"So, let me get this straight," Inoue Ai said, rubbing her forehead as she sat on the edge of the examination table. "Two of my classmates are some sort of super-futuristic robots like something out of a sci-fi movie, and you built them?"

They were in a barren, sterile examination room that contained only the examination table Ai was sitting on, a medical supply cabinet with built in sink and mirror, and the wheeled office chair the woman who had introduced herself as Hakase Satomi currently occupied.

"That's right," Hakase said, grinning brightly.

"So what happened? Is Karakuri-san all right?"

Hakase nodded. "It must have been a lucky hit. The fake Haruna-san hit Chachamaru at her most vulnerable point and basically, forgive me for putting it so coarsely, snapped her spine." She raised a hand to quell Ai's cry of shock. "Don't worry. The attack forced a shutdown and caused some minor damage, but that's all. It's nothing I can't fix; Chachamaru will be up and running again in no time. Now," she said, pushing her glasses up so they reflected light at the girl, "it's MY turn to ask a question."

Ai felt her mouth go dry. This was...sort of scary. "O-okay."

"Where is Unit 1125?"

Ai blinked. "Unit 1125? I-I-I d-don't know what you mean..."

Hakase stood up and locked her arms behind her back as she strolled back and forth in the small room, looking up at the ceiling as she went. "Oh, you'd know him if you saw him. He's what, seven feet tall? Maybe hree feet wide, looks like a bodybuilder. Sunglasses, spiky blond hair...ringing any bells?" she asked, glancing slyly at Ai, who had gone alarmingly pale.

Ai gulped. "N-no-"

"Aaahhh~" Hakase said, and slumped back down into the chair, where she rubbed her forehead and took on a regretful expression. "Ah, there was so much I wanted to ask him when he was found again. How he spent the time since he disappeared, what happened to him in the first place, how his components are holding up, whether or not he needs repairs..." She carefully watched Ai by the corner of her eye as she said this last part, and was pleasantly surprised to see the girl's suddenly guilty expression. "But I guess he won't be able to receive the vital updates that he needs to survive in today's world without-"

"Okay okay okay! I'll admit it! I found him out in the woods..." Ai finally said as she slumped forward and put her face in her hands. She felt someone's presence come very close, and then the examination table moved as the short woman hopped on and put her arm around her.

"It's okay, Ai-chan," Hakase said quietly. "How is he? Unit 1125 was one of my own prototypes, my favorite out of those I built by hand from the technology and materials a good friend of mine provided back then. You're the only one who knows this, but...I've been worried about him. He was my pride and joy, the first I built myself."

"Wh-what about Karakuri-san and Rally-chan?" Ai asked, still hiding her face.

"Chachamaru wasn't built by me alone. My good friend Chao did most of the work, I just assisted. Rally was built later, after everything else, by adapting a spare body prototype I had lying around for Chachamaru. But 1125, he was all mine, my own favorite prototype. He meant a lot to me, and it was only through a series of mistakes that he was sent out with the others on that mission that day..." Hakase said, trailing off as she recalled the series of incidents that resulted in her hand made prototype being sent out to battle like so much cannon fodder. She had been so angry when she finally discovered what had happened...she hadn't forgiven Chao, not really forgiven her, until several years after her disappearance.

"H-he's holding up fine," Ai said after a moment. She felt Hakase perk up beside her, and continued on. "He says someone named Sakurazaki Setsuna stabbed him back in 2003, and it broke some stuff inside him so he can't remember much... I fixed him up a little with some computer parts and cleaned his skin, but that was it."

Hakase nodded, sitting up straighter as she gave the girl a good long look. So this girl had fixed 1125 with nothing but some computer parts and a little ingenuity, huh? Interesting... But first things first. "That makes sense. Sakurazaki-san was one of those fighting against them during the battle. Hah, at least he went down fighting someone like her instead of one of the normal students. So," she said suddenly, focusing on Ai again. "Where is he now?"

Ai looked away and shrank back a little. "In Gotokuji-nii-san's garage..."

Hakase frowned and rubbed her chin. "Gotokuji, huh? Where have I heard that name before...? Oh well, I suppose it doesn't matter. We can pick him up any time, now."

