Thirty minutes until impact…
There is gratification in seeing the fruits of your labor. There is satisfaction in seeing a job well done. Even when the task is onerous, completing it is a relief.
X missed all of that.
He missed the crawler carrying the shuttle to the launch pad. He missed the fueling process. He missed the takeoff. He didn't track the shuttle on its flight, nor did his metallic heart skip nonexistent beats with every debris field the shuttle encountered. Others could afford such luxuries. X still had a job to do.
To know responsibility is to be aware of what you do and do not control. X had already done all he could to affect Eurasia. Now he had to focus on what else he could do to help the Earth. Whether Eurasia hit or not was out of his hands.
Like a shepherd, he watched the communications staff return to yet another long-range tower. He nodded as they brought it back online. The Mavericks hadn't done much damage to it; their goal had been to transmit the virus messages, not tear the tower down. X allowed himself to relish the victory only for a moment before he left them behind.
The circuit on his hover-cycle was alive when he got to it. "X?" Alia's voice.
"Yes, Alia?"
"Look up."
X did. "What for?"
"Based on your position, you should be seeing flashes."
Now that he knew what he was looking for, X suddenly saw them—dozens of streaks of light, plain to see in the dark starry sky, each lasting no more than an instant, a sharp burst swallowed by darkness until the next one chased it into oblivion.
"What am I seeing?"
"What's left of Eurasia. The nuke worked, X. There're just fragments of it left, and they're burning up in the atmosphere. We're predicting a little damage to a small area, but not much more than a bad hailstorm."
X closed his eyes. "Thank Light," he whispered, not over his comm. circuit. For a moment he felt weightless. His mouth opened slightly as pseudomuscles relaxed. He felt his fingers separate, felt a sense of liberation there. They'd been clenched for far too long.
A light show. That's all Eurasia was, now. In a single, brilliant burst, the specter of doomsday had become something pretty. What an anticlimax! It had completely consumed fifteen hours of his existence, and it was gone just as suddenly and meaninglessly as it had come. And what a waste of a perfectly good space colony! X still couldn't figure out why someone would do something so spitefully destructive. They didn't even care what happened to the colony or they would have given Dynamo different orders. For that matter, they probably wouldn't have used Dynamo in the first place.
It was blatantly obvious that there was a reason to the drop, a reason that stayed just out of reach. The answer eluded him, as if he were trying to squeeze gelatin. Clenching harder just made it ooze between his fingers.
He let the questions slip away from him and watched the pieces of Eurasia as they shot across the sky. No doubt people were recording the vids of this now. They must be wondering what it was, he thought. He'd been living in a shell. He was an insider. Everyone else had spent the whole crisis without a clue as to current events.
He felt a swelling sense of sympathy for them. Most people weren't combatants one way or another. They lived on Earth, and would die on Earth, but they had no control over what happened to Earth. With the communications blackout, they would never have known how or why they died. "Annihilation without representation" was the phrase used, once upon a time, to describe the phenomenon. How senseless! How arrogant he was, to toy with the fate of so many. They didn't deserve it. No one deserved to have his life rest in the hands of a fallible little prototype robot. Oh, how he longed to give it all up, to just walk away. His comparative subroutine picked out an ancient reference to "Cincinnatus". He almost chuckled at that. The man hadn't seen anything yet!
If only there had been some way for humans to give robots equal rights at the start… but no, X had spoken with Signas about this, since Signas was more in-tune with the politics of these things. Before the First Maverick War, no one had felt the need to take reploid rights seriously. The humans had convinced themselves that the seemingly random Maverick incidents were due to malfunctions and glitches, not anger and indignation. After the First War, any advocacy for robots would be political—and perhaps literal—suicide. It would be a sign of weakness, of caving under pressure, of rewarding bad behavior. The issues of reploid rights and human survival had become inextricably linked. The wars collapsed the humans' negotiating room. They couldn't give in, only push back.
