The inner partition of the subnetwork floats like a white lily pad among the towering rushes of the outer network.
Small rooms dot the nostalgic circular path, grouped according to number. Some are locked and the designations appear in solid black over smooth white walls without entry or exit. The rest are open doorways to basic bedrooms that more or less resemble the ones they had before. Most of the occupants have taken the opportunity to clutter their spaces with digital representations of things they'd never have been allowed to keep on the Bunker. There are flowers, stuffed animals, fishbowls… There are even smooth panels that might be posters or mirrors. It's hard to tell; general resolution is too poor for them to have any images on them.
The rooms are in numerical order so he doesn't get too many glimpses of those unexpected eccentricities before he comes to the last of the doors in section 3.
3S sags like a wilted plant at the edge of his bed with a tense, irritable expression that isn't like him. The last thing 9S wants or needs is more of other people's bad news, but he isn't cold or single-minded enough that he can ignore how terrible the other scanner looks. There's no way he can barge in with all his problems.
He knocks first.
3S greets the intrusion with a smile as airy as it is fake. "Ah... Hey, 9S. You need something? Other than updates on 2B, I mean. Cause I don't have any of those."
"I'll find her." The words are a reflex, but not one that conceals any worry or disappointment. Finding her is just that much a certainty in his mind. "I had something else to ask. Is this a bad time?"
3S shrugs and looks at his smooth data-construct bed with something like longing. "It's fine… I just can't sleep in here, you know?"
9S chews the inside of his lip. It's a small, inconsequential thing that wouldn't even register as an issue for anyone else, but 3S' relationship with sleep is infamous.
"I guess…" he offers, at a loss.
3S smiles a little more persistently. "Don't worry about it. What can I do for you?"
The low-resolution manifestation of Cruel Oath looks like any other small sword in this space. He holds it out for 3S to examine. "Can you tell me anything about where I got this?"
3S runs his hands along the shape as he flicks through his interfaces to access the object's data. His face falls and 9S breath stops. There is recognition in the old scanner's eyes.
"Cruel Oath, huh…" 3S sighs and lays it across his lap. "This was the standard issue weapon for combat models in the second generation of the experimental M squad. The last time anyone saw any of them was..."
"Guadalcanal," 9S completes with dry-mouthed awe. He drops to one knee with wide and pleading eyes. The truth is close. He can feel it. "4S told me I went through two orientations. What happened to me, 3S?"
3S shies back from him and avoids meeting his eyes. "I'm just the server admin. All I know is that right before the skirmish where the Number 9 base personality configuration was damaged, you went through the Bunker's data." He pauses. A bittersweet shadow flickers over his face. "You always do."
"You knew the whole time…?"
"That humans were dead? Yeah. Special clearance. Came with the job." That isn't what 9S meant, but 3S doesn't give him the chance to make himself clear. "I didn't know all the rest though. The black boxes and the back door... I had no reason to suspect we were all going to be killed off when R&D was still going so strong and …" He frowns and throws whatever thoughts he has away before anything can come of them. "Well, it doesn't matter now."
"Any information you have," 9S presses. Please, it's all new to me."
"Yeah, that's probably what it's like to be you. Always new, all the time…" 9S can't find it in him to take those words personally. They're too heavy with frustration, and it isn't with him. "Everything was chaotic at that time and you in particular… By the time anybody realized there was any cause for concern, it was too late to stop you. You were a like a tornado. You tore through the Bunker's confidential servers then you tried to hack the fusion. Next thing I knew, your personality data was scrambled to hell and I got a quarantine order."
"And I was killed…"
"Yeah." He squints as his mind catches up to what conclusion 9S is suggesting. "It wasn't an execution, though."
Puzzled lines crease 9S' face. "I was killed…but not executed? Did I get cornered by machines?"
"No, just like you thought it was YoRHa. It's like this: Everybody already knew a YoRHa merging with a machine was what caused Guadalcanal. That's the information you were digging around in, not the stuff about Project YoRHa." He rubs absently at his unruly bird's nest of hair. "You were probably in deep shit, but there was no actual execution order for you. The units on the ground requested permission to destroy your body when they found it because…" He waves his hand vaguely. "You know."
"Because there was no way I didn't contract the logic virus?"