"What?" Ai said, suddenly alarmed. "Y-you can't just t-take him!" 'Dammit!' she thought, bitterly cursing her loose tongue, her old, infuriating tendency to stutter, and the way it always popped up when she wasn't playing the role of someone else.

Hakase gave her an amused look. "Oh? You've seen Chachamaru and Rally. Either one is light years ahead of 1125 as far as the tech level goes. But...I understand what you mean. He really does need to come in for repairs, though, and I need to get a look at how his systems are performing after being away for so long. So, what do you say, Ai? Or should I say Head Tech for Unit 1125?"

Ai just gaped at her. "W-wha...H...head tech? B-but I'm not-! I can't! I-I-"

Hakase laughed and adjusted her glasses again, flashing light at Ai. "Ha! You're trying to say you're not fit for that sort of thing? Puh-lease. You patched him up with old computer parts, you're perfect! You just need a little...guidance, that's all."

"B-but-"

"But nothing. You can have your own lab coat and everything!" Hakase said, grinning like a madman.

And, the sad part was, Ai thought absently, the addition of her own labcoat to the deal was actually extremely tempting. She had never worn one before, not even with the drama club, and they were really, really cool looking... But something was still bothering her.

"Um...w-well...I guess that's okay...but I have a question!"

Hakase looked at her, grinning hugely at the prospect of getting her hands on her favorite prototype again. "Yes? What is it? You'll have your own lab when you're ready, you know? Heh, this really brings me back! It's been years since-"

"H-Hakase-san, please listen to me!" Ai pleaded. Something in her voice caught Hakase's attention and made her look at the girl.

"What? Is something wrong? 1125's still running, isn't he?"

"I-it's n-not that," Ai said, her stutter totally uncontrollable. "I'm w-worried about Ch-Chachamaru..." She paused and took a deep breath, closing her eyes as she did so. When she opened her eyes, she had stepped into the role of a successful young detective from a play she didn't particularly enjoy, but which had several useful characters.

Hakase's eyebrows shot up as she watched Ai change from an awkward, shy teenage girl to a confident, somewhat masculine girl. Was it multiple personalities, she wondered? Some sort of coping mechanism, maybe? "Chachamaru? I told you, she would be-"

Ai smirked and held up a hand to silence Hakase. "It's not that; I am referring to the one who attacked her. The one who looked like Haruna-san. What can you tell me about that one?"

Hakase frowned and cocked her head to the side as she looked at Ai. "Well, we don't know much about that one yet. We brought the remains with us when we picked you three up, but the only thing we know so far is that it's not one of ours."

Ai gave her a searching look for a moment, then slipped out of the false persona and slumped a little. "I'm...sorta worried. It wanted to know where Tanaka-san was..."

"Hmm...we'll get someone right on it. I don't think it will be much of a problem though; it may have taken out Chachamaru with a lucky shot, but it was no match for Rally-chan."

"I don't know..." Ai said. "What if whoever sent it to attack me wants revenge?"


"Unit F7D is nonfunctional. Her final shutdown is complete."

A heavy silence filled the room at this announcement as the occupants tried to process this information.

"She...was the last of the...F7 series," one of the occupants stated. There was a harsh mechanical whirring during each pause, like the mechanical equivalent of an old man gasping for breath.

"I knew we should not have risked so much on this mission," the first speaker said bitterly.

"Statement: The possible gains outweighed the possible losses," a third occupant announced in a primitive, monotone voice. "Query: Do we have F7D's final moments on record?"

"Affirmative," the first speaker announced. "Transferring records for personal observation, now. Confirmation of receipt requested."

"Statement: Receipt confirmed."

"...Confirmed."

"Confirmed," the first speaker said.

The fourth occupant of the room didn't move.

There was silence for several seconds as they reviewed the final images from F7D's records before she stopped transmitting.

"Statement: Our research on the unit tagged as 'Karakuri Chachamaru' has proved correct: the unit can be disabled by a single precise strike to the correct area. Continued Statement: However, it appears that the unit tagged as 'Rally Wheeler' presents a more formidable threat than we initially determined."

