't responding to my calls."

"Who's Pi?" Infinity turned the part she'd picked up over in her hands.

"The crystal you concealed from me during your infiltration mission." 02 looked at her through the 360 view. "Fortunately, Gamma is fast enough to have recovered it."

Infinity went quiet.

11 looked at the crystal embedded in her own suit. "You mean they're still alive? I understand now why the crystal mattered. Getting it back isn't going to be easy."

02's voice came down slightly. "We'll see." She looked around the open area as they reached its far edge. No police presence anywhere, no cameras, no guards, no visible enforcement infrastructure of any kind. People moved between each other without incident. Everything was free. The baseline conditions for most crime simply didn't exist here. ‘They don’t need us here.’

"We've reached the Corniche." Infinity stopped in front of a store at the base of one of the larger towers. The surrounding area was packed with robots, the servers inside working as fast as they could. "We hit rush hour. There might be nothing left."

11 straightened and took herself back. She walked to the cluster of robots and produced an electronic badge.

"Golden Circle member. Emergency."

The crowd made a path. She moved through it and started ordering.

02 watched her from the outside, smiling. The helmet sat at the top of her head, leaving the lower half of her face visible. "I always appreciated how precise she is. Her stance, the way she walks, all of it. The arguments she used to have with Dave about how he installed her leg were entertaining."

"Do you miss her?"

"Not at all." 02 kept the smile where it was. "She made her choice. She sold her sisters and then fought them. But I respect the standard she holds her own work to. It might be exactly why Reaper took her in."

Infinity watched 11 reach the front of the line. "She is remarkable. Unstable, though."

"Very." 02 looked at the custom piece attached to Infinity's back, which she'd apparently been carrying since the open market area. "Is that an extra orange arm?"

Infinity watched 02 smile at her, watched the blue energy move from her hand like it had never crossed a border and erased a country. The thought arrived unwanted.

‘Including for you.’

She looked away before 02 could read it.