A/N: This is your courtesy call that the shit 9S went through with Adam and Eve is the primary subject matter of this chapter. So if you're sensitive to rape allusions, tread carefully. And while we're here, since I am deep, deep in the side material at this juncture: Everything about what Adam was dealing while also being a scenery-chewing ham in-game is canonical.

Hundreds of insubstantial remnants of data cling to 9S. They are only junk packets with no coherent thought or memory, coating him the same way dust or stands of animal fur eventually accumulate on his clothes. They come away just as easily and he will pick up more insignificant noise just like it over time.

He is more concerned about the massive shapes that stretch across the deepest parts of his consciousness data like conductive trails on a circuit board. There's no way they don't disrupt the natural paths of his thought routines, but he can only guess at how or to what extent. Trying to remove these larger intrusions by himself has proved pointless. All he's managed is to end up flat on his back, his vision strobing in washed-out shades of gray and pops of colorless pixelation.

But he hasn't given up yet.

If the initial experience with A2 indicates a pattern, even deep-rooted synaptic alignments like these will be removable if he's in proximity to the original source. At least half of this trash left inside of him must belong to Adam. Presuming he's somewhere on the ark to begin with, 9S can still purge the data if he locates the administrator. An urgent, back-of-the-throat nausea makes him press the back of his hand to his mouth. Finding Adam isn't something he wants to do, but he is already here and his mind is already set.

Local resolution scales back. His vision clears. The machine network is white. Once more on the surface layer of the network, he picks himself up off the ground and opens his read-outs.

N2's red and black shape hangs in the air on the other side of the translucent screen.

She has been hovering around him since he arrived. Like she knows there is no one outside and he is unguarded. Or knows what he is trying to do and finds it interesting. 9S avoids her gaze, but it's hard to ignore the way her unblinking stare traces everything he's doing. Within the ark, she is the closest thing to an omniscient presence. Everything he is doing, thinking, and feeling at any given moment, she should be able to see. There's no reason for her to bother with examining it from the outside like that.

Machines do have reasons for their behavior, strange or counterintuitive as they are to 9S. He's come to accept this much. But he thinks with irritation that he really doesn't care to understand the kind of motives a meta-personification like N2 might have for this kind of behavior.

Her face flickers. He thinks he catches a wide, smug grin before she disappears, as though she'd heard his thoughts.

The landscape of the network changes around him. The white paths shift and restructure, no doubt according to N2's whim. 9S doesn't move. Whatever she is doing, if it's dangerous to him it will be more effective to disconnect than to run. Soon enough, the space is stationary and silent again. The route before him still twists and turns in maze-like angles, but he notes that there are no branches ahead of him for as far as he can see.

The way back is gone. In its place is a long drop to a different layer of the network that is clearly not where he was only a moment ago.

A threat assessment sub-routine recalls Pod 153's voice from his memory data, asking why the tower had had any means of android access to begin with. Just like then, it does not matter. 9S knows already that something he wants is the end of this path. He trots along the empty route mechanically, paying little attention to where he is headed. N2 can move the network around him at will, and he can disconnect at will. On that ground at least, they're evenly matched.

The empty uniformity of the network gives his mind too little to do and the minutes pile up like snow. There's no information to take in. Nothing to keep him grounded but the fabricated metronome beat of his boots and a dull buzz of apprehension low in his chest. He remembers 1S saying being out here alone was like being dead and thinks he understands. No matter how fast or slow he goes, or how deep into unknown territory, the network stretches on and on.

It is relief that washes over him as he finally sees the end of the path, but a murmur in the air stops him short of it. The sound is quiet but jarring after hearing only his footsteps for what feels like hours. It doesn't sound like N2 or like anyone calling after him. It is an ambient, distant sound.

A sharp tug in his chest tells him he's found what he's looking for.

"Adam..."

His muted whisper scatters the noise. For several minutes he is left alone to shift his weight from toe to heel and leg to leg while searching for any sign of activity. When a familiar light finally swirls down before him, the one who appears from it isn't Adam.

It's Eve.

A bright red warning appears in 9S' interface. Adam had torn him apart from the inside, but it was Eve who had battered his body to the point he could no longer connect to it. 9S easily recalls being swung like a toy by whichever limb Eve found closest at hand and the vicious smile as he did it.

