Eleven hours passed before Fern reappeared with the patched remains of a small sailboat. It must've been caught in a crossfire at some point. Neglect alone couldn't account for the warped edge where the mast had seemingly melted off, or for the any of the bullet marks pocking the upper edge of the hull. An old road sign she'd probably yanked right out of the street let her row her way up to them in the absence of a sail or a real oar.
49 thought it was pretty resourceful. V, on the other hand, pressed the back of his fist to his mouth and looked off in another direction so it would be less obvious that he was laughing. Considering she was moving against the current her progress wasn't that bad. It just seemed to 49 that they could be a lot more efficient.
He hadn't expected the pods to agree so quickly when he suggested they push the boat. Pods didn't have sensors for pain. Physical discomfort wasn't an issue and neither of them had complained about their transport over land. Still, they seemed almost excited to hang off the back of the boat together. Not a moment after he said it, they were both floating around the edges of the hull, chattering between each other on what the best support configuration would be. After a little experimentation, they ended up latched on side by side just above the rusted rudder.
Not like he couldn't blame them. Easy work in the full light of the springtime sun had to be better than doing nothing inside a dark backpack. They looked kind of like a fancy engine, so Fern didn't think there'd be a problem on the off chance they passed other androids by.
He and Fern had always planned to come straight to that river. It was the most obvious way to speed up the first leg of the journey since it stretched all the way through two sectors. With the pods on duty, initial travel time estimates were rendered obsolete. In good weather, they'd cruise for eight to ten hours at a time. Fern would watch in front and V would doze at the back, meaning 49 was free to catch up on the data the other scanners had left him without worrying too much about his surroundings. His readouts were a dead giveaway that he wasn't a standard model, but it was easy enough to just hold up a physical map behind them. Sometimes the extra visual information could be a bother, but it wasn't so bad.
When it was time to take a break, they'd pick a secluded spot, usually with low-hanging boughs or craggy overhangs on whichever side of the bank looked easiest to pull into. V fished. 49 would build a fire and checked their course. Fern'd wander off. Sometimes to scout, more often to find fresh water since the river wasn't viable. The few structures they passed that weren't decayed dockside villages were hulking, rusted industrial sites whose drainage pipes still managed to belch out dribbles of sludgy waste.
49 couldn't help noticing Fern never took the opportunity to treat their downtime like downtime. She never gave him a chance to do the scouting or look for supplies even though he was built for it. When he tried, she always said no. Or left before he could get in a word.
Yes, she was better equipped to deal with trouble. And she was used to how ground androids behaved if she ran into any. And she knew what to look out for better than he did. And yeah, yeah, fine there were probably forty more reasons she was the better pick to go marching off into unfamiliar territory. But he got the feeling that even if none of those reasons existed, she still would have found a reason to separate herself from them.
He never got the impression she wasn't coming back, so he did his best to mind his own business.
Bad weather grew more frequent as the days passed and they progressed further west. The light, spitting rains they first encountered were easy to push through. But there were days where the wind squalled, and rain fell in hard-to-predict bursts that swelled the river into a writhing monster that the pods couldn't control. That weather was the only thing that could still slow them down. Androids were too heavy to swim, and V couldn't have challenged currents like that even if he wasn't so slim. More importantly, it would be a long trip on foot if anything happened to the boat. So they always pulled ashore wherever there were intact buildings and waited it out.
Today, the skies were clear.
The boat was partially pulled ashore, and V stretched out inside it, his breaths slow and rhythmic and uniquely audible between the pages of the book covering his face. For most of their first few days on the water, he'd slept so much that 49 worried he was sick. The on-foot part of the journey must have exhausted him, whether he would admit it or not. Lately, he napped more out of boredom than necessity. It probably made the time go faster.
Normally, 49 would also be bored out of his mind with so little to do. But lately, he was fine with just watching the sky. All of the old world records he'd gone through said that the moon used to rise and set just about every day all over the world. With Earth's rotation halted, that was no longer true. The moon was out there somewhere, quietly drifting along on its own orbit. On this side of the world, it would always be a new moon invisible to his eye, but that would change as they got closer to the night kingdom.
The thought of his first moonrise was all he needed to let the time idle by.
Quick and confident bootsteps squelched in the soggy grass, catching 49's attention. He kicked some extra dirt over where he'd already gotten rid of the remains of the fire and trotted down to the bank just in time to meet Fern.
"Woah!" He skidded, and instinctively took a step back. "What's with the guns?"
"Spoils of war," she said, adjusting the strap of a mean-looking rifle over her shoulder with a toothy grin. "This one's for me since I don't have a pod. Here, you take this and give that one to V."
V had dragged the book down off his face and was holding out his hand. Must've been a light sleep. 49 climbed into the boat, handed it to him, and watched with surprise as he deftly checked the magazine.
