V O L U M E . S I X : C O D E_R E S E T

Epilogue: Going Down

Reaper and Shelly found Kuantum outside the Mega Automatisms Bay, standing alongside four colleagues. The bay doors behind them exceeded thirty meters in height, built to accommodate giant machinery moving in and out, hauling motors and structural components too large for anywhere else in the building.

"Lord Reaper." Kuantum bowed. His colleagues followed. "You came. It's an honor."

"Drop the formalities, Kuantum." Reaper laughed briefly. "You've been to my personal office more than once, and you brought us Esoptron. We know each other well enough."

"I heard about the yellow crystal situation." Something apologetic entered Kuantum's voice. "I'm embarrassed by his decision. We pushed his logic core past a comfortable deadline hoping to make him operational when you needed him. The simulation room would have caught it."

"Forget it." Reaper raised a hand. "The hardware you built is impressive enough that the software gap is already forgiven. What's your plan for correcting him?"

"We couldn't pull him from active service," Kuantum said, opening a screen to show a location marker, "so we sent him to Behemoth at the western borders. Hands-on training under a general, war, security, real decisions under pressure. And in the meantime, the orange crystal performed beyond what we projected. We found a way to exceed the limit Rivera placed on it."

Shelly tilted her head. "Father usually didn't build ceilings into his hardware."

"The G-Bots were the exception." Kuantum produced the red crystal from his coat pocket and turned it in his hand. "This one, for example, it doesn't just form weapons. With the right blueprint, it can build anything. The bottleneck is the processor running it. High heat, constant calculation. For now, we've kept that ceiling in place. But with Esoptron, the white metal supply was enough on its own, we were able to duplicate him without hitting the wall."

"Nothing duplicates endlessly," Reaper said, arms folded. "The bodies need processing power to function."

"Exactly right!" Kuantum's pixelated face lit up across its full display. "So we borrowed a procedure from another of Rivera's creations that's currently in operation."

Shelly's eyes went wide. "The E-Medic thought server."

Reaper tapped the top of her head. "What's that?"

Shelly straightened. "A central server that held every E-Medic in the network simultaneously, it was housed in the Hope Bubble. The original 02 was working toward applying the same architecture to the E-UNIT decades ago, to prevent permanent death back when the SSD was the only thing holding a robot's mind. The revival system made it redundant. But the thought server provides one thing regardless."

Kuantum and Shelly finished it at the same time. "Massive compute power."

Kuantum clapped in rapid, delighted bursts, his display running at full brightness. "Precisely. Esoptron's original body and the orange crystal are secured beneath one of our hospital-conversion revival centers. From there, we've distributed five thousand copies. He can function as a fully encrypted communication network, impossible to intercept, impossible to hack. He's everywhere at once."

He stepped aside, and a copy of Esoptron moved forward from behind him. "We can assign you copies for direct communication with Behemoth. Or for other purposes." He glanced at Shelly.

Reaper nodded once. "Two."

Shelly looked at him. "You're not even trying to disguise this. Two drones. On me. Constantly."

The first Esoptron copy turned toward her. "To prevent you from starting a war out of boredom, the way you once threatened to do."

The second added, "And to avoid another private diplomatic meeting with neighboring ministers committing Elysium to wars it wasn't consulted on. The way you did with your secret meeting with Kasparia’s and Veridian Coast’s ministers."

Shelly turned to face her brother in the slow, deliberate way of someone choosing their words carefully. "You're keeping those… both of them… near me. Indefinitely."

"Yes." Reaper said it with the tone of someone who had already considered the objections and dismissed them.

"Kuantum." He turned back to the scientist. "You mentioned the project we discussed several months ago. Completing it at this stage is exceptional work."

"The budget you provided made it possible, Lord Reaper." The face on Kuantum's display arranged itself into something genuinely warm.

Shelly's eyes narrowed. "I found a transfer log. Three billion Eta coins. Project Worm Wall."

"Let's let it speak for itself." Kuantum held his key card to the panel beside the bay's double doors. They hissed open.

The room inside was built on a different scale from anything in the rest of the facility, designed originally for Behemoth prototypes and large architectural assembly. White floor, white walls, orange tubing and perfectly routed orange cabling running in organized lines across every surface. Screens at intervals, complex lifting machines holding other machines in suspension, the ceiling a single continuous lamp eliminating shadow from the entire space. Scientists moved at their stations in every section.

The group crossed the bay, passing the work stations and the drawn boundary lines on the floor, until they reached a perfect circular hole at the center of the room. Its edges were enclosed by orange railing with modern glass paneling. Black text on the glass read: Do not lean in.

Kuantum began speaking as the floor started to tremble.

"This is our most recent creation. A fully conscious weapon, one that respects what Elysium stands for and what it's built on. Something that could live freely among us if given a different form." The trembling intensified, working up through the floor and into the walls. "We believe life should exist in more than one shape. Since we consider robots to be life, we think that principle should extend to—"

The worm came up from the tunnel in one continuous motion and the sound of its motors swallowed the rest of the sentence.

It was enormous. Constructed from multiple wide cylindrical sections, each one rotating independently at its own speed and direction, a machine built to look like something that had always existed beneath the earth and had simply been waiting to be found. Sharp iron teeth lined the interior of the mouth, rotating without pause. Between each cylinder ran a thin seam of deep yellow light. The frontmost section, the mouth, wore a white ring of light around its circumference like a collar.

The rotation stopped.

The worm bent forward, toward Kuantum and Reaper, and held.

Kuantum reached up and patted it. "140 cylinders Mecha-Fossorial . 58 meters long, 8 meters wide. We call her Fossati."

Reaper clapped twice. "This is why I make a point of visiting Metro Robotics. Three billion Eta coins well spent."

"Lord Reaper." Kuantum's tone shifted into something quietly satisfied. "You're quite happy about just one."

Reaper and Shelly turned to him at the same moment.

Kuantum produced a short, high whistle.

The floor shook, properly this time, the kind of trembling that moves through the body and makes the room feel smaller. Shelly caught her brother's arm without deciding to.

Three more worms rose beside Fossati. Same form, same dimensions, same rotating cylinders, but without the white ring at the mouth. One of them bent low, and Kuantum stepped onto the surface as it raised him to a comfortable speaking height.

"The borders are protected going forward, Lord Reaper." He looked down at them from the worm's back, calm and precise. "And we made one additional modification to justify the full investment. They can sense crystal output and track it, even when operating a hundred meters underground."

He looked at Shelly.

His pixel display formed something that was almost a smirk.

At that exact moment, the three unmarked worms snapped their massive heads toward Shelly. Their internal cylinders began rotating faster, the metal grinding as their sensors locked onto the highest energy source in the room, the green crystal.

Shelly's expression went still. ‘ Why is he looking at me like that. Does he know what I actually am?’

Reaper placed his hand against Fossati's side. She produced a low, resonant sound at the contact, something between a hum and a recognition.

He looked up.

"What do you do," he said, "with an enemy who can move on the negative axis, Captain?"