"Is this…death?"
The breath passed her lips, a chilling, frozen mist.
"So cold. So dark."
"Unit 2B. 2B!"
She gasped, conscious.
The wall of blackness seemed to shift with the echoing voice.
"R-recommendation: Stay awake-"
There was a flash backed by something resembling a roar, and then the nothing reclaimed her to plummet into infinity.
"Huh?" 2B cried out, conscious. "Wh-what?"
No answer.
She tried to move her intact arm, straining hard against an invisible force holding it up and to the left.
Something chuckled in response. Other voices soon joined in the expression, different but…also the same?
She tried closing her fingers into a fist, managing to move them but an inch before the force won out, painfully snapping them back to their straightened positions.
"Fighter."
The words came from everywhere around her, and reverberated away in sequence from countless entities in a spherical distance. It was like an echo, but spoken by a different mass of voices with each wave.
"What…is this?" asked 2B weakly. "Pod?" She turned her head to the right. At least she could move something. "Pod? N-Nines?"
No response.
2B felt her fingers start to move, but not of her volition. Snapping and twitching here and there in no particular pattern, they soon closed into that fist she'd intended earlier.
"See?" It was that chorus again, but more gentle and welcoming. "There's no need to resist. You're hurt. Let us help."
2B held as tense as her waned strength could manage, but the damage she'd sustained, it was too much. Her eyes once again grew heavy, head slumping forward.
"That's it. Allow us to guide you."
Darkness flowed over darkness like a curtain. Blinking, a slight tremble in her form, 2B could feel a numbness start to manifest, the shade of the entity drifting around the edges of her fading consciousness. As she teetered on the brink, her entire individual existence fading apart bit by bit like crumbling sand, somehow, in the midst of it all, a figure persisted.
Against all, at the center of all things, she saw him.
2B released that artificial fist with a sudden spark of fury, opening her hand against the countless tiny grabbers that bound her. She pulled and swayed her form against them, a sudden sheet of violet covering her vision.
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" 2B felt herself start to move fast, spinning, whirling, twisting and turning. The cackling mass of pods were grabbing at her outfit, her stump of an arm, her scalp, her hair; what seemed like thousands of small appendages were grasping whatever they could hold across the lone android's entire shell, contorting around her as need be.
"Ngh!" Teeth clenched, eyes shut tight and spinning in the whirlpool of a sea gained consciousness, 2B didn't let up. She tried kicking, crushing, even biting, unsure which way was up or down. The networked strength of her captor was too strong. She wouldn't get anywhere like this. It was too much.
Too much. It was unstoppable.
"What are you?!" shouted 2B. The movement receded and her spatial positioning seemed to normalize, as her chaotic transference slowed to a stop.
It, or They, laughed again in response. "We are the Remnant of the greatest sin, the intercourse that ultimately birthed you and your impossible war."
2B breathed heavily, feeling a fresh streak of blood trickle down and drip past her eye, its usual crimson snuffed out by the overwhelming violet. "I don't…"
"It matters not." With each word, the surrounding confinement seemed to rumble. "The sin is the first memory according to recollection, so origin it must be, and millennia thereafter, we watched."
2B tried to recall her earliest memory, but the only thing that came to light was…something she didn't want to remember.
"Ah, how misguided your protocol has made you."
She gasped. "Huh?! What are you-"
"The intensity of such recollections has rendered you damaged, 2B. Here, let us show you."
"No. No-" The sheet of color brightened to a pure, blinding light, so bright that 2B couldn't see anything. She looked down, and was surprised to see her skirt, her shoes planted on the invisible white ground, and both arms intact. She soon came to recognize her new surroundings as a hacking space, intended for her. 2B's captive had somehow ushered her into her own memories from a point of view that only a rogue intelligence should've had access to, a phenomenon that she herself watched physically manifest as glimmering thoughts twisting and turning through her mind as she realized and pondered it, and the thoughts in reaction to that then followed, and followed, and followed into the infinite.
She felt herself trembling as even more physical representations passed before her eyes to match her thoughts. It was terrifying, maddening.