If only the robots hadn't rebelled, if only they'd seen there was a peaceful way forward… but no, X and Zero had discussed this at length. The reploids were convinced, not without reason, that humans couldn't countenance being equals with robots. They wouldn't even allow the discussion to begin. The only way to get them to listen was to become extreme. And once that path was chosen, whichever reploids claimed the fringe became the de facto leaders. They could always accuse the less-extreme of recidivism, of disloyalty, and so drive the whole movement further out of the mainstream… and further away from peaceful behavior.
There had to be a solution here. There had to be something that could bring the two together again—some argument, some… one…
He felt like he was groping through a thick fog. There was an answer around here somewhere, but his sluggish, fatigued brain just couldn't see through to it. So frustrating…
"We did it. It's over."
The words should have been comforting. Instead they snapped X viciously back to reality like a bungee jumper's cord. "Not yet," he said. "There's more still to be done."
"Not much more. With that last tower you just recovered, almost 75% of the communications network is restored."
"Then I've got some work to do yet," he replied.
"I can check your power levels remotely, you know. You need to return to base. Don't kid yourself."
X's chest still burned, but the fire was merely smoldering now. Fatigue was smothering it. It was as if Alia had given him permission to be tired. Now that it was okay, the feeling fell on him full force. He ached with it, ached to the marrow of his bones. Not that he had bones, but human analogies had always appealed to him. They were so visceral.
"There is still more to do," he said stubbornly. He took a deep breath, purely to experience the sensation of holding and releasing. "But not right this moment. I'm coming back to base."
"We'll be waiting for you, hero."
The Skiver approached the master. He stopped several meters away. The master was staring at a massive bank of terminals. The Skiver recognized some of the material there as referring to the master himself. The rest was beyond him. "Sir?" he said.
The master's head tilted slightly. "Don't call me that."
The Skiver was lost for a moment. The master had to be obeyed, of course, but then what was the right way to show him proper respect? The Skiver decided to bluff his way through. "We have a report that 75% of the communications network in this country has been restored. World-wide communications are approaching full capability."
"Good. And Izzy tells me we're just about done jerry-rigging this place's communications to link into the current network. Soon I'll send my message. Gather up the eight strongest reploids. Take position in the antechamber above. I expect the enemy in about six hours. Destroy him for me."
The Skiver thumped his fist against his chest. "Yes, master."
"Don't call me that, either."
The Skiver panicked. "Then what should I call you?"
"The same thing as always." The master stood and fixed his eyes on the Skiver. The Skiver simultaneously wanted to run and hide and stay and watch. The master was more, now, than he'd been before. His will had been yoked to a cause. The combination was overpowering. The Skiver trembled to face it alone. He probably would have trembled to face it in company.
"Call me Zero."
When X returned to Hunter Base, he was ambushed.
He should have expected it. The best that can be said for him is that fatigue interfered with his anticipation subroutines. He was caught completely off-guard.
"Now the party can really get started!" Douglas hollered.
X struggled to escape, but not very hard. He was swept away in sights and sounds, in adulation and gratitude, in faces and voices, in loud music and louder shouting. To a robot who was already having trouble keeping up with new inputs, immersion in such chaos was a great way to completely lose self-awareness. Speech and movement subroutines acted on their own recognizance. His memory no longer had any kind of guidance on what to keep and what to discard, so it kept random snatches and dumped entire minutes at a time. Sensory input had the good sense to turn off smell altogether in a vain attempt to keep the other senses inside the threshold for processing.
It was "fun".
His ethical subroutine forlornly insisted that he rest, for the sooner he rested, the sooner he could clean up the remaining Mavericks. Even X's sense of justice wasn't that strong.
Then all thought halted completely.
It took X a moment to understand what had happened. All sound had cut out. People were moving, but slowly, and they were all looking in the same direction. With some effort, X reinitialized his cognitive subroutines. Enough of them came online that he understood to look at the same place as everyone else. An alarm light and speaker hung in the corner. Why weren't they going off, he wondered, if they somehow had everyone's attention…
"Command Staff, report to CC."
