9.9 – Internal War

Pi's office occupied a corner of the E-Police building that had been stripped down and rebuilt specifically for her, light grey walls, matte white flooring that gave back nothing but the room's own light. Her desk floated black and reflective at exactly chair height, no visible support beneath it, paired with a hovering seat in the same finish.

Screens ringed her at every angle she could turn to, each one running its own feed of the city. Set into the wall beside her, an orange locker held the SSDs of every E-UNIT still trapped in the boot loop—keypad-sealed, the only thing in the room with any color to it at all. The orange locker stayed in the corner of her vision no matter how many screens she opened. Every SSD inside it had a designation. Every designation had a face.

"The archive isn't a real target." Pi said it into a call already in progress, eyes on the relevant screen.

On the other end, Bellatrix was walking through the reasoning, the archive's near-zero population, the theatrical value of the target versus its actual casualty potential, the growing likelihood that Black Voltage had started feeding them falsified intelligence through operatives convincing enough to pass as human.

"Good instinct, Bella." Pi watched a new shipment of plants arriving in the corner of her office, someone quietly filling the space with greenery she hadn't asked for. "I'll make sure you're next in line for captain." She glanced toward the noise. "We sound human too, for what it's worth. I don't see why other androids couldn't manage it."

A small blue orb resolved itself above the desk. Sophos, present in the only form that didn't require him to leave the tunnel his main frame was currently occupying. He faced her without a word.

"You don't sound human, Prez. And I don't want the title," Bellatrix said, somewhere on the other end.

Pi's mouth moved at one corner, not quite a smile. "The title wants you,"

[Sophos: Why do you keep proposing her for captain when she declines every time?]

She covered the desk's microphone with two fingers. To Sophos: "Because she's a natural leader. She holds a room without trying to, and people follow that without being told to. You'd know, if you'd seen her training footage."

On the open line, Bellatrix had moved on, adding a casualty-maximization variable to the prediction model, her voice dropping slightly as she registered the reaction from the pedestrians nearby. Pi watched several of them go still on her street-level feed, two of them stepping back. "It's an investigation," Bellatrix added quickly, off-mic but not quite quiet enough.

Frost's voice came through underneath it, a little strained. "Ignore my colleague, she's still working on her bedside manner—"

"We'll discuss that later." Bellatrix's focus returned. "Any progress, Prez?"

"Narrowing." Pi was already pulling in everything she could, minor incident reports, traffic anomalies, anything that could nudge the probability model toward something usable, and fast. Her vents picked up, audibly, cycle by cycle. She lifted her head to the orb still waiting beside her and gave it a small wave. Go ahead.

[Sophos: How do you know she's a natural leader from data and training footage alone?]

Pi held the calculations for a moment. Covered the mic again. "Because I've seen one before. One year ago, at the hangar, all of us G-Bots, training to face Reaper."

[Sophos: The captain 02?]

"Exactly." She extended her hand and the orb settled onto her palm, weightless. "I couldn't predict anything about her. Not her next sentence, not her next move. She broke the model completely. It was the first time I felt like I was talking to a real person, I actually wanted to know what she'd say next, instead of already knowing." A pause. "It happened again with Bellatrix."

[Sophos: I'd need more data before agreeing with that.]

The smallest possible smirk crossed Pi's face. "Join the call." She uncovered the mic. "I'll hand this over to him."

[Sophos: I'll focus on helping them, don't mind me floating around.]

"I never do." Pi's tone stayed level. "You're like a fish at this point. Pleasant company, no actual contribution." She looked at the screen to her left, it had been pulsing blue and red for several minutes, insistent. "02's calling again. We need this resolved before she decides to handle it herself."

"If you don't answer soon, she'll come here and boot loop you personally." The voice arrived through the frosted glass of the office door before the door did, a deep purple glow visible at the edges, muffled but unmistakable. "Are you ready for that, Prez?"

Pi didn't look up from her screens. "You don't need to use that title with me, Delta."

The door slid open. Delta stepped through, the floor registering her weight in a faint tremor before she caught herself and dropped her density, settling onto the edge of the black desk like she weighed nothing at all. “Anything on fire besides your relationship with 02?”

“Gamma is taking too long to reach the E-Medic location.” Pi didn’t look away from the feed. “Which is impressive, considering speed is supposed to be her entire argument.”

“Maybe she stopped to scream at a mountain.”