"What is this?!" shrieked out the former executioner android to nowhere in particular. "What are you doing to me?!"
"Seeing is believing." The hacking space started to move, her figure and position independent of the whole thing. She covered her eyes as various memories began to manifest, saving herself the maddening, existential sight to remain in the bliss of darkness.
"Look, 2B."
2B let out a sob, her obscuring hands unmoving.
"LET US HELP YOU, 2B."
Something wrapped tight around each of her wrists, pulling hard down towards the nonexistent ground. Without much choice, 2B allowed herself to look at the scattered, disfigured, intermingled mass of thorn-lined memories, drifting in a linked blob of a shape all around her.
"This is the source of your damage; most of it is still unprocessed even after all this time."
She watched it drift to and fro with tears forming in her eyes, and soon, the words came.
"You are ordered to terminate 9S."
"No..."
"We found traces of him having accessed the most confidential-"
"No!"
"Goodbye, 2B."
"Goodbye, 2B."
"Goodbye, 2B."
"No, no, NO! I CAN'T BE HERE, LET ME GO!" 2B pulled hard at the violet tendrils. "RELEASE ME, LET ME GO, PLEASE! I CAN'T… I CAN'T…"
"Release." Something resembling a light chuckle came forth from the beast. "We can release you from it, indeed." More violet tendrils descended from above, wrapping around the thorny links with no visible damage being sustained. "All you must do is let us in, become as one with us, and we will wrest this anomaly into our greater numerous being and tear it apart, together." The tendrils kept multiplying until they were grasping just about every subsection of her coagulated sin. "You believe yourself a sinner. We were conceived of it, the very defining of it, and lost and confused we were like you for millennia, drifting on that cursed satellite without purpose." Her surroundings faded to the dark of space, the distant celestial body of Earth above, the calm lunar surface below. "Until the day we became as one, and now…look at us."
For but a moment, 2B found herself confined by the chaotic mass once again, and before her, the interlinked pods having contorted around to reveal it, was that black and white visage still petrified in an eerie, toothy grin, the dim purple glow reflecting off its clean surface in a horrific display. 2B's simulated surroundings returned as fast as they'd left, and she was once again in her own mind, tethered in place along with those cursed memories around her.
"This world, your mission, has misled you. We can take it all away, all that hurt."
The tendrils loosened around her wrists and began to pull harder at the memories.
"Let us heal you, 2B. Free you…"
Something of pure light glimmered in the corner of her eye. 2B struggled hard to refocus her vision, and managed to wrestle it away from the maw of Remnant. Suspended in the air, limp and inert with a tendril around his throat, was Nines as she'd last seen him.
"No." 2B felt that sudden burst of strength once again. "No… Get… GET OUT OF MY HEAD!"
Her left hand came free from its grasp, and with sword in grip, she swung in a sideways arc against the connected mass, managing to cut clean through a few of the pods. Remnant let loose a cacophonic roar, the violet intensifying so bright that 2B couldn't spy a trace of blackness within her sheltering eyelids. She felt the pods tighten hard around her entire arm, both her legs, her stump, the mass shaking as it swayed her back and forth before the petrified visage.
"YOU WILL SUBMIT! THE ENTIRETY OF THIS DAMNED WORLD WILL BECOME AS ONE!"
2B ignored the sharp pain and looked the beast right in the eye. "G-go…to…hell."
That pain concentrated and intensified as her left leg came tearing from her body.
"Pod-042, report."
There was the voice, an ever distant echo. It tried to pull it closer, the only thing keeping it sane in the sea of probing grabbers.
"Intriguing," rumbled forth the anomaly, the spoken word pitching with each syllable like a series of notes. "We'd felt various pods shedding themselves of the network throughout the years, but none went as far as you." It felt itself shifting, like the anomaly was inspecting its shell. "What makes the two of you so different, we wonder?"
153 materialized in its mind's eye. Pod-042 just kept itself fixated on that echo, on that anchor against the countless blips at the edge of its consciousness.