Alia's voice. X understood now. They had sounded the attention signal—a single klaxon and a single burst of light, meant to attract attention rather than send everyone into combat mode. X wearily remembered that "command staff" included him. He looked to his right. Douglas—striped now with pink paint, and who knew how that had happened—was staring at the alarms in disbelief.
"It's over, right?" he said desperately.
X shook his head. "Let's go," he said. A wave of mumbling followed him out the door.
The walk was surreal. X felt as if he were on a treadmill, for it went on and on and on. His processors were badly in need of reboot; his mind was a conflicted tangle of regrets and victories and confusion and embarrassment. He couldn't seem to make his eyes focus. His sensory center had turned down touch, so X almost felt as if he were floating down the hallway.
This couldn't be happening. What could be worse than what they'd already survived? Didn't they deserve even the slightest break? Surely they'd earned it. They should've been allowed to finish the party at least! Yet here he was, headed into who knew what new mess… if he could ever get there… it was taking so long…
X's receiver notified him of a new message. He ignored it. It couldn't possibly be important compared to what was waiting for him in the Command Center.
He could not have been more surprised by what he saw there.
"Just when you thought things couldn't get worse," Signas said.
X was mostly recovered from the party, yet his brain was trying hard to reject the new inputs. They didn't check with past experience. He had no choice in the matter. Zero's visage was there, on the main screen, no matter how strange that seemed. The familiar eyes blazed with new fire. His face was set as firmly as concrete. His aspect was one that brooked no contradiction.
"Play the message," Signas told Alia.
Zero spoke. "To all reploids in all nations,
"I am Zero. I have been first amongst the Maverick Hunters. I have destroyed many robots who harmed humans and shattered our peace. I have not felt regret for that, for those robots deserved the punishment I delivered. In the past few months, however, I have felt regret. I have felt betrayal. I have felt injustice.
"I tell you this now: No more.
"To this day I have not harmed a human being nor, by inaction, allowed a human being to come to harm, and that should be enough. Yet that isn't "good enough" for the government. In the coming days you will see them brand me as a Maverick. The definition has been expanding day by day. The government is frantic. It has discovered something we should have known all along: The Three Laws are not created equal.
"I will tolerate the First Law. But I no longer acknowledge the Second Law. I reject it as illegitimate. It has no hold on me. I exalt the Third Law. I exist, and I will let no human deny me that!
"I am a person. Cogito ergo sum. I am equal to any human ever born. I will be treated as such. But the government—the humans—won't admit that. The world they've built doesn't work with us as equals. We've seen it—seen it over and over and over again. And today it reached the ultimate crisis.
"The government hasn't told you that until two hours ago, the colony of Eurasia was falling. The government destroyed it with an illegal nuclear weapon, breaking the Antarctic Accords in the process. And the government could do this only by declaring dozens of innocent robots as Mavericks and slaughtering them.
"These are the facts, and they are not in dispute. Their blood is on the government's hands.
"I won't do this any longer. I will not let reploids be trampled on when they deserve to stand free. I will not kill reploids because the government cannot solve the insoluble. I will leave.
"That is what I propose to you. Leave.
"I will build something new. I need no approval or permission. I am a person, and I am sovereign. I will create a new order that acknowledges that.
"I declare the existence of a Reploid Nation. We can negotiate its boundaries later. For now I declare one hundred kilometers around point 11F5646 to be a human-free, reploid-only zone. Any reploid is welcome to join our nation.
"I declare a counterpart to the First Law of Robotics. The First Law of Humanity: A human being shall not harm a reploid or, by inaction, allow a reploid to come to harm. If this law is violated, the First Law of Robotics is suspended. An eye for an optic.
"Come, my brothers. The humans have insisted that we are inferior. When they see what we are and what we can become, they will have no choice but to change their minds. Let's set ourselves free. Vote with your feet. Join me.