"Well yeah that too I guess… but they were more worried about the fusion. Just one YorHa made that monster, and nobody wanted to find out what would happen if the top-shelf scanner got sucked in too."
'Discover the truth about YoRHa and be erased' is what 9S knows and a large part of him has been expecting this inquiry to lead to more of the same. To find instead that the circumstances of his strange first life don't involve humanity or even an execution leaves him unsettled. He had picked through the bunker for information, but different information. His body had been destroyed, but for practical reasons. His first reset had been reactive rather than proactive, and this worries him.
Adam and Eve alone were enough to cause major distortions. Hacking into a fusion of almost eleven thousand machines at once, the first 9S must have experienced an alignment event that was catastrophic. 'Damaged' would have been a loose and very polite term to describe the state of his data after something like that. The prospect is tidy but terrifying in its failure to explain how that data would have gotten back to the Bunker.
Once more, 9S feels himself on the edge of dangerous unknowns. If there is a moment to decide he knows enough, it's now, and he would only be lying to himself if he didn't admit to the temptation to leave the past in the past. But his dogged curiosity helps him swallow his fears. He already knows what he's made of and what he was made for. There cannot possibly be anything worse to know.
"Is there anyone else I could talk to who would have been more involved with my data? Someone on the repair team maybe?"
3S' face contracts all at once as though 9S has punched him. "They're dead. Just like the H units that were on the planet's surface, most of them resisted the infection. Then the Bunker exploded. They're not here."
The momentum of 9S' thoughts collapses all at once. From the pile-up, words he knows he shouldn't say launch out. "That's why 801S isn't here, isn't it…?"
"I just remembered," 3S says, sitting up with worrying nonchalance. "There's one of them here. A unit who was in M002."
He should have expected that. 3S is approachable, but he has never been much for talking past the surface of himself. 9S isn't sure whether to be more sorry or skeptical. "Come on, 3S, I've seen the body storage records. Why would a unit that hasn't been in production for three years be here?"
"Dunno. His memory wasn't all there last I spoke to him. Real reclusive guy, but I'm probably the only face he recognized, so he gave me his unit address. I'll send it to you. Maybe you'll be able to help each other."
"Thanks, 3S. And sorry…for bothering you."
3S leans back onto his bed with some vague assurance that he's fine. Even when he closes his eyes, he looks like he hasn't slept in a thousand years and won't today either.
9S knows when he finds the YoRHa from M002.
He is built more like 3S than the compact modern scanners—taller and a little broader. He stands at the edge of a T-section, fixated on the distant pillar of light that connects the remains of the network. Déjà vu gusts through 9S. It may be the M unit's bent posture or the familiar, if more professionally sewn, high-collared coat, but to 9S' eyes, he bears a strong resemblance to V.
Reason tells him it must the other way around, but how V could resemble someone he's never met?
"Hello?"
The unit turns. There is a braid down the right side of his short, brown hair. There are no scanners with such a specific aspect to their personal appearance, but something in him insists he has seen that braid and this unit before.
"I'm 9S…" It's odd to be meeting a 'new' YoRHa model. Especially when they are older than him. "Are you the unit who was in the M002 experimental squadron?"
"YoRHa No. 2, Type D." His voice is slow and steady and strangely comforting. "But you probably know that's just a cover designation."
The words strike 9S like a metal beam, knocking away all sense of familiarity and security. The one before him is an Executioner. His palm squeezes around Cruel Oath as it materializes in his hand.
"That's good," 2E says with a short, harmless laugh. "You're not naïve after everything you've experienced."
His tone grates on 9S. It's over-familiar. "What do you know about what I've experienced?"
2E slouches his weight onto one leg. "It's not as though there are any secrets in a place like this. I haven't had much to do but figure out what happened since I was last active."
9S can sympathize with that much, at least. 2E's rollout would have been during the era before Attacker and Gunner models were discontinued in favor of the more all-encompassing Battler types. It's natural for him to seek answers even if he isn't a scanner when he's arrived so far beyond his own time. 9S still doesn't trust him, but answers are more important than the sourness piling in his stomach. All he has to do I spare enough civility to ask his questions and then it can be over.
"3S told me about you," he begins slowly. His stance loosens to show he is of no harm as he draws closer. "He said you might be able to help me."