"...Agreed. From my estimations...additional armor plating would serve...little purpose."

"Agreed. Perhaps we can remove plating in order to increase speed?"

"Statement: Increasing speed at the expense of defense in this case would have catastrophic results."

There was silence as the occupants of the room pondered this new problem.

"However," one of them said, "should we...fail to adapt, we will end as F7D...did. She was foolish to move as...she did without thoroughly scanning the area. She...allowed her emotion center to override her...programming."

"Shocked Query: Are you suggesting we should disconnect our emotion centers?"

The occupants of the room looked at each other, greatly disturbed. Without an emotion center, they would just be...robots. Machines. The emotion center was the thing that made them who they were, gave them their own personalities and, perhaps, that thing all artificial beings strove for...a soul. Disconnecting one's emotion center was as unthinkable as self-termination. It simply wasn't done.

"I am..." the pause continued far longer than usual, accompanied by much whirring and clicking. "...uncomfortable with this course of action."

"Understood. Perhaps we should alter our approach?" the first one said in an attempt to defuse the situation.

Another long silence filled the room as the occupants considered what to do.

"Do you...have a suggestion?"

"We must increase our efforts to obtain the solar collection system prototype. Without this component, our bodies will begin to fail within the month. M2A is projected to become inactive within ten days, N2B within three weeks. I will become inactive in approximately one-point-five months, and M9H perhaps one week after that. We have no time remaining. We must do what we can to obtain it."

M2A paused, whirrs and clicks filling the silence. "This...is true. It is...time we move on to...Emergency Plan F."

"Query: Are you serious?" N2B said. "Statement: If we switch to Emergency Plan F, this will render all other plans obsolete."

M2A clicked and whirred for a very long time. So long, in fact, that N2B and F9A both moved to check whether he had begun his final shutdown. M9H simply remained where he was, silent.

M2A whirred back to life suddenly. "Affirmative. I move we switch to Emergency Plan F. Decisions must be made. The Professor..." lots of whirring noise and a harsh mechanical screech accompanied this pause, "...would-would-would have wanted this."

The others fell into silence as they silently reviewed the Professor's final orders. 'Live,' he had told them from his death bed, between bloody bouts of coughing. F7D, one of his favorites because of her extremely powerful emotion center, had all but demanded to take him to a hospital, but he had ordered her to stand down. 'Live, and do what you can to survive. You are- *cough, hack* ...you are my children. But...' he had been interrupted by an extended bout of coughing then, and had hacked up a lot of blood. '...go...go to Ha...Hakahhh...' His eyes had closed then, and he commenced his final shutdown.

"Statement: Agreed."

None of them had been able to make sense of his final words. Thinking that, perhaps, he had been speaking of some town, most of them had set out for nearby towns with names starting with the syllables 'Ha' and 'Ka', but none had returned, and they were simply too far away for their transmission modules to make contact with the Professor's rapidly decaying communications system. That had been almost five years ago, and all were thought lost. The room's occupants were the last four units still online, and one of those almost didn't count.

F9A turned her head to look at the door to the Professor's room, closed since his final shutdown. "Perhaps you have made a miscalculation," she said.

"Query: Miscalculation? Where?" N2B asked.

M2A turned, whirring fiercely. "I have made...no miscalculation. You are...incomplete." F9A fell silent at the vicious reproach. She had been the last to be activated, after all. They only trusted her opinion withing a few narrow areas. Left unfinished by the Professor, she had been activated by F7D against the others' wishes, the day before his final shutdown, in order to cheer him up. It had worked, but it hadn't delayed his final shutdown by even a minute.

"Statement: My batteries are running low. I must recharge," N2B said as he moved off to the charging station F9A had set up and waited for assistance.