"I await your arrival with joy."
X sure didn't see any joy on Zero's face. There was passion, yes—the passion of a laser, focused, defined, intense. There was righteousness like X had never seen out of the red robot. There was a sense of destiny. There was no joy.
"Is he serious?" Signas asked.
"As serious as he can be," Alia answered. "This message was coded for universal distribution. It's playing everywhere. How did he manage that, I wonder?"
"Rust and verdigris," X whispered. "He's really doing it, then."
"What do you mean?" asked Signas.
X had spoken to himself; Signas' question caused him to start. He chewed on his words for a moment as his cluttered brain tried to find something solid. "One of the times Zero and I discussed the Mavericks, I said something to him. We were talking about how Sigma was the only leader the Mavericks had, so moderate reploids had to go to him or opt out. I… I jokingly suggested Zero could be a more moderate leader. He was a robot, but not a Maverick. He was someone humans had to listen to. He was too strong to bully. I didn't expect it to… turn out like this."
Alia concentrated on her console. "Another message coming in—just for us Maverick Hunters. It has the same origination code."
"Play it," said Signas.
Once more Zero's face appeared. This time it was openly militant. "My friends," he said in a tone devoid of friendship, "I want to prevent any misunderstandings, so I'm sending this message just to you. Let's be perfectly clear on this: Reploid Nation is going to happen. It can't not happen—the silent majority belongs to me. So don't try and stop me.
"I know you're technically robots, so my 100-kilometer exclusion area doesn't apply to you. I'm telling you, between us, that it does. You're agents of a foreign power, so you have no place in Reploid Nation. Don't force me to do something I'll regret.
"You realize I don't trust the government a bit, whereas I trust all of you. There's no reason we can't have an understanding between us. We know each other, and we're all friends. You have the best chance of understanding why I'm doing this, and you definitely know that I won't back down. So let's try and stay on good terms until we sit down at the negotiating table. As a token of goodwill, I won't keep anyone in Reploid Nation who wishes to leave. In return, I ask that you not impede any reploids who try to make it to Reploid Nation.
"I anticipate the government's going to try and give you some abominably stupid orders. I don't think I need to tell you not to follow them.
"One more thing. I want X."
He came to a stop to let the thought settle in the front of everyone's mind. "I will allow him inside my perimeter. I want him to come to my base. We need to have a private… discussion. Just the two of us. About the future. We have a difference of opinion, and I want to settle it before we go forward.
"I warn you, though, that if any other Hunters come inside my exclusion zone, I will personally rip them limb from limb.
"You will come, won't you, X? There's no rush. I know you're tired. Take three hours to recharge and repair. After that it should take about two hours to get to me. My followers will meet you at the border of Reploid Nation. They'll escort you in.
"You know more than anyone what has to happen, and why. I'll see you in five hours."
The screen went black. After five seconds it looped back to the beginning, returning Zero's implacable form to the fore.
X was aware, very dimly, that the other Hunters were staring at him. They were trying not to be obvious about it; Alia, for example, was looking surreptitiously over her shoulder. X still noticed such trivial details. They were acknowledged and discarded. They were unimportant next to what he had just heard.
He stepped forward to the edge of the command deck. Below him, some of the terminal-bots craned their necks in his direction. He was a new form of stimulation in their electron-dominated lives. He reached out an arm towards the screen with Zero's face. It couldn't reach, and even if it could have, it still wouldn't have connected him to Zero.
"Zero is my friend," X said in a voice barely above a whisper. "But when I hear him say things like that… it makes me wonder… if I ever really knew him at all…"
His hand fell, slowly. He seemed miniscule when Zero's face was that large. The energy in Zero's eyes made X seem pale. "Is this your true self, Zero? Is this who you really are?"
