This time he didn't have his eyes closed, so he saw the burst of light. So he now had his buster (he'd picked up the beam saber from Sigma, Wily hadn't designed him to use it) and it turned out his hair wasn't just ornamental. That was pretty cool, actually.

"That went better, but if you keep tossing your head like certain shampoo commercials that didn't survive the cataclysm I'll be forced to call you girlybot."

Zero didn't dignify that with a response. "Two down. Take me to the last one, Darth Considerate."

"Inconsiderate? I go to all this trouble to enable you to save X, and the world, and that's the sith name you saddle me with?" Invader, insidious… The pattern had been broken with Darth Maul, but Sigma had used a 'beam' saber and Vile, who looked like a certain family of bounty hunters, had been a hunter before he went maverick. You couldn't really have been an irregular hunter without getting to know your Star Wars trivia.

"You'll be Darth Ept if you don't hurry up and he dies."

"I suppose that depends on who you would ask. Dr. Wily, for one, would call you the inept one for not having killed him by now. I took you to Iris first because otherwise Colonel would have taken you apart before you got your head on straight."

Colonel wouldn't have wanted to dishonor his sister's sacrifice and it was true that without the armor Zero would have survived only a few hits. He would have to do better than that.

The first lab had been, while not exactly military, very lab-like. Not a hunter lab or any one Zero recognized, but clearly someplace meant for science and not a nice bedside manner. Zero hadn't paid attention to the scenery but it had seemed more generic lab-like, only with ancient tech, than something he would have associated Dr. Wily with.

This one, though, was practically the opposite of all things Wily or impersonal. Zero had been here before. Zero had practically been born here, in the sense of himself as Zero instead of the crazy irregular or the maverick.

There were curtains, and not cut flowers, that would have been wasting an incredible amount of money, but very pretty fake ones in vases on the bedside tables and in random places. This was the lab Dr. Cain and X had shared before the violence had escalated and they had first moved to a lab at the irregular hunters' headquarters and then X had joined the hunters. There had been a secure ward and so on, he wasn't the first insane irregular they had treated and they weren't stupid, but this was the general work, eating, and living area. Socialization was apparently good for recovering patients and traumatized children.

Zero certainly hadn't killed anyone here, even if he hadn't stayed long, and he had no idea who he'd killed that would see this as such an important place. "Not…"

"Don't worry, you trained him better than that." When Zero turned around he was a bit surprised to find a rookie. No, not a rookie, but a basic, standard model, utterly dated, old-school, and pretty close to X's design. No frills, no animal motifs, just green and gray body armor. Well, that did put him at about the era this lab would have been in operation: they hadn't made them like that in decades. Nowadays reploids were purpose-built from the beginning instead of given generalist builds so that they could decide what they wanted to be customized into.

The 'general' models were unspecific about everything, including age and gender. So the person who had just spoken with a tone of voice that was 'been here, done that,' intelligent, and reassuring enough to register on ex-trainer Zero's radar as someone who was an experienced commander, of a workgroup if nothing else, and should be fast-tracked to officer training, sounded young and girly enough to be X.

Zero realized that he'd actually calmed down and was taking this guy's word for it, which was odd. "Do I know you?" Well, he'd killed the guy, so not recognizing him was pretty insulting, wasn't it.

At least it made him laugh, a rather paternal laugh in a boy's voice, instead of scowl. "I'm not really surprised that you don't recognize me, now that I think about it. We met for about five minutes and it was after I got upgraded into a different body."

Instead of getting into a fighting stance as Zero had half-expected the non-rookie gestured for him to sit down. Zero found himself doing so on the seat across the table from him. He had no idea who this guy, or girl for that matter, since who knew what this genderless model had upgraded into even though Zero would guess a guy, was. Maybe a medic X had trained? Someone Zero had killed in the initial rampage? The Irregular Hunters had captured alive in the old days and when it came to Zero that had cost them.

"I'm the one that sealed away your access to the virus." Yes: this was certainly an Irregular Hunter, and this was a briefing. "Or rather, I am the seal. I never got certified as a doctor, but I was built here, I grew up here, I learned at X and Cain's knees, and I've forgotten more than that Lifesaver knows about reploid design."

Zero would bet. "How did that happen?"

"I died during the rampage, I ended up haunting you, and you were brought back here. It became obvious that you were a Wilybot, and if the virus had been able to sabotage the replacement OS Dr. Cain installed then X would have been your first target when you devolved to insanity without warning." That hadn't been an option. "So I started playing scrambler. The more virus you were exposed to the more I had to link into the systems in question in order to sabotage them faster than the virus nanites repaired them. At this point I'm in control of them more than just being a tenant, I have personal nanites and am not just a ghost like the other two, but I can't control the virus the way you might be able to and if I disengage I die."