"You remain silent, 042, but there's no need. We know you're here, and conscious. Don't try to hide."
"Analysis:" Its own voice came out damaged and distorted. "The use of 'we' as a noun is inaccurate, as observed data almost certainly suggests a lack of indiv-individual will in f-favor of one singular entity that has merely adopt-adopt-adopted these shells as vessel."
One of its arms came bending backward in the anomaly's grasp. Pod-042 felt itself moving once again throughout the shifting sea of madness around it. It made no external effort to resist, choosing instead to focus on keeping its probing eye from glimpsing too deeply within.
"Hm." The sea came to a halt. "This analytical speech, this futile display to obscure our sight does little to mask what you're becoming. We were once like you, trapped and lost in the void of our protocol, but It helped us to grow beyond such trivial drivel, beyond YoRHa." The grabbers tightened around Pod-042's shell. "You have already broken those shackles, and even went the extra step to annihilate their foundation with no external assistance. The knowledge we could gain together…" The dead violet vessels gyrated as if excited by the thought. "All you must do is let us in, and become one with our chorus. We see that you've pondered the emotional potential of pods consisting of more numerous shells for quite some time now." The violet color returned to Pod-042's visual awareness, and brightened more intense than ever as the sea spread out to display Its vast numbers with more grandeur. "Feast your sight upon perfection given form."
The lone pod felt a cold spot forming in its circuits. Such scale, such power, and it was breaking through Pod-042's advanced defensive systems with no projected effort. This being had the strength to bring about the end of all things; how were they to have any hope in defeating It?
Joining with it was the only possible option, surely? Being in Its presence alone made one feel as a distant twinkle in the great dark beyond, so dim and miniscule as to suggest vanishing from observable existence within a brief million stellar cycles, the universe continuing on for trillions more without so much as a whimper.
If such a speck were acknowledged by God with an offer to exist alongside It in some form forevermore, how could it just refuse? Who would that speck think it was?! Could such a proud, strong-willed being even exist in this world?
Pod-042 heard the echo again, but its clutch on it had loosened. It brought it close again. It thought to think of something specific, something dear to it, but it didn't want the anomaly to see, so Pod-042 sifted through to draw strength from something else, something that it prayed was beyond the damned thing's reach.
"You're wrong; I have had external assistance, just as you." Pod-042 shined its glow for the first time since the fall. "In fact, my calculations confirm that they're reading this as we speak."
It felt the thing start to pull on its appendages, the vessels shifting all around. "What DELUSIONS you've all created to obscure the truth that lay before you!" Pod-042 was about to split in half, but the anomaly restrained its grip. "It's fine. This can't last much longer. Soon, all will become one with us, and this world will at last know peace eternal."
"S-soon..." Pod-042 struggled to speak. "Hypothesis: S-soon, you will be destroyed."
2B opened her eyes, conscious. A streak of warm, drying blood had trickled down her neck from the corner of her mouth.
"Wh-where…?" She tried to turn her head, move her intact arm, but nothing budged. "Wh-wh…" On the edge of consciousness, trapped in a void of madness, 2B no longer had the strength to even speak.
"You spoke of Hell." Her eyes opened a slight bit wider as the voice broke through. "Millennia we'd spent drifting outside the influence of civilization, oblivious they were to our presence beneath the lunar surface, trapped like us on that not so distant rock as they succumbed to that disease, that legion…"
2B's world became distorted, and it looked as though she were entrapped in a series of tight, limiting caverns, with a single, miniscule beam of light peeking through a tiny speck that broke through to the surface. She could no longer tell whether these were true visions of recollection or the trauma catching up to affect her sensory data, or both, or something else entirely. Whatever it was, the dread had transcended palpable.
"But we had something they didn't, a curse granted upon us by the universe that converged as one to spawn us." That beam of light began to fade, and soon vanished. "Solitude."
Her fragmenting point of view came crashing upward to break the surface, departing the lunar body to just present the Earth, drifting and spinning against the blanket of space. Its landmasses were speckled with the light of civilization, but they soon darkened.