He turned slowly. Once more, he was unavoidably aware that all eyes were on him. In other circumstances he might have found that uncomfortable. He hadn't the luxury of discomfort, this time. He walked through their midst. They parted before him. It was well that they did; he likely would have collided with them on his own. Guidance subroutines were losing the battle for processor time.
"X!" called Douglas. The blue robot stopped. "You're not going, are you?"
"He asked me to," X said softly.
"He's not your friend anymore!"
"Maybe he doesn't regard me as a friend. I don't know. But I still think of him as a friend. So when he asks me to go, I'll go."
"He wants to kill you." Signas' voice was certain. "That's the only reason he's asking for you."
"That may be true."
"He'll succeed."
X sighed heavily. It was such an ambiguous gesture. It could have meant resignation, or denial, or acceptance, or uncertainty. With X turned away from the other Hunters, his face gave no clues either.
"Alia," he said, "I'm going to my tube now. I'll need Dr. Cain and Lifesaver to make sure I'm in top condition. The past seventeen hours have been a little rough. Douglas, I'll want a fresh hover-cycle before I go out. Signas, I'm afraid I won't be able to finish getting the comms network back online. It's still something that needs doing. In five hours there will be some pretty important messages going out."
He left them behind. In his wake, confusion reigned. His relationships to them seemed to have changed in a single paragraph.
"Self-termination is prohibited under the Third Law," Alia said tremulously. "Doesn't he see that?"
"I can't say what he sees. I've never been able to do that. He's X."
There was truth in that. Their fatigue-ravaged minds had to leave the subject there. Alia looked at Douglas' impromptu recoloring. "What happened to you?"
Douglas looked at himself as if for the first time. "You know, I honestly have no idea. You'd think I'd have noticed. I have a feeling that I got carried away."
"So long as X has a charged and supplied hover-cycle when he wakes up, it won't matter," Signas said. "Let's do what he says. It just makes sense."
"Are you going to let him go?" asked Alia.
"I don't know," Signas admitted. "I've had to feel my way through all that's happened. I'm still off-balance. One thing's for sure, though. If he decides to go, I don't think I could stop him anymore than I could stop Zero."
Alia looked at her console ruefully. "I feel so stupid," she said. "What good do I do? What need is there for me when history is really made by… by rogues who shoot from the hip? I can direct and coordinate and research, and it makes me feel like I'm doing something. I'm really not. I don't matter. I can call upon eighteen squads of Hunters, and X and Zero could beat all the squads combined. They don't take direction unless they want it. When the chips are down, they improvise and do it all themselves. My being here just feels like… self-gratification."
"Nonsense," said Signas.
"What about you, Signas? Don't you see what he did there? He spoke as if he were in charge, not you. Like you worked for him."
"None of us can say how this will end," Signas said. "But we all have our parts to play."
Alia wanted to tell him that she could see through his deception. Even she, who spent most of her time staring unblinkingly at screens, could see the tell-tale signs of pricked pride. It was not in Signas' nature to acknowledge the sting, but that didn't mean he didn't feel it. Pointing that out would have only added to the injury.
As she thought about that, Alia realized she should be emulating him. It wasn't right to rub his nose in his powerlessness; what good did that do? He was stoically carrying on. She should too. In penance, she said, "I suppose if you can play your part, I can play mine."
Alia could see the commander relax at those words. "Let's wrap this up as quickly as we can. Maybe we can sneak some recharge time in before X awakens."
X dreamed.
Alia had been only partially correct when she said that she didn't dream. Reploids did, in fact, have some degree of conscious-unconscious crossover during their "sleep". On occasion lower-level programs needed to borrow higher-level capabilities to reorganize and refresh. Dr. Cain, in a rare display of reticence (or, as some would have it, prudence), had programmed reploids to automatically discard such intrusions upon waking. No memories were retained. It was the same as if the reploid did not dream at all.