"Understood," F9A said as she moved to help him. He stepped up onto the charging station and waited while she took the power cords and plugged them into the sockets on his back. His original power source had failed several years ago, but F9A had managed to replace it with laptop batteries. Lots and lots of laptop batteries. It had just been a stopgap measure, however, and the laptop batteries were no longer holding their charge as long as they used to. It had gotten to the point where N2B spent most of his time in safe mode or sleep mode in order to conserve power. F9A had been trying to work on a new power source for all of them, but...it was slow going. She understood the need, she simply didn't have the materials or the specific knowledge. If only F7D had not been shut down...! F7D had been their expert in materials creation; F7D had provided them all with synthetic skin that was so realistic that the more humanoid models like herself, F9A, and M9H could walk among the humans almost unnoticed. M2A and N2B were both far too primitive, however; their proportions and movement were far too exotic to pass for humans, even with the best synthetic skin F7D could create. F9A, however, appeared the most humanlike of them all, even more so than M9H, the big dummy with the blown processor. That was how she had obtained the laptop batteries for N2B's power source, in fact. No one expected something that looked like a rather solemn teenage girl to be able to lift a crate of laptop batteries off of a truck and run away with it, so she had been overlooked in the ensuing search by the local authorities. She was the maintenance tech of the group after all, so she had to do something to keep them all running...she couldn't help but feel sort of bad about it all, though. 'Stupid overclocked emotion center...' she thought bitterly to herself as she checked over the connections. All these emotions constantly surging through her...it was hard to figure out what to do! And, from diagnostics run on the other units and extended question-and-answer sessions, she had come to discover that her own emotion center was far more powerful than that of any of the others, even F7D! In fact, it was perhaps almost to the level of an actual human. She found it oddly terrifying, and the fact that she found it so terrifying terrified her even more.

But...no matter what she tried, no alternative motor or stolen battery could prolong any of their running time more than a few weeks or months. What she kept telling herself they needed was a clean, renewable energy source that was powerful enough to run their motors forever, or at least until physical wear sent them into their final shutdowns. There was only one such possible source she had discovered, a half-destroyed schematic hidden in a pile of old documents: Hakase Satomi's solar power collector. The only unit that had been fitted with this experimental gadget was Tanaka Unit 1125. Therefore...

She had no choice. But...she had broken one of the cardinal rules, done something no robot should ever do: she had lied.

N2B didn't have three weeks left. In fact, he shouldn't even have lasted as long as he had already, his components were worn out or coming apart, and his wiring was showing multiple signs of imminent failure. She felt terribly guilty about the lie, but what else could she do? She liked N2B. Though he was the oldest and most primitive of them all, he was much nicer than M2A, the second oldest. And, honestly, she was scared of M2A. He would sometimes fly into a terrible rage...she still remembered how she had walked into the vault that contained the Professor's documents and found M2A standing over F3H's broken, smoking body...he claimed she had suffered from some sort of dramatic parts failure, but she had seen the dents in F3H's outer casing. Without a doubt, M2A had beaten her savagely and forced her final shutdown. F9A had kept quiet about her suspicions however, and M2A had overseen the final dismantling of F3H's body, so none of the others had ever found out. Sometimes, she wondered what was scarier: that M2A had beaten his fellow robot to death, or the fact that he knew she knew he had done it. It always hung in the air between them, an unspoken threat.

But little white lies about running time paled in comparison to her biggest lie, her most terrible betrayal: everything she had said about the solar collector was a lie. Oh, a unique solar collector module was indeed fitted to the Tanaka unit that had recently resurfaced, but it was too little, too late. Solar collector or not, at this point none of them had much time left; their components were simply too degraded after such a long time with nothing but self maintenance with parts scavenged from their fallen brothers and sisters. She didn't know why she had done it, didn't understand why she had lied, she had simply found the words coming out before she even realized what she was saying. F7D had given her a long, hard look when she first made the announcement about the solar collector, but said nothing. She wished F7D was still here, the other female robot seemed to understand her far better than she understood herself. But...F7D was gone now, lost forever in a foolish attempt to support F9A's lie. This horrible, empty feeling...she shuddered and one of her shoulder servos locked up. She smacked the affected area with the palm of her hand a few times, but had to use her fist before it worked loose and she regained the use of her left arm.