2E's eyes flick down. Threat response routines flare across 9S' systems and movement triggers his dodge function. When he skids to a stop, 2E stands where he was only a moment ago, unarmed and antiquated, but eyeing 9S like a target.
"The sword," 2E demands.
The sword?
The blade of Cruel Oath gleams black and gold in his grip, as fully articulated as if he were holding the physical thing. Dozens of questions bloom into hundreds of hypotheses, but 2E's growing aura of menace is a tall task to ignore even for him. "This is the whole reason I'm here," he blurts, hoping to stem this misunderstanding before it can grow any worse. "I need to know here I got this from!"
"Figure it out fast." 2E shifts his weight and raises his fists. "It's mine."
9S has no reason to believe he's lying. He can't—not with the sword having such an obvious response. It must be some sort of resonation based in proximity, similar to the reactions 9S had experienced when approaching units whose consciousness data he'd absorbed. The possibilities are dizzying. Unfortunately, the luxury to examine them closer, in a less prickly situation, is not something he has.
The sword may be the only familiar thing 2E has seen since his resurrection in the ark. Under any other circumstance, 9S would give it to him, executioner or not. But this piece of 2E's past is also the only clue 9S has about his own history.
The moment his grip changes, 2E is on him.
Without a weapon, the executioner is not immediately lethal but he is free to put his entire body to work. He leaves no openings for 9S to try and hack him and refuses to let any meaningful distance form between them. It is clear in every fluid motion that his priority is to get his hands on the sword in the shortest amount of time.
The battle—if it can be called that at all—is brief. It only takes one stumble for 2E to weave around behind 9S and twist his arm up between his shoulders until his sensors scream white pain through his vision. His legs thrash against the textureless platform as he struggles to activate his disconnection protocol. Pressure crushes at his wrist, and his fingers jerk and flex against his will.
As the sword clatters to the path, 2E releases him
9S twists and reaches out despite the flaring protests from his shoulder. Cruel Oath is already in 2E's hands, but he catches the blade in his grip. He can't let him take it. Even if it rightfully belongs to 2E, he cannot let it go.
"Please…" His grip tightens as he wheezes. His gloves split. "Please…!"
There is a brief needle of pain from the sensors in his hands and blood flows down the golden edge.
His face blanks and his mind empties. His desperation is entirely forgotten.
2E hesitates. "9S?"
9S' wide eyes rise to a face that is suddenly more familiar than mere déjà vu can explain. "No. 2…?"
Memories erupt into the network from the point where his body and the sword meet, small and innumerable and filling the air like starlings. 9S doesn't see any of them.
He doesn't have to.
The '2B' model coming our way isn't going to save us. Just like No. 2, she is probably an Executioner. One who will properly complete the mission to dispose of us.
Even though No.2 asked, the Bunker refuses to allow me to delete his data… because it was also part of the experiment. They created us and sent us to fail over and over, decided we would be eliminated, and now at the end even his last request is denied. After he spared us. After he took his own life instead...
It's too cruel.
I don't know if this feeling inside of me is rage, but when No. 4 and No. 22 suggest that we shouldn't die without a fight, I'm ready to listen.
xXx
The idea to fuse with a machine was No. 22's, but I volunteered to be the one to do it. As a Healer, I was always the one to be protected and stay safe. I carried everyone's back up data, so I had to be kept alive at all times if there was any hope the others could be restored.
I was the only one who couldn't put my life on the line.
I was the only one who didn't have to suffer dying and losing myself over and over.
So I wanted to be the one to take on the risks. We were all on a suicide mission, but if No. 4 and No. 22 were successful, they would raise a whole city of machines and die once. If I was successful, my consciousness would eventually spread out and I would probably die many, many times before YoRHa managed to truly kill me.
It was only fair, but I had my own reasons too.
I still had the data of all my friends stored inside of me. Maybe I could put them somewhere that not even YoRHa could reach.
xXx
I lose control of systems the moment my black box is absorbed. My body is consumed by metal as the logic virus eats it alive, but I willingly leave it behind. Untethered from everything I am safe, but my consciousness is small and lost by the time one hundred machines have fused in. At five hundred, grains of my data start to slip out across all the minds I have been connected to. At five thousand, I start to lose my sense of self.
Attacker No. 3. Gunner No. 4. Attacker No 6. Scanner No. 21. Gunner No. 22.