“If she did, I hope the mountain gave useful intelligence.”

"I always wonder what the Prez does with all these screens." Delta looked around the ring of displays. "Your eyes are going to age faster than the rest of you at this rate."

"Using a human's physical limitations as a punchline is beneath you."

"Want a better one?"

"I want a worse one."

"I'm basically making a new Reaper." Delta laughed, short and genuine.

"I am the furthest possible thing from Reaper." Pi stood, and only the top of her head cleared the desk's edge, eyes lit grey. "I look like a doll standing next to him. I question the math sometimes, that we share a creator."

"You look like a doll standing next to anyone." Delta glanced over the screens, unbothered. "1.39 meters. That's about as close to the floor as a person gets."

Pi cleared a throat she didn't technically have, the sound came out with a faint electronic edge to it. "One point four meters, if you're being precise. And you rounded down on purpose." She sat back down. "And for the record, I'm closer to your height than I am to the floor. You're only one point six three."

"I suppose every centimeter counts, in your case." Delta slid off the desk and stood beside her properly. Then her tone shifted. "You've been pulling in every detail from across the city, reviewing everything, cross-referencing for miscalculations. There's a problem with that."

"Which is?" Pi didn't look away from the floating screens.

"We're crystals. The crystal is what we are, not what we carry."

"Correct."

"And memory gets stored in the crystal."

"Also correct."

"What happens when it runs out of room?" Delta's smile arrived without anything genuine behind it. "We don't exactly have a clean storage architecture for that. Do you start forgetting things, or do you just stop being able to take anything new in at all?"

Pi turned her head toward Delta slowly, eyes wide, the rest of her face holding its usual unmoving calm. "Why would you say that. I was perfectly happy not knowing that." Same flat register. "Spending time around the E-UNIT has made you witty. I'm reconsidering whether you need a reset."

Delta laughed hard enough to slap her own knee once. "Your delivery is something else." She looked back at the screens, still occupied. "Is this actually weighing on you, or did the joke just not land?"

Pi tapped the side of her desk. A narrow vertical port extended itself from the surface, and a drive labeled E05 rose slowly into view and stopped there, waiting. Pi lifted it and held it out for Delta to look at.

"Is that—"

"05's SSD." Pi took it back before Delta's fingers fully closed around it and slotted it back into the port. The port absorbed it and resealed, the desk's surface seamless again. "I noticed her loading indicator was barely registering during the reset. There are two reasons that reset never completed properly. The first is that her storage capacity is enormous, and most of it was already full."

"Checked." Delta nodded. "Surveillance state doing surveillance state things."

"That's a terrible name for her."

"Then come up with a better one instead of complaining about mine."

Pi started counting on her fingers. "Creepy Hawk. Walking Security System. Passionate Drone. Curious Neighbor. Peeping Android. Eyes For Everyone. Creep As Hobby—"

Delta put a hand over Pi's mouth. "I get it. Best insulter alive." She withdrew the hand. "What's the second reason?"

"The second reason is that 05 was actively fighting a cyber war with Eve, inside her own head, for a short window." Pi pulled up the relevant security footage, scrolling fast. "The moment she registered that Eve was winning, she shut her own systems down, and she did it early enough that only twenty percent of her data was lost to the corruption."

"What—" Delta leaned in toward the screen.

"And that's not even the part that matters most. She survived the shutdown, and she's been repairing herself this entire time, manually, piece by piece, line by line. While frozen."

Pi pulled up two side-by-side captures of 05's eyes, the loading bar visibly further along in the second. "Corruption is down to ten percent now. I've connected her SSD to the main server, so she's running on hardware that can support the recovery properly. A few more hours and she'll be back with us."

Delta dropped to her knees in front of the screen, taking in both images. "She's incredible." She turned to Pi. "Why can't you be like that?"

"I don't put myself in situations like that to begin with. I predict them far enough out to avoid them entirely." Pi raised one eyebrow at her. "Why can't you be like that?"

Delta smiled at the two pictures, unbothered. "I'm too dense for that kind of subtlety."

"I notice you're agreeing with my assessment of you."

"Since when is an insult an assessment?"

"Since I made it one." Pi allowed herself the smallest smile, her grey eyes reflecting the blue cascade of code as her fingers resumed their rapid dance across the screen, helping 05 reconstruct her broken mind, line by line.

"Is your crystal getting full, Delta? You're starting to forget things already."