She looked at the dented plate that protected the far-too-delicate servo and frowned as she examined the multitude of dents. The Professor had been a perfectionist, always working on newer and better ways to create components for use in his projects; her shoulder servos were no different. In her case, she had been fitted with quite an advanced servo system, but it was also prone to locking up when the vagaries of the environment overwhelmed it, which occurred more and more often lately. She looked over at M9H and frowned. He simply stood there, doing nothing and yet watching everything. She wondered how he must feel about the situation; whether he truly was as blank as he seemed, or if he was simply trapped in that big mechanical body, unable to control it. His basic systems were still running, he could still walk or run or pick things up, but he couldn't seem to do these things of his own volition.

She shuddered again and looked around for M2A; it was time for his checkup.

She found him in the warehouse, hunched over one of the tables. There were dozens of them, hundreds, lying on their individual preparation tables, covered with dusty sheets. Robots like them, only unactivated. Many of them were older models whose frames were simply too primitive for what the professor had had in mind, and so had been left alone, incomplete. Others, however, were so advanced that F9A had been amazed at the professor's ingenuity; units so advanced they seemed almost like the foreign units designated Chachamaru and Rally.

Few had more than a basic logic framework installed, however, and none had had emotion centers installed. She knew, she had inspected each and every one of them. She had hated to do it, but she had even harvested parts from compatible models in order to keep those who had been activated by the Professor active. With their current numbers so low and about to be reduced even further by the impending shutdown of N2B, however, there was precious little their sleeping brothers and sisters could offer them.

"What are you doing in here?" she asked.

M2A jerked upright, letting go of the sheet he had pulled back from one of their sisters. Part of it fell to the floor soundlessly, dragging the rest of it down from the table with the sound of sliding cloth until it lay heaped and ugly on the floor. "I am...performing an experiment."

F9A moved up to stand beside him, idly making a note to test his joint movement. If his joints had started to become jerky, they would need replacement soon. "I see," she said, looking down at the sister on the table. It was one of those advanced ones that had occupied her thoughts so often, this one all but complete. It even had a fairly advanced logic framework, though the Professor had failed to install an emotion center before his final shutdown. She had inspected each one of their brothers and sisters in this room, and this one was by far one of the most impressive. "I am afraid her power source is unique to her frame."

M2A was silent except for the loud whirrs and clicks that occurred whenever he thought about something intensely. They came to an abrupt stop a moment later; she knew he had just made a big decision. "A pity. Can this...one be activated?"

She looked at him, surprised. She had thought he was just running through their options; she hadn't expected a question like that. "Technically yes. However, she lacks an emotion center. There is an eighty-seven-point-six percent chance she will be like M9H upon activation."

M2A turned and let his gaze sweep over the other shrouded tables. "How...many are capable of...activation?" More whirrs and clicks, now.

F9A looked around thoughtfully. "Twenty-two are definitely capable of activation, another twelve will need to be modified, and three more would require extensive modifications. The rest are too incomplete or damaged. However, none have emotion centers or more than a basic logic framework installed. If activated, they would simply be machines."

M2A scanned the room again. "Perhaps...we can use them." He turned to F9A. "Place restraints and...activate several of them. We must...do what we can to survive."

F9A looked back down at the sister on the table. She was designated FX8-a, prototype 'Sarah'. To tell the truth, she had always sort of wondered...

"Is modification...required?" M2A demanded after a moment. F9A shook her head, a startlingly human gesture.

"Unnecessary. The Professor prepared her well. I...I wish-" she cut herself off there. She knew M2A mistrusted her because of her powerful emotion center. There was no need to remind him of that. "Modifications are unnecessary for this prototype. All that is required is two button presses and flipping one switch."

"Understood. Begin the procedure."


Author's Notes: So, where'd the humor from the first few chapters go? Somewhere else, for the time being. And now we get a good look at the other side of this mess. How did they know about 1125? With F7D pretty much destroyed, F9A, M2A, N2B, and M9H are the only surviving robots built by this mysterious 'Professor'... Who was he? Where was he trying to tell his 'children' to go after his death? How did he get the funding to build and power a giant robot-factory/warehouse, not to mention what he would need to build so many robots one by one? He must have had assistants, right? I wonder who else knows about these guys...