I'm sorry.
Their data loses its shape as my memory falls apart. My body housed all the systems for protecting my memory regions. All I can do is continue to latch on to No.2's sword. The static storage format of a weapon is less susceptible to fragmentation, so I fold what remains of my existence around it and pray.
I know the war won't end. I know I'll never read a book by the sea in a peaceful world. I don't need anything like that; just let me hold on to this one thing.
xXx
Someone is here. Inside the network with me. A YoRHa unit.
There are over ten thousand of us joined together now. It's no place for an android. I can feel their consciousness breaking apart. They are fusing in, just like I did. Becoming just another single point of data scattered around. They have to know they will die. So why would they come here?
I can feel someone reaching out for me. I can hear someone calling my name.
Somehow, I organize enough of my disjointed remains to answer.
xXx
Our data compresses together, trying in vain to establish some barrier between us and the rest of the fusion. There isn't much of me left, and he is fading fast, but I remember myself as I hold onto him.
I remember that I was No.9, because he is also No. 9. I remember that I did this reckless thing to cling to something important, because he also did this reckless thing to save something he thought was important.
Maybe it's the other YoRHa, who must have been dying over and over again to bring the fusion to an end.
I have forgotten the names and faces of the ones I did this for. All I know is the shape of the sword that the last pieces of my consciousness refuse to release. A voice that says goodbye but also that we will meet again.
My fleeting consciousness becomes disorganized again. The other No.9 and I melt together in the endless white network, and small but coherent thought routines bounce between us in a rudimentary exchange.
I'm sorry.
'I'm so sorry.'
I don't want you to die.
'I don't want to let you die.'
I… don't want to die.
'I didn't come here to die.'
We will not die.
9S wakes slowly. No.2 is kneeling over him. The golden line of Cruel Oath rests at his hip.
"Seven brothers…" 9S mumbles, his mind flinging old data about the sword forward in an effort to enforce sense on his otherwise disorientated state. "Seven brothers with a traitor among them... That was about M002. That was about… you."
"No. 9? Is it really…?"
There is enough hope in his whisper to crush 9S.
"I'm not No.9." It's a terrible half-truth, because he is logging the strands that comprise this not-stranger's braid and he already knows what number he should come to. A dozen phantom images of him shift like shadows at the corners of 9S' memory. An expanse of emotions and experiences that do and don't belong to him fight to be the first out of some secret partition inside of him, finally found and finally open.
"We were… in pieces. Everything was in pieces. But there was enough of me… of us? Of 9S—to use the bunker's back door. We wrote over the personality data with the mess of what we were, so that YoRHa would have no choice… Erase their most advanced scanner and start over, or salvage us."
He can see so much evidence now that he hears it aloud. Prioritizing 2B's data every time without fail even when he didn't know her. Insisting on repair of even the slightest, most insignificant injury even though he often overdid it. These were Healer unit's habits, left somewhere so deep in his consciousness data that it was just a ripple on the surface.
What extent of the original 9S he embodied he might never really know. All he has is an impression of someone whose only choices were to find out what would make another No.9 cause so much chaos or utterly lose his mind. Someone who couldn't stand for anyone to be pointlessly thrown away. 9S thinks that he and No. 9 may be a little more selfish than that. Or, given the way the other scanners talked about him, maybe the original 9S was just the only one between the three of them who had remained alone.
He'd never known 2B.
She'd never known the original 9S.
She'd never known him to be any other way than he was now—the reconstructed personality that his predecessors had become when they refused to die. 'He' has never existed without her, and all the messy and contradictory things he feels for her are indisputably his own.
No. 2 holds out his hand and 9S gladly accepts the help. The air is clear and silent. The memories have all flown away.
"You can keep the sword," says No. 2.
9S almost laughs. It feels like they were fighting for it a lifetime ago. "I don't need it anymore. I got what I was looking for."
"So did I." He holds up a hand and there is a cut across his glove. "No.9 couldn't delete my data… so he hid it in the sword's storage system. Then one of you compressed it and hid it a place no one would look."
"My NFCS base protocol," 9S says with a prideful smile. "Which was conveniently set to 'off' when I was rebooted as a modern Scanner."
"Crafty."