But now the younger of the brothers regards him with an almost passive expression. He is all surprise and cautious curiosity. "Long way from your friends, aren't you? You need my brother for something?"

It takes a surprising amount of effort just for 9S to nod. Breathing is difficult. The longer he looks at Eve, the harder the tug in his chest. He drops to one knee, fingers scraping at his coat to get at the burning sensation he initially assumed was anger. He'd suspected this would be the case but isn't happy to find his theory correct.

He's been carrying both of them all this time.

"Hey!" Eve leans over him, wide-eyed and bewildered. There isn't the slightest hostility in his voice. "Are you okay? Just wait—I'll get my brother!"

9S is left behind on the path where he squeezes out a bitter, wheezing laugh.

The blueprint for the version 9S remembers is there—Adam is still the center of his existence and should anything happen to Adam, Eve will probably go mad in the exact same way. But there's nothing else. This is not the exact same Eve.

"Look, look! He's all bent over!"

"Yes, I can see that, Eve."

Cords bunch beneath 9S' plates. Together, the brothers are a more accurate semblance of what 9S recalls. Eve still refuses to put a shirt on and Adam still looks like an old-world businessman who fell asleep in his clothes after having too much alcohol. He's even still wearing those stupid glasses, albeit they're sitting on top of his head now. He has the same voice and same face, but the similarities end there. His expression is more aloof than smug, in the same way that Eve's is more inquisitive than aggressive. There's no animosity. No intent to kill.

Adam pauses to consider 9S, and it's clear that he at least recognizes him. He isn't the same Adam, but he knows. When he kneels he says something almost clumsy about not harming 9S. He's sure it's supposed to soothe or reassure him, but being spoken to so softly by that voice is like having his skin on backwards. For Adam to reach out to him too?

That's too much.

"DON'T TOUCH ME!"

The local resolution blasts back around 9S. Eve's head swivels as memories void into the open air and circle them like jagged shadows of vultures, shuddering with the remnants of emotional response. He grabs Adam and pulls him back from 9S as though his crumpled shape somehow poses a threat to either of them. Adam is calmer. He watches his previous incarnation with his chin casually at rest on the back of one hand.

"Adam, leave him." Eve glares at the memory of the prior Adam's corpse. It is a peripheral detail as 9S was carried out of the copied city, but one magnified by 9S' loathing. "He's probably just here to hurt you again; you don't have to help him."

"Now, now, don't be petty. We've seen this data before. I took 9S to make 2B hate me in the first place, remember?"

"You're the one who's my brother!" Eve protests stubbornly. "Why should I care about him? I don't wanna help someone who took you away from me."

"I'm right here, Eve. And that's not you."

"It used to be!"

9S ignores their bickering. They're both where he needs them. He can purge their data if he just gets ahold of it. His fingers curl into claws over his chest. Something gives. Every inch gained sends bright flares through his body, but he doesn't stop. Whatever they have altered in him will finally be out and gone, and he can't decide more if he wants to shove those unwanted intrusions down both their goddamn throats or crush them underfoot.

"Hey…" Eve mutters, shifting uncomfortably as his attention drifts back to 9S. When 9S ignores him, he reaches out and grabs him by the wrists. "Hey! Stop, you're being weird! You can't just yank on your data like that! Adam, can he do that?"

9S cannot manage to clench his teeth or muster another shout around his ragged breaths, nor does he have the strength to snatch his arms out of Eve's grip.

Beside them, Adam taps two fingers just below the poorly tied ribbon at his neck. He is humming to himself as though neither Eve nor 9S are any of his concern, transfixed on a mass of basic data, all static and text. 9S had no connection to his body at the time, so the memory lacks any sort of distraction. No visuals. No audio. No external sensory or interface at all. 'Someone help me' and 'You're wrong!' display in sterile white font a thousand times each. The only way he could scream in the absence of a mouth. They wrap around each other and around every secret thought and feeling and contradiction Adam tears loose and leaves like open wounds in his wake, salting them with his words and coating them with the oily film of his gratification.