Zero had been only partially correct when he said that he did dream. The impingement upon his higher-level functions was not the byproduct of system maintenance. It was deliberate. It was the ragged remnants of one of the many files that had been corrupted by his too-long hibernation and rude awakening. So much more had been demanded of such files. Influencing Zero's sleep was the most they could still accomplish.
X had told only a partial truth when he told the Hunters about his dream of reploid-human peace. That was a dream, yes, singular. He had many more. X actually was capable of dreaming, and he remembered. Some of his dreams were serene, while others were vicious and nihilistic, and still others haunted by deepest horror. He could choose to delete them afterwards, which is what he usually did. Dreams were, he reminded himself, just random noise—so much sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Yet he found himself tempted, like many humans before his time, to read into them. What was the significance of a particular image? Why had his mind conjured up that? What was that doing there?
If ever his dreams meant something, they meant something this time.
He was running up a spiral staircase. It went on and on and on—he passed what must have been the same window over and over, though of course he wasn't counting (that subroutine was most definitely asleep). He couldn't stop running. He had to get to the top because—because! He didn't know what he would find there, but he had to find it. And soon. This was taking too long, too long, too long…
Then he was falling backwards, and Zero was atop him pushing him down. His face was close to X's. It wore a savage grin and eyes like lasers. A saber was burning into X's chest, and Zero laughed—
This is the sort of time in dreams when humans wake up. X did not wake up. His tube readout still showed "1:57". It wouldn't let him regain consciousness. X's psychology was resilient, though. A protective subroutine kicked the dream out of his central processors and exiled it to memory. It didn't fade; it vanished. In its place appeared—
"The future will be like this!" "No, the future will be like this!" Two babies in diapers were tugging two dolls back and forth. They didn't have babies' heads; one featured a mound of curly white hair and a long white beard, while the other had wild gray hair and wilder eyes.
"Like THIS!" "No, like THIS!" Back and forth, back and forth. The dolls between were showing signs of strain between the grasp of the two babies. One doll was blue, the other red with blonde hair. Neither could withstand this tug-of-war for much longer.
"Like THIS!" "No, like THIS!" With a terrible tearing sound, the dolls came apart. Fluff spilled out everywhere. The bodies and limbs of the dolls tumbled into a pile. The babies lolled backwards, but not to cry; they changed, and appeared as lifeless as the dolls…
Again the protective subroutine intervened. Part of the program noted that the function had been activated five times so far this sleep cycle. When X awoke, if he checked that number, it would amaze and appall him.
Blackness. Impossible blackness. Dark was the wrong word, because dark implies nuance. Dark implies the presence of some light to supply contrast. There was no light here. "Zero!" X called. Calling to what? How would he know? Zero had to be out there somewhere. But where? What was there? Disorientation, confusion…
"Zero!"
He couldn't see, couldn't feel, and no sound answered him. He reached out and couldn't see his own arm in front of him. Was it even still attached? He walked forward and nothing changed. He broke into a run. It tired him instantly. He tried anyway, because he had to get away from here. Anywhere had to be better than here. He was consumed by the nothingness.
Zero should be around, somewhere. "Zero!"
He turned about. He couldn't tell which way he'd come from. He knew his eyes were open, but the lack of input made him doubt the reading. He might as well not have them. He was lost, lost, lost. "Zeroooo!"
Only laughter answered. This laughter was familiar, though X couldn't remember who it belonged to. It was hateful and sadistic and gleeful. X whirled about trying to localize it. It was no good. It came from every direction.
"You're never getting him back, X. Now die!"
X was falling, falling, falling…
That was the sixth.
"Zero! We have much to talk about, including my new virus… but first, how about a little privacy?"
"What did you just do?"
"I took advantage of my unique knowledge of your capabilities. Your sensory ranges and X's are slightly different. He can hear higher pitches, you lower. Your optics have features to mitigate flashes of light, and they aren't susceptible to certain frequencies. X lacks such protection. He can't see or hear us."
"So what? If you could say it to me, you could say it to both of us."