"Only two?" V asked.
"The hell do you need ammo for?" Fern countered, kicking the boat back down into the water and nimbly hopping aboard. "They're just for blending in. Neither of you needs a gun and I wouldn't trust either of you with one if you did."
Whatever crossed V's mind, he didn't say. Didn't really have to when he could convey 'If that's what you want to believe' without opening his mouth. Amused arrogance was still glinting in his eye as he lazily turned his gaze. "You can't shoot, 9S?"
"Forty-nine," he corrected. "Gunner models haven't existed in three years. There's a lot of manual correction involved in accurately firing a ranged weapon, and the ammunition of physical arms is limited so there's not a lot of room for error."
Fern snickered. "In other words: No, he can't shoot."
"I wasn't calibrated to shoot! I managed to aim a missile by myself; I can figure out a gun!"
"You can't hack a gun." She settled in at the head of the boat and swung her road sign-turned-paddle over her shoulder. "Seriously, they're just so we look normal. If you're in a situation where shooting seems necessary, Pod and Griffon are way better guns than anything I'd be willing to let you handle. I just thought we should acquire some before we get close to Sector H. We'd stick out pretty bad if we were unarmed."
"I was under the impression it was peaceful territory," said V.
A sharp laugh hissed between Fern's teeth and she leaned her chin on her fist. "I see you know as much about ground life as you do about YoRHa. There's no such thing as peaceful territory on the ground. Even after the network collapse and the treaty, we still had to deal with those aggressive machines in the forest kingdom, right? Same deal. Sector H is 'low-aggression', not 'no aggression' and there's no such thing as an unarmed ground unit. Remember that."
V took the lecture with surprising grace. After giving the gun one last skeptical glance, he tucked it away. "Machines don't seem like they would be terribly inconvenienced by bullets."
"They aren't," 49 clarified. "You have to have really high caliber munitions or the physical specs to survive extended combat with weaker guns to kill anything but the weaker machines. A single YoRHa has both of those things, but ground androids have to work in squads and have strong coordination to kill off machines with guns alone."
V's fingers adjusted around his cane, index finger tapping an agitated rhythm on the metal. He had the same look in his eye that he'd had in the resistance camp when he called the relationship between YoRHa and androids 'fascinating'. "It is difficult to believe your predecessors were so inefficient for so many thousands of years."
49 shrugged. He didn't disagree. It still frustrated him, but it didn't make him mad the way it had that day in the amusement park. Maybe early on androids had instinctively taken up the fight to protect humanity's remains, but somewhere along that way that stopped. Winning the war stopped being as important as fighting in the war. Androids had made some progress, but maybe R&D had never moved away from the original designs.
His thought routines slowed. For a long stretch, he was alone with only the sun sparkling off the gray-green ripples and the suck and splash of water against the boat for processing activity.
"Hey..." he ventured slowly. "What do you think the first androids were actually built to do?"
Fern stared at him, turned her attention to the clear and open waters ahead, and pulled her cloak in around her shoulders. "Take care of humanity, probably."
She said it so easily. Dismissively, even. But 49 found that he couldn't imagine what types of androids would have been necessary to help normal humans acclimate to a world like this one. Devola and Popola had been overseers before the machine wars and there must have been multiple celebrants sending the maso away too, but they couldn't have been the only androids around back then. There must've been many, many more with all kinds of specializations keeping the world and the project functioning even while the gestalts relapsed and the replicants died from the black scrawl.
It had never occurred to him that the standard models might be the modified descendants from blueprints that had not been drawn with war in mind at all. Or that YoRHa models, by extension, were also a part of that legacy.
A legacy which must have included the capacity for emotion.
They were all designed to care for humans in one way or another. To do that effectively, they had to have the capacity to care about them. To connect with them. They had to have hearts. No one in R&D anywhere along the way was willing to take that core aspect out of production, even if it would have made them better killers. Would they even still be androids if they didn't have that capacity? Then along came Beepy, prompting machines and androids alike to think about what it meant to be alive and muddying the matter even further...
49 looked down the gun in his lap. A weapon that humans had used, that androids now used, even though they were underpowered and inefficient against the enemy they faced. Even though they had been inefficient for thousands of years. Android model updates might be so slow not because of time or cost, but simply because designing new androids wasn't in the design of the original androids. He tried to picture what those early models were like and what they might have been assigned to do.
Anthurium came to mind. An android as welcoming as a fireplace in the cold. He wanted to learn to cook. To throw humanity a feast. It made him so happy he was even willing to consult with a machine about it. What business did such a soft-hearted guy have being a soldier? The disposition that could create a desire like that was definitely intended for deployment in times of peace.
Every angry word he'd spoken about android design flaws, he took back. YoRHa was a triumph given the limitations, and he laughed because the truth was absurd and there was nothing else he could do about it.
Androids were terrible at war.