The whole experience measures barely sixty kilobytes and 9S thinks finding that out must be what it feels like to be spit on.

"Eve, hold him for me." Eve lifts 9S up off his feet without question and Adam gives a weary sigh. "Not like that... Just help him stay upright."

With A2, this experience was one of surprise and paralyzing sparks of agony. There is no pain at all as Adam weaves the data away, just a strange phantom presence in the shape of what must have been left behind. Obsession. Hate. Things 9S already knows. Anxiety. Frustration. He clings to those, thinking that those things are his own and Adam is taking away more than he should.

As he latches on, it spreads to reveal itself otherwise.

The weight hits him first. A heavy sense of obligation to know and perform the role of 'elder' to the younger being he has created to prevent his own death. Eve imitates him and learns from him, but there is no one for Adam to learn from in the same way. If he wants growth, knowledge, anything at all, even if it is just the ability to be reliable and ensure his and Eve's survival, he has to pursue it himself. He looks like humans, but he is still a machine crafted by simplistic aliens. He cannot comprehend how humans think or behave when examining their remains. There are too many inconsistencies. Understanding is out of his reach, and that eventually gives way to a sort of madness.

The Adam of then was so sure he'd finally understand humans if he could just experience death one time.

The Adam of now speaks to Eve and cuts through the fog of memory. He's giving directions. The thoughts of the little brother trickle down and they are laughably simplistic compared to Adam's: I won't let you be hurt. I'll protect you. Stay with me.

Don't leave me all alone.

9S doesn't cling on when he feels those familiar things writhe out of him. He's been to the core of Eve's being once before and none of it can be a surprise to him. Nothing in Eve exists or existed that 9S didn't already have inside himself. Even if that could not be admitted at the time.

"See?" asks Adam. "Was that so bad?"

Eve makes an exaggerated 'blegh' noise and drops 9S carelessly. His weight hits the path to the sound of Adam's sigh.

9S barely notices. The removal of so much data that has been a part of him for so long has functionally restarted him, and a dozen sub-processes rush to suture his thought routines back together. In the meantime, his consciousness is reduced to a single bulb blinking on an off in an otherwise dark interface. All awareness waits on ellipses crossing his boot-up screen until their string finally ends in 'Complete'.

His interfaces click back on like a light. The first thing he sees is Adam and Eve, and he finds to his dismay that he can classify them in a single word.

Children.

They've appeared physically older than him from the moment they were born, but without any reason for them to fight it is obvious they are only kids. Smart and powerful but the exact same kind of simple 9S is used to encountering among machine kind. Everything about their former selves was a base protocol to kill androids layered over a game of make-believe they played with humanity's afterimage. There was nothing left for them to shape themselves after.

The current Adam balances two white cubes of his and Eve's extracted data atop a finger. He gives the impression he is a version who isn't worried about shaping himself after much of anything. With a clench of his fist, he crushes both the cubes and with them all that remains of the previous Adam and Eve's thought routines.

Still pressed to the floor, 9S watches the white flecks float away like ash. For him, there's something horrible about the way it disappears that far surpasses the reality that Adam has cheated him out of the chance to destroy those fragments himself.

"That was… your data…"

The brothers share a squint and Eve looks back at 9S with innocent puzzlement. "No it wasn't."

"Even if it were," says Adam. "Carrying around the frustrations of our previous versions is a bit regressive, isn't it? We left all of that behind."

"I didn't," 9S hisses between his teeth, struggling just to pick his head up. "I can't."

Adam's frown is unexpectedly sympathetic, but resentment numbs what little of 9S' senses he's managed to regain. The network's co-administrators are past being bound by what they were originally made to do. They don't hate 9S. They don't feel anything for him at all. They don't have to.

"Whatever," Eve huffs, crossing his arms over his needlessly puffed out chest. "You're fine now, right? If you wanna be gloomy, you don't need us. Right, Adam? Let's go play!"

Eve pulls his older brother toward the edge of the path, and Adam lets himself be pulled with the kind of leniency only fondness could give despite his dispassionate, long-suffering reproach. They have each other and the rest of the world is inconsequential.

9S watches them dissipate into the network without a glance back at him.