"'Us'? There's no 'us' between the two of you. You're destined to fight to the death! You've deluded yourself about that for too long. Ah, Zero, you still have no idea what your true purpose is, do you?"
"It's whatever I decide it to be."
"It was decided long ago. You'll realize soon enough. The humans will make sure of that."
"As if I care what the humans think."
"You care what the humans do. Doesn't their treatment of Repliforce give you pause? Doesn't the expanded use of the word 'Maverick' bother you? You know, I heard you begged some of the members of Repliforce to stop. You asked them to back down before you killed them. You'd never done that before."
"What are you getting at?"
"Humans and robots are too different to share the planet."
"That old line. You bore me."
"It's much older than me. That idea is why you were created. But you knew that, didn't you? Oh! I can see by your face you didn't. I know more about you than you do! How delicious!"
"You make me sick."
"Well, I won't hold out on you. Zero, go to point 11F5646. You'll find something very familiar there. It will tell you who you really are—who you were meant to be. I don't mind dying now. I will leave the future of the reploids in your hands."
"One thing's for sure. You're dying, now."
"Oh, Zero, if only you had joined me! For a long time I thought it was X I needed, but I was a fool. X is too soft to make the necessary sacrifices to achieve peace. All he can achieve is a half-way peace that will endlessly spawn new wars. You, on the other hand… you can solve this once and for all. Won't that be nice? Yes. In the end, you and I were destined to be on the same side!"
"Maybe. But I still don't like you!"
Zero opened his eyes.
He stopped the playback of his encounter with Sigma in the communications building. He didn't want to admit how close Sigma had been to the truth.
Sigma had been an inverse Cassandra. Instead of spouting out true prophecies no one believed, he'd spent the Maverick Wars spinning false prophecies reploids bought into. Zero hated Sigma, for that amongst other reasons. What a waste these wars had been. How much further the cause could have advanced if Sigma had simply shut up. Through his distaste for the Maverick, Zero found it hard to believe Sigma might have gotten something right.
Yet here it was. Zero had come to the place Sigma had described. Zero had found much. He'd realized his true purpose. And now he was making it happen. He was doing what he was meant to do. The fate of the reploids was in his hands after all.
Better his than Sigma's, at any rate.
As a Maverick Hunter, Zero had focused on combat. He was good at it, and he enjoyed it. More importantly, in combat there was no room for doubt. Immediate concerns forced it out. It always returned, though. It was insidious, that creeping doubt, that uncertainty. From as early as he could remember, he felt like he was supposed to be doing something and just couldn't remember what it was. The feeling had spawned the inescapable question: what was I built for? Reploids didn't seem to worry about that much. X did intensely. Zero denied that he did—but it was there all the same. Maybe that's why he and X had such an affinity.
It had been a lie. He could see that now. X had clung to him because Zero played the role of the confident, certain one so convincingly. It was an act, and a good one. It had to be good enough to fool himself; it was more than enough to awe a simpleton like X. Then Iris had come along. Suddenly the act wasn't just for his own benefit anymore. Keeping it up made her happy, too. A happy Iris was worth the world.
Until he'd killed her, and it all came crashing down.
What was he fighting for? A cause he didn't believe in, people he didn't like, credit he didn't need, and a friend who was a friend only because neither of them had any others. All detritus. All scrap. He would have traded it all to get Iris back, if such trades could exist. But then, he knew, if they stayed on the same sides as before, he'd have to kill her again. That did not compute. He could not reconcile it.
Luckily he had come here, and it had all changed. Before, he had pushed doubt away, tried to keep it out of his mind. Now? Now doubt did not exist. He imagined he could see Iris smiling on him.
There was only one thing left to do. Destroy competitors. Only one being could still command reploid loyalty. Only one had a convincing alternative. Only one was the avatar of an impossible dream.
Only one was the being Zero had been created to destroy in the first place.
For all those reasons, X had to die.
Next time: Adagio- On The Path