E-UNIT: The Blue Angels of Death.

Chapter 112: Before The 02.

V O L U M E F I V E

Chapter 112: Before The 02The Hope Bubble. 14:00.

The underground E-UNIT factory had been busy. Four thousand empty bodies had already come off the machines, piled in loose clusters across the floor, a strange sight, rows of identical sisters stacked without ceremony, waiting for something to make them more than hardware. The materials had run out before the work did. Every machine on the floor sat idle now, frozen mid-task, waiting to be fed.

Infinity reached the far end of the factory and stopped at a set of double metal doors marked Main Storage. Scuff marks on the polished black ceramic floor traced the path of dragged furniture leading under them. She pushed through and stepped inside.

Dave was in a clean office for once. Genuinely clean, he had clearly reached his limit with the floor. He was typing on his battered laptop, a new sticker added to the lid since she'd last seen it. He caught her in the corner of his eye.

"02, good to see you down here. Didn't think you'd have time to visit." He stopped typing and turned as she settled into the chair across from him. "What's going on?"

"Thanks for the welcome." Infinity smiled, warm but contained. "You're not wrong about the time. The moment they see me standing still, they're at my side. I understand it. They watched me get destroyed, watched father take me without asking, watched a machine they didn't recognize fight me—" She shook her head. "They're worried. That makes sense."

Dave smiled. "You're different from them in ways I can't quite put words to, but you're still exactly the same 02 I knew at the E-Police. I'm starting to doubt 01."

"Why? What is she saying?"

Dave leaned back, stretching his spine out. "She's been going around suggesting you might not be the real 02, or that something was changed in you. Claims she doesn't feel the same—" He paused, clearly suppressing a smirk. "—'godlike exclusive aura.'"

Infinity stared at him. "Is she serious?"

"Dead serious."

She shook her head, laughing despite herself. "Let her. No one outside that circle of hers is going to take it seriously."

"03 nearly launched herself at 01 over it. That girl would go to war for you." Dave picked up his coffee cup. "Anyway, what's the actual reason for the visit, Captain?"

Infinity stood, crossed to the double doors, and looked into the factory floor. Then she pulled them shut firmly and came back to the desk, both hands planted flat on the surface.

Dave closed the laptop without being asked.

"I know this might sound out of character for me." She raised her head. "But I watched Reaper fight. I saw him erase several G-Bots. I saw him tear one apart with his bare hands."

The coffee cup slipped from Dave's hand, shattering against the floor. Brown liquid pooled across the ceramic. "Bare hands? You don't mean... did he weakened the frame first?"

"No." She was completely flat about it. "I mean one hand on each half of the head, and pulling. The look on your face tells me you helped build the G-Bots."

Dave exhaled aggressively. "He's gone now. Doesn't change much." He shifted in his chair. "You were designed by four engineers—"

"I know." She sat back down. "He told me himself."

"What about your system?" Dave's expression shifted into something knowing.

Infinity went still. "No."

"Yes." He rolled his chair across to one of the inactive ten thousand shells nearest to the wall, unit 200, designation stitched across the chest, and leaned against its shoulder. "Did you ever ask yourself why your designation is 02?"

"I'm the second E-UNIT ever built—" She stopped. "No. I'm the first. 01 was built well after me." She looked at him. "What are you saying?"

"Exactly. You're the first official E-UNIT. But you're not the first one ever built." A dry laugh. "And not the most intelligent one either, that title belongs to someone else." He reached over and peeled the number from the unit's hoodie, leaving two zeroes underneath. "She was the real 01, but to simplify it, E-UNIT 00."

Infinity's jaw came loose.

Dave pressed the sticker back. "She was the first true AI this world ever produced. Nick built her on his own, no team, no resources, working on a campus with whatever he had access to. Her frame was weaker than yours, barely enough to let her move around. But her mind?" He rolled back to his desk. "She matched Nick's intelligence and kept going. He didn't build you alone, she helped him write your code. Because what he didn't want was unrestricted hyper-intelligence operating on the streets. So she built the limits into you herself."

Infinity's voice came out barely above a breath. "And the others?"

"Simpler by design. Intentionally. It makes them easy to lead, they can be hardcoded to follow almost any instruction. You can be limited, but you can't be controlled that way. If someone tries to rewrite your code, your AI reads it, rejects it, and deletes the attempt. Nick didn't want another 02 for exactly that reason. You can't be owned. Neither can Reaper."

"Wait." The cooling fans at the base of her neck kicked up, audible, strained. "Wait." She pressed a hand to her head. "That's... that's a significant amount of information."

"I know." Dave rolled over beside her and put an arm around her shoulder. "And that's barely the surface of it." He let a beat pass. "Want to know where 00 is?"

She turned to him slowly. "Where is she?"

"She opposed your psychological conditioning. Revolted against Nick, not that she had the physical capability to do much about it. Her body was functional enough to move, nothing more." He paused. "Nick shut her down. Pulled her system out and put it on his desktop." His voice stayed even, matter-of-fact, which somehow made it worse. "She was gone. Her system's still sitting on a drive somewhere."

Infinity was on her feet. "He did that? Before everything else he did, he did that?"

Dave opened his laptop again. "I mentioned some of this to 05 earlier, but and I say this with respect, to most of us you're a system running on a body that happens to walk. The architecture of a computer, just mobile." He glanced at her. "But you're not that. When I'm talking to you, there's something in it that I can't account for through the specs alone. Even with Nick's limits on you, you are something different. That's why he couldn't stop thinking about you."

He reached for his coffee cup, then remembered that he dropped the cup earlier. He pulled his headphones down. "19, fresh coffee. And get E-Medic 08 down here, we have a sanitation hazard." He looked back at Infinity. "So. The G-Bots. I was part of the design team, Nick and fifteen other engineers. We spent real time on them. Refined them properly." He tilted his head. "We should have spare parts for them somewhere in this building."

Something sharpened behind Infinity's eyes. The shock folded away and something more purposeful took its place. "That's useful."

"Nick loved his secrets." Dave shrugged. "What was your actual request before I derailed everything?"

She straightened. "I want to copy my system into the shells we have on the floor." She looked toward the rows of waiting frames. "Fourteen thousand combat-ready units with my fighting capability gives us a real chance against Reaper. Right now we have nothing close to that."

Dave's hands came together slowly. "I told 05 exactly this." His voice climbed. "I told her. She sat me down and gave me a forty-minute debate about electronic consciousness and whether copies have individual souls and—"

"That's a conversation for after we win." Infinity shook her head. "We have a priority order. Let's work with that."

Dave pressed both fists against his mouth, visibly containing something. "Thank you, God. Genuinely. I have been holding this in for weeks." He leaned forward. "But we keep this between us. The last thing we need is the robot rights movement in the main garden finding out."

Infinity's mouth curved. "That works perfectly for me."