"Did you get anything you actually wanted out of this?" a familiar voice asks. "Did you do anything that mattered?"

The black stalks of N2's legs materialize just to the side of 9S' head. Her hands are folded behind her back. She isn't facing him, so he can't tell if she's asking him or mocking him or both.


9S clamped his hands to his face but couldn't block out the temperature, the light, the sound, and all the rest of the ambient, awful sensations of being back in his body. The frequency sang its gnat-buzz song, driving a needle through him as he writhed on the white silicon. He swatted blindly for the dial only for the sound to suddenly to fade away without his interference. A black shape sat beside the pod, indistinct through 9S' watery squint. It was idly twirling a spear.

"4S…?"

"Yep."

9S winced. Either 4S was pissed or something bad had happened. "How long have you been there?"

"Almost an hour." The heavy spearhead hummed through the still air. "How long were you in?"

He checked his internal clock and sank back down with a grumble. No wonder he felt like he was splitting in half. "87 minutes."

The spear stopped. "When I finally got the all-clear you know what I came out to? A pile of chopped up YoRHa in the back of two trucks, enough explosives to wipe the camp off the map, and resistance androids flashing their optic test lights at each other like they were trying to signal in Morse code. And you were gone."

9S rubbed at his forehead. So they were really going to do it. Blow the debris blocking the factory entrance and incinerate the bodies. He didn't blame them. He knew it was demons and still found himself scrutinizing the corpses of android and machine alike after leaving the camp. 'Are you alive' was suddenly a real and rational question to judge a stranger by.

Jackass had been in the middle of a demolition assessment when he found her. She wasn't going anywhere, just providing the charges. The camp had gotten away with a rare casualty rate of zero so she opted to remain at the maintenance bay and ensure it stayed that way. True to her unpredictable nature, she'd let 9S take the pod with no more than a distracted 'Whatever, just don't break it'.

"You found me," 9S pointed out. "So Jackass must've explained…"

"Yeah she explained! And I told her I'd chase her down with this spear like a caveman if you were damaged!" He stabbed it down with surprising force for having just one arm and planted himself beside 9S. "What are you trying to do? Why are you being so reckless?"

"The guy whose plan was 'I'll just ask the person who made up the whole YoRHa plan where the factory is' doesn't get to call anyone reckless."

4S punched him, but lightly.

9S folded his arms over his chest and stared up at the white ceiling. After seeing Adam and Eve, the uneven blocks in different shapes left a sour taste in his mouth, all claustrophobia and bad memories. "I'm not trying to be reckless. I know everyone is… I know you guys need me. But I need answers and I'm tired of waiting for them to come to me."

"Answers, hm…" 4S sighed and dragged his hand up over his face and scratched absently at his hair. "Did you make any progress at least?"

"Purged some consciousness data that wasn't mine. A lot of it, actually."

"More synaptic alignment? With who?"

"…Doesn't matter. They destroyed the data. It's over."

Did you get anything you actually wanted out of this? Did you do anything that mattered?

Honestly, it hadn't gone the way he hoped. It wasn't like he expected some big identifiable change right away. Synaptic alignments were subtle—they felt like naturally-generated thought routines and behaviors and that was what made them so insidious to begin with. But purging them was supposed to be different. He'd done exactly what he set out to do, so of course it mattered, but… It dampened something in him to see how little any of it mattered to the reconstructed Adam and Eve. No matter how much damage they had done to him, they were different beings now. Ones that had everything they wanted. They didn't care about the past at all, but they'd still casually snatched the one petty act of revenge 9S could have still enacted on their old iterations.

Success had never felt so unrewarding.

"Look," 4S said, interrupting his thoughts. "You do what you need to, but I'm helping."

"No," 9S answered firmly.

"Don't 'no' me, you need someone to monitor your condition." He retrieved his spear, picked up the pod, and crossed the tunnel to sit out of 9S' reach. "If you want me to go away, prove you can come do it yourself."

9S glared. They both knew if he tried to get up off his bed of carbon, he was going to eat dirt.

"Thought so. Take a maintenance break. I'll handle calibration. You have coordinates for your next move, right?"

"Yeah…" It felt like this was something he should do alone, but he knew better than to argue. "I need to talk to 3S."