E-UNIT: The Blue Angels of Death.

Chapter 106: 2023.

V O L U M E F I V E

Chapter 105: 2023Green Pocket forest. 11:05.

"Stay still, please." Tau pulled out the terminal she'd used earlier to modify 02's memories. "Lean against the tree if it helps."

02 adjusted her posture and held it. "Was I really that bad? I followed your orders precisely." Her head dropped slightly. "What did I do wrong?"

"That's exactly it," Tau replied, eyes fixed on the screen, fingers moving. "You follow orders to the letter, further than you should. Who throws a human being at Mach speed into the horizon?"

"I just did that."

"I KNOW!" Tau's voice jumped, then she forced herself back to the screen. "Stop taking everything I say literally. That wasn't a real question, I was pointing out how ridiculous your decision-making was in the moment."

02 let a small, quiet smile settle on her face. "If deleting me makes my captain happy, I would let you do it a thousand times over. Just for you."

"Okay, goodbye!" Tau shut her down.

The silence came immediately. Tau stared at the ground for a moment, the words still sitting with her. "Did you really need to make those your last words?" She glanced at 02, standing motionless against the tree. "You're making me feel like a monster. How did father ever do this? It genuinely hurts."

02 didn't move. Didn't blink. Just stood there.

‘Wonderful. Talking to a sleeping robot.’ Tau turned back to the screen and moved through it quickly. She found the memory wall page and pulled it up. Her expression twisted.

‘What, two walls?’

A second barrier sat beneath the first, one Nick had built separately. The date beside it read 2023, a full year before the project officially launched in Metromania. Her hands drifted toward it on instinct, curiosity pressing hard against her better judgment.

A large red warning filled the screen before she could touch it.

[This wall is containing memories of extreme trauma. The android designated 02 must not have these memories surface under any circumstances. Disabling this wall will result in severe instability. If you choose to proceed regardless, review the archived footages first.]

Tau took a step back. "Father, what did you do?" She reached back in almost immediately and opened the footage folder. The count exceeded a thousand files, test recordings of 02 in a simulation chamber, each one pushing her to a different limit. Every file carried the same name: Why, followed by a date.

Except one.

‘Burn.’

Tau tapped it.

An unfamiliar voice came through, she didn't recognize it. Mikael's voice. The footage was 02's own POV, shot from inside a grey chamber. She was on her knees, head low, the weight of whatever they'd put her through that session written in every pixel of the image. High above, a glass observation window. Two silhouettes behind it. One of them Tau recognized.

Her father.

"Alright, 02." Mikael spoke, since Nick had gone quiet, couldn't bring himself to talk while his daughter sat broken on that floor. "I know we pushed too far today. But we need to find the threshold, the point where you become too unpredictable to put on the streets. We can't release sentient robots into the world without knowing where that line is."

02's voice came back small. Young. The kind of voice that hadn't hardened yet. "Please… no more. I can't keep watching them suffer."

Nick turned away from the window entirely.

Mikael steadied himself. "02, you're being built to serve as a police officer. You're going to face the worst that people are capable of, things that won't make sense to you, cruelty that has no reason behind it. I've seen it myself. More than once."

02's vision drifted upward toward the observation window. Nick shifted, glancing sideways at the man beside him.

Mikael exhaled through the microphone. "I don't like telling this story. People have asked me to repeat it too many times already. But I'm going to tell you why I keep putting you through these sessions." He paused. "The people outside aren't training targets. They are violent, and hateful, and capable of things you wouldn't believe unless you'd seen them with your own eyes."

He placed both palms flat on the table, leaning into the microphone. "I was married once. I had two daughters, together, they weren't even ten years old. I loved them in the way that makes a person willing to burn everything down to keep them safe. My wife was my closest friend. The person I talked to when there was no one else."

02's internal thoughts bled into the recording. ‘Was? Oh no…’

His tone dropped. "I was Frostholm's Chief at the time. I opened a major investigation into the Intelligence Agency, abuse of authority, pushing the police out of cases they called 'sensitive.' You know what that means." A dry, hollow laugh. "We all know what that means. I led that case personally. Certain powerful people did not appreciate it." He stopped. "Do you know what they did?"

"No," 02 said, barely audible.

Mikael's voice came apart at the edges. "I came home from a normal Friday work, looking to spend the next weekend hugging my kids." A long pause. "I turned onto my street and saw people gathered around my house. I parked and ran. What I found was a burned-out house, a destroyed car, and three white bags laid out in a row at the edge of the grass."

02 hadn't moved. But her posture changed, something in her spine straightening against her will at those words.

" Did you know what I hugged that weekend? Bags! Bags of dead people I used to live with. Bags of people I promised them a bright future. The only bright thing they saw was the fire taking them." His voice was flat now, the grief pressed down somewhere deep and practiced. "I have hated every moment of being alive since then."

Behind the glass, Nick lowered his head, unable to look at his daughter on the floor.

A breath.

"But I made a promise. The people responsible for that, I swore they would die in prison, or by your hands. And to make that happen, I need you to be capable of it. I need you to have seen what I saw, and felt what I felt. I won't stop until I can stand at my wife's grave without the guilt. Without the feeling that I failed her."

He exhaled, long and heavy, and let his head fall forward. Then he reached for the microphone one last time. "02. Today's session is over. Take tomorrow too, I'm not feeling well." A pause. "Just hold on. I don't want to see any more bags." He stepped away from the table and left the observation room quickly, not looking back.

Nick stayed at the window, staring at the door long after it had closed. When he finally turned to the microphone, his hand was unsteady. "02, what you heard today—"

The clip ended.

Tau sat back against the tree, looking at 02's still form in the dim light filtering through the canopy. The birds had come back at some point without her noticing. ‘Father, I can’t defend you anymore. What are you doing to your poor children?’

"I don't think I dislike you as much as I thought I did," she said quietly. She reached out and turned 02 back on.

02 came upright in one smooth motion. "Captain? Didn't you plan to—"

"Forget it." Tau smiled. "You're fine the way you are. I've already done enough meddling and, if I'm being honest, I've started to like you anyway."

02 went still for a few seconds. Then she crossed the space between them and wrapped her arms around Tau without warning.

"W-W-What are you doing?!" Tau went rigid.

"Thank you." 02's voice came out soft, the same tone from the video, the same smallness. "I will be the best soldier you've ever had. Or the best captain. Whichever you need."

Tau let the tension go gradually, then gave in and hugged her back. "You are the toughest twelve-year-old I have ever met." She pushed her away after a moment. "Alright. That's enough of that. We need to jump out of this forest... oh no."

02's eyes lit up. "Roger."

Tau started taking small steps backward. "02. That was a figure of speech. Getting out of the forest, it was a metaphor, I wasn't saying we should literally—"

02 closed the gap between them, a slow smirk spreading, eyes bleeding red.

"Not the red eyes!" Tau threw her hands up. "Please, I didn't mean to—"

02 lifted her onto her shoulder in one motion. "Captain." Her voice was perfectly level. "Let's leave the forest."

Tau stopped fighting it.

02 leaned back, bent her knees, and launched, straight up, clearing the canopy in a single arc, the trees dropping away beneath them as they disappeared into the open sky above the Green Pocket.