"Of course, the old 9S was top of the line too, you know." He can tell by No.2's expression that his immodesty would not have been characteristic of No.9. As it should be—he isn't No. 9, after all. "Are you sure you want me to have it?"
"You carried it all this time. Besides, the war's over." A smile pulls familiar creases into being beneath No. 2's eyes. "And now I know why I came back in a place like this. It was to meet you."
No. 2 doesn't have 2B's face, but he is similar enough for the words to tie 9S' black box up in flustered ribbons. "W-well. Most likely you came back because some part of your consciousness data fractured off into the fusion and has been floating around in the machine network this whole time. I had a similar thing happen to me where my consciousness spontaneously regenerated as linked fragments across a local machine network and after finding out we run on machine cores there's a really high probability that we were always capable of doing things like this but the logic virus contamination risk kept the possibilities from being explored properly and—"
"9S," No.2 interrupts quietly. "Even though you're not the No. 9 I knew. I'm glad… that you didn't die."
There is a gentleness in his gaze that matches the occasional glimpse that 2B would clumsily show, only No.2 doesn't bother to hide it. Their time together was short, but No. 2 and No. 9 were probably at least as close as 9S and 2B had been…
9S looks out over the edge of the T-section, where he'd found No.2 standing. His eyes widen, and a flutter of laughter escapes him. No. 2 looks at him like he might be a bit unstable, but he has never been more clear-headed.
"I know where she is," he says breathlessly. "I know where 2B is!"
"You gonna be okay from here?"
9S nodded and grumbled a weak thank you to 4S for practically carrying him back to the camp.
"No problem. It's gonna take me a while to calculate the coordinates and calibrate the pod. I won't tell Iota about the state you're in or how long you were in the network but in exchange, you are gonna get in bed and power down for at least six hours. No exceptions."
As the door to the private room swung open and the bright winter daylight yielded to the cool darkness, 9S found he couldn't imagine anything better. There was no powering through the kind of headache he had.
Virtuous Contract was right where he left it across the empty, unused second bed beyond the bookcases and plain, wooden table in the center of the toom. The bed 2B once used.
4S took one look at it and patted him on the back. "See you in the morning, Nines."
The door closed with a polite click. 9S sat and stared at his white reflection in the blade. Humans had dozens, maybe even hundreds of sayings about knowing yourself or finding yourself. For androids, the concept was redundant. One personality might differ from another, but every android had a role and a purpose and that was all the self-knowledge they needed. 9S was not most androids. He was YoRHa, and his existence was the logical extreme of YoRHa's practices. The fractal of his many lives repeated in their own image down to whatever iteration he was, and he thought this one human thing he understood perfectly. Knowing what had happened to his first self gave him a direct and traceable line through his past. It wouldn't have been important to any of the previous versions of him. They had a war to fight and 2B to be with and when they found out the truth they never had to carry it for very long.
Knowing where he and Cruel Oath came from did so much more than give him a sense of control over himself. It gave him a sense of direction. Made him feel less like a lone point and more like a dotted line.
And if 2B had really left all her memories, inside of Virtuous Contract was where 9S would find the means to make that line solid.
Slowly, he tugged his gloves off and let them fall to the floor. His one finger was still sort of misshapen due to the improper maintenance, but his hands were otherwise pristine. He'd sliced them a dozen times carrying Virtuous Contract around, but nothing had ever happened. It had to be a part of him. He had to carry it with him into the network, where everything was just data that could merge and blend as easily as the barriers between two digital objects could be broken down.
In the case of a weapon, breaking that barrier was apparently as easy as being cut.
The sword dissipated into a swirl of golden-white sparks and integrated into his NFCS. By the time he opened his read-out and found the bright orange indicator for new data, it was already back in his hands, resting easily on his lap. It ached a bit that this was how he had to learn, but he took it all in. Her uncertainty. Her doubts.
Underneath that cold exterior, she was always asking herself how much more she could take.
He held the sword close to his body and let himself sag gently onto the stiff mattress. There was no scent. It surprised him a little that it even crossed his mind to look for one. 2B was an android and it had been… almost a year since she used this bed. As he curled up with his knees nearly to his chin, he thought of her voice coming from the tinny speaker of a broken flight unit on the ruined coastline. Of her calling him Nines and referring to their time together as pure light.
He closed his eyes.
I'll see you soon, 2B…