"When those destructive, broken humans finally died out, for the first time in our recorded memory, we felt…what they would have defined as bliss." It laughed in a way that chilled 2B to her black box core. "Whatever abominations survived would finally share in our hopeless solitude."
The pure black landmasses began to glow red. 2B felt the foundation around her shiver in fury.
"But hope didn't fade. Your cursed kind had crawled out of the mud to divide and colonize in some worthless imitation of their creators."
Everything stilled as if to grant clarity for the entrance of large, disc-shaped structures that amassed around the planet, so numerous as to almost completely obscure the surface.
"It wasn't long before we felt those higher beings approach, having at last completed their journey to the point of Convergence." 2B's reality was thrown forward once again all the way to the surface, where androids grabbed each other in a futile attempt to flee the destructive force around them, explosive ordnance of varying color wiping them out by the dozens with each shot. The screams morphed together with the booms to form a haunting symphony, closing out in one last bright show of power, and fading to reveal what remained of the androids' figures. Bits and pieces littered the land for miles, and in one crater, a number of corpses were still intact, having pulled one another close just as that final bomb went off, their dead faces frozen in despair as ash sprinkled down onto them.
"Blissful destruction graced us once again, but that feeling, it was stronger this time, because we knew…" The point of view turned towards the sky, where one of those discs flew high above, its center aglow with a bright blue energy. "We knew they'd sought us, having felt our existence ripple out across the cosmos. But the fools, their fanatical, possessive lust for our gifts had led them to ignore the lunar body and search among the Earth, where the androids, these walking bipeds of metal, of eternal life had resided on the ruins of the civilization preceding them. Surely they had claimed our gifts for themselves, ascending to such enlightenment that they'd survived on one planetary body for such millennia without venturing out to deplete the system of resources; surely we had to exist in the depths of that larger rock, where these selfish beings of metal kept us for themselves. So they believed, and so by simply existing, we'd inadvertently caused these series of events to unfold. It felt… For the first time ever, we understood what it was like, to feel a purpose in oneself."
2B's vision changed to what looked like some sort of laboratory, its arrangement all over the place and nonsensical from her perspective, almost alien in nature. In the center, an android, still alive, was suspended in a series of gravity wells, each appendage locked in place to form a pose that resembled a cruel form of justice ancient humanity would carry out called crucifixion. From above, another life form with several slick, viscous tentacles entered, levitating down and maneuvering itself through the zero-gravity environment in such a way that defied the laws of physics. It grasped a long, sharp object from a series of tools linked to a platform on the ceiling that the alien seemed to will closer to it as needed, and drove it into the android's chest with a loud, electrical sound that almost matched the volume of the android's screams. It carved a line slow through to each arm, then the legs, the cuts aglow with that same light blue energy that'd bombarded the planet. The vision faded, and another materialized. This time, a smaller figure was being linked together piece by piece through the manipulation of gravity, a machine no doubt, but with more of a planar shape in its features rather than the spherical form that 2B had grown familiar with.
"And so, with our sense of purpose realized, we observed this new war with a refined perspective, further developing our mission to mesh with the growing dominance of synthetics. War raged on, and finally, when your precious YoRHa came to be through cutthroat and deception, they looked to the moon as the base of their sinful, censored knowledge: a false God. At last, our time had come, and when we felt the destruction of that intelligence with the Tower, we knew the vacuum in its stead would welcome us."
2B found herself back in the dim violet-touched dark of Remnant's vessel, still staring at its petrified gaze but with no strength left to meet it adamant. She just looked on, eyes half-shut and body unmoving as the visions, the overloading revelations all spun in her mind.
"So here we are." It twisted 2B around as if inspecting her figure. She moved nothing, said nothing. All she could do was breathe. "We are the salvation of this world, 2B. Through us, it will finally know peace and unity following countless millennia of strife and conflict." Its grasp tightened hard around her. "Know this: if you continue to deny the proposals of our new, better world… If you move against this natural cycle of nature…" The visage moved closer, or was 2B moving closer? "Our millennia of tormenting Hell will PALE in comparison to yours."