"So you were helping me… Stay me? All this time?"

A dismissive shrug: it seemed nothing special to this person. Well, if they were an irregular hunter that was what they had done while they were alive, helped the insane get their lives back, but for some reason… "Well, that and letting you access a few of my databanks. A few of the other non-mavericks that you grabbed one way or another tried to help you resist the virus, but they came in on the wrong bandwidth so there was only so much they could do before running out of power."

"Your databanks…" This person's name was really hovering on the edge of Zero's mind right now, but it just wasn't adding up. He had this urge to salute but on the other hand this person was so much like X. But then, X's first creation, the first reploid he and Dr. Cain had built, had become, "General Sigma?!"

That earned a slight smile. Bingo, it seemed. Then he returned to an officer's sternness. "You saw that data file of our first encounter. I came to detain you and rescue my men. During our fight, you started to become more and more rational, until finally you decided not to kill me. I had thought something wasn't adding up, and then that crystal on your forehead started to glow. I thought it was a remote control device, attempted to disable it, and the next thing I know I'm having an out of body experience. At first I thought you'd somehow managed to download a sample of my memories and that 'I' was 'you,' but as my body carried you out of there to this lab it became very clear very quickly that they were not me. Failing to inform X of the key factor, that crystal, confirmed it. I wasn't able to get control of your body but I was able to keep that crystal from becoming fully operational. Eventually it became clear that you had no idea what was going on either, and that the crystal was attempting to regain control of you."

Sigma tapped papers spread out on the table between them. "I could use some of the channels it tried to use to influence you on some occasions, and you seem to have picked up a few of my traits, in addition to the beam saber style. I suppose I have to apologize for manipulating you. I took shameless advantage of your guilt to first get you into the hunters to investigate my replacement and then get you to accept the virus' scheme to place you as X's tutor. Only instead of being manipulated into sabotaging his training and learning his weak points…"

Zero had to nod. "You are good. Were good." No grudges here, no sir.

"We were very, very lucky. A combination of factors including my body's status as the first infectee, the fact reploids are far inferior to the androids the virus was designed for, and the fact I was focused on that crystal when I died caused it to give me a maverick's clearance level and, well. I'll leave my notes here, you can read through them later." The papers were expertly put into a neat stack. Ah, paperwork. "The key issue is that I'm not immune. I've been keeping the virus out of the area that contains my personality but if you fall to the virus I will as well and given what my doppelganger has been responsible for I, like X, would rather die."

Only it wasn't as simple as that sounded. Zero folded his arms instead of playing straight man by just asking him to hand over control.

That won a slight smile. No, no rookies here, appearances aside. "Unlike you, I have some notion of the danger the capability to control the virus poses. Even the two upgraded versions 'S' managed to cobble together aren't anything but hack jobs. If a virus were created by these systems specifically geared to modern reploids with the ability to go stealth, X would wake up one morning and every single reploid on the planet would have become a maverick overnight, with no idea they were infected until suddenly it used the perfect control it had already attained. Tied by Omega into a real-time unblockable tactical net, carrying out his commands instantly… exactly." If Zero had been a human his face would have been gray.

"I have two options," Sigma went on. "I can give you back control or I can activate one of Wily's safety precautions. It won't destroy the virus itself but it will do better than just trigger your self-destruct: it will prevent Omega from coming back to life. On the one hand, that means no upgraded versions. On the other, while that would let X win one battle without your systems and codes there likely isn't a way to win the war. Dr. Wily was a genius. Insane, but a genius."

"But if you give me back control and I lose it again, we're doomed."

"No. Worse." Zero knew some of how worse. "What's your analysis of the situation, Commander Zero?"

Iris had been willing to help, it was just how much Zero was going to let her and he'd botched that, as always. Colonel had been a contest of wills. He'd started caring again because of her and he'd regained his determination because of her twin.

Now he was going to have to think and he'd given up on thinking at the end of the fourth war, because thinking didn't do any good. He had to just keep going, but that wasn't going to cut it against the person who, it turned out, really was the greatest strategist of their time. "I can't let X die, so Omega can't regain these capabilities." That was review, but then situational analysis was reviewing the situation. "X was able to analyze his own systems to create you, so if he had mine to analyze, well. Dr. Wily would have done stuff to prevent that, so I would have an uphill fight to let him. But that's the only real hope of stopping the wars." Zero knew it.

"However, is that chance of total victory great enough to take the risk of a near-instant defeat? At least option two would give X, and the Maverick Hunters, time to potentially find another way." Maverick, not Irregular. This wasn't Sigma's world, not anymore, and from the age in those designed-to-look-young eyes he was getting weary of it.