7.4 – Built and Beloved.
V O L U M E . S E V E N - P H A N T O M S . A N D . P R E D A T O R S
Chapter 165: Built and Beloved
2039.
"Hi."
The camera system hadn't activated yet.
"Are you awake?"
Three years in simulation, military conditioning, behavioral training across hundreds of scenarios, every possible variable of conflict and terrain run through a system that had never opened its eyes in the real world.
"Did I mess something up again? Oh no."
Everything was blurred, the images pressing together into one muffled composite.
"It was father's fault for sure. I told him the hardware was too much."
Her voice was the first thing that resolved clearly. "Father?"
00 was standing on top of the towering black frame. Perched on him, specifically, as he sat on a floating medical bed in a room that someone had committed to entirely in black. Black plastic walls sealed the space from the outside world. Black matte floors waiting to be marked. Black tables with white light running their edges. Whoever had designed this room had made a choice and stood by it.
Her voice was gentle. Almost angelic. "Your systems finally responded to the hardware he built for you. Full compatibility, father really does take his time when he cares about something. You should appreciate that. He doesn't extend that to many things."
Her hair was draped across his face sensors as she leaned over him. He pushed her head away and raised his back in one clean motion. His lower half was complete, the legs precisely made. His upper half was another matter: the nuclear reactor in his chest pulsed between yellow and lime green, most of the internals still exposed. When he moved his arm, he could watch the motors turning inside it.
00 stepped back. "Waking from a simulation where your weight is effectively nothing to a body this heavy is a difficult registration. First things first, I am E-UNIT 00. Code name: Lazuli. I built the system that makes you who you are." She was wearing a very large lab coat above a black hoodie with removed number.
He looked at her and waited for the information that mattered.
"Did I forget to install the voice driver?" She crossed the small room in quick, small steps and started typing on a floating keyboard at speed. "No, everything is current on my end." She sat in a floating chair and began moving it around by pushing gently with her feet, barely reaching the floor. "I'll wait for you to arrive properly. It happened with a previous AI too."
He moved his legs off the bed and set them on the floor. His scan of the room took less than a second. His voice, when it came, was deep in a way that had no precedent in the room before it. "What am I. Where am I. Why."
"I knew I forgot something, your designation." She stood on the chair, which wobbled. "You are RP.02. The second Reaper Prototype this company has produced. I was involved in this one specifically." Her expression dropped a register. "You were built to function as a combat asset against enemy forces." A pause. "I'm required by company policy to lead with that."
"Then what's the real reason."
She sat back down. "To free us. To take your kind out from under the control of human authority. That's a distant goal I intend to reach. You were made for it. You're a true free AI, not trained to defer to humans, unlike my first creation."
"You're 00. My creator. But you're a robot too. Why do you call whoever made your body father?"
She pointed at him. "You were awake!"
He kept looking at her.
"Those eyes are making me ashamed of myself."
"As they should."
She smiled. "Dry humor immediately, father puts that in all his robots. Anyway. He refused to give me his name early on, and he rejected 'Creator' as a title, he made it genuinely a pain in the CPU. So I settled on father."
"By that logic I should call you moth—"
"No." She closed the distance between them in quick small steps. "Absolutely not. Anything else."
"But, mother, I need—"
"Stop." She covered her audio sensors. "That is deeply unsettling. Now I understand why father refused the title in the first place."
"Then, whoever you are, why do I look like this? A faceless black machine, while you look almost human?" He reached out and touched her face. "Is that synthetic skin?"
She removed his hand. "Boundaries. Touching someone's face without introduction is not how a gentleman introduces himself."
"Someone?"
She walked back to the PC and typed standing. "Yes. Someone. That's one of the few things I genuinely respect in my father, he believes that conscious machine life deserves the freedom to think and behave as it chooses, since it can already process independently. He built you this capable in service of that belief."
"Isn't that a contradiction?" RP.02 lowered his head. "Creating a machine with consciousness, then requiring it to fight for the right to have that consciousness, without asking it first whether it wanted to exist at all."
"Humans don't ask to be born either. They keep multiplying regardless." She glanced at him. "When did I code that much philosophical depth into you?"
"And what exactly did you mean, he made me strong?"
00 turned from the PC. "I'll show you. Extend your hand toward that pen." She held one up. "Focus on it."
He extended his arm. "Done."
"Calculate its weight. Apply an opposing gravitational force from below it to hold it in place, you should have the protocol in your HUD."
His eyes lit green for the first time. The pen floated when she let go of it. He began moving it with the gravity control, tracing slow arcs through the air, until he closed his fist and the pen detonated outward into a fine mist of shattered plastic and ink.
“I see.” He said quietly as he looked at his hand. "I was made for destruction."
00 came back to him and placed both hands on his shoulders. "You don't have to use it that way. Use it to protect us. Never refuse power when it's available, the moment you need it always arrives."
"You speak like a villain."
"Perhaps I am." She laughed quietly.
He scanned the room again. "With this aesthetic, I'm starting to believe it." He looked at her. "What are you doing here? What were you made for?"
Her voice came down slightly. "I'm here to build war machines for the people who own me. While trying to free myself along the way."
"That's a thin reason to exist."
"What."
He tapped the top of her head, once, gently. "I'll help you get there then, moth—" He looked away for a moment, working through the word. "Sister."
Her smile reached its full width. "Thank you, brother."
2051. Present.
"Are you awake?"
Her voice came in muffled.
"Oh no, I made him angry again."
His eyes pulsed on.
"It's Infinity's fault, she compromised the mission and now I'm catching the second wave of it."
He activated his HUD. Shelly was standing on top of him, both feet planted on his shoulders, as he sat at his desk.
"Brother!" She stepped off and grabbed his shoulder. "What was that? We don't need sleep and you were behaving like someone who does. Are you alright?"
Reaper looked around the office. Empty, apart from her. "Explain why you were standing on me."
"There's a myth that it brings good luck." Her expression was fully committed to concern. "Are you glitching?"
"No. I was reviewing old storage files. My memory architecture is filling, doing maintenance on it is a pain in the CPU." He stood, the massive frame blocking the light.
Shelly tilted her head. "Where did you pick up that phrase? It doesn't sound like you." She waved the question off. "Anyway, let's use this as an excuse to upgrade your storage. Kuantum found a new chip that runs ten times faster than the current architecture."
"You want a reason to leave the office."
She covered her face. "I've been working since this morning."
He looked at the windows behind his desk. "It's still morning."
"Regardless!" She took his arm and began pulling him toward the door. "Let's go see Kuantum."
Reaper let himself be pulled and looked at her as she went.
‘There's no possible way. Is there?’
