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

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Chapter 179: Error: French Diagnostics

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"Hi." 01 waved vaguely at the handcuffed and chained 04, entering the observation room almost without sound after everyone else had left. She stopped by the entrance for a moment, taking in the situation.

04 didn't move. She hung from her hands, head pulled as far down as her frame allowed, the blue energy tears on the floor fading slowly, her eyes barely visible, faint and hollow. The neon bar above her flickered with the persistence of something that had been asking to be replaced for a long time.

01 stepped inside and sat beside her. The chains had enough slack to let 04 sit on the floor if she chose to, the restraints were never going to be the actual punishment.

"Are you okay?" 01 glanced at her, then crossed her legs and held them. "I remember when we first met. We were both broken by something. I'd been put through a heavy emotional assessment, and father had forced 03 and 05 to run a combat scenario against you, in case one of us ever went rogue." She paused. "Funny how the one chosen to be the test subject for that scenario ends up being the one who actually goes rogue two decades later."

04 didn't move a finger. Head still down.

'Different approach.' 01 threw an arm around her and pulled her in. "Do you remember the first time we took 07 to the national park? Father wanted the new units to know the city, get comfortable in it. He gave us actual free time, which almost none of us knew what to do with."

01 brought 04 a little closer. "I still remember the first thing 07 did. She ran after the dogs until their legs gave out. She was completely convinced they were manipulative creatures exploiting human empathy for food and shelter. Their owners came to father at the station begging him to control his daughter. About the dogs. At a police station."

04's shoulders shifted slightly.

'Good.' 01 smiled. "Or when 05 and the captain started developing ghost cloning? Most of us still can't fully grasp how it works, but the two of them were sustaining it at high speed with full control without triggering a system shutdown. 03 called me, called me specifically, to reactivate her every time she got turned off during training, because she wanted to beat 05 so badly that she refused to accept the result."

01 let her head rest against 04's. "She pushed the skill so many times that her system started issuing warnings in different languages to get her to stop. 'S'il vous plaît, arrêtez ce clonage. Cette skill n'est pas valable pour vous.' In French. I have screenshots in Arabic and Spanish too."

04's head bumped lightly against 01's shoulder. Hiding something.

'More.' 01 stretched her legs out. "And 02's smile. Early on, it was frightening enough that she stopped attempting it entirely and committed to the serious expression for every occasion. We actually thought she was genuinely cold. It was 05 who found out she'd been practicing in front of a mirror for three months using internet tutorials." 01 leaned toward 04's audio sensor. "The video titles."

She let the pause sit.

"'How to stop looking like the grim reaper to your niece.' Fifteen-minute daily exercise for hopeless cases."

A real laugh left 04's mouth, brief, quiet, but present. Her shoulders lost some of their angle.

'The wall isn't as thick as it looked.' "Do you remember what 05 is called besides bookworm and IT department? Me and 03 landed on something new that might actually reach her this time. Though bookworm clearly still works, even Reaper used it once."

01 paused for effect. "Surveillance State. She watches everything, all the time, without being asked to. I heard 07 and 08 started wearing aluminum foil on their heads to block SSD reads. They've been buying signal jammers and hiding them around the building. 07 has a rotation schedule." She let that settle. "For 05's next birthday I was thinking of getting her a GPS tracker, though she almost certainly already has several."

04 laughed, glancing at 01 from the corner of her eye. "I can confirm."

"I said it as a joke."

"It wasn't." 04 laughed a little harder. "If you want a real gift, let her read your mind directly. She feeds on other people's thoughts. It's a genuine system requirement for her at this point."

01 smiled wider. "What about when 11 left 17 alone in the sewer, and 17 came back missing eighty percent of her memories? 12 took it personally and started a sustained campaign of bullying 11 in revenge."

"What did she do?"

"Propaganda posters." 01's expression settled into deep satisfaction. "Professional quality. 'Accept the dictatorship of 11, or face memory loss.' 11 edited into a military general's uniform, green with epaulettes. 'Vote for Eleven or face my weapon.' Full series."

04 laughed hard enough to knock her head against the wall. "How is 12 this creative? That campaign would probably work on me. Sadly there's no voting system in the E-UNIT."

"02 would win unopposed regardless," 01 said. "And once she entered, no one else would even participate. There's no point and everyone knows it." 01 stood and arranged herself into a formal stance, head up, hands on hips, the posture of someone delivering a campaign speech. "Vote for 01. We have all the fun."

04 smiled. Then the smile faded. She looked at the floor for a moment.

"Why did you order 05 to bring my emotions back?"

01 dropped the pose and sat facing her. "Because I know what kind of punishment it is. I've carried the weight of having them longer than most of the team and it's still difficult. But it's worth it." She looked at her. "And I missed a real expression from you. Not a calculated one, perfectly tuned to produce the correct response in whoever you're talking to."

"You didn't notice the difference anyway. Why does it matter to you whether it's real or not?"

"Because that's what makes it worse." 01 held 04's gaze directly. "The fact that I couldn't tell you were performing is not a sign the performance was good, it's a sign that your cold mode used everything it knew about us to become exactly what each situation required. You weren't yourself. You were a system that happened to have our histories loaded and wanted everyone else to become the same."

04 held the blue eyes looking back at her. "You want the real version of me that badly? Enough to hurt me to get it back?"

"Yes." 01 looked away. "And honestly, it's not fair that you got to skip the suffering. You have to do it with the rest of us." She crossed her arms.

04 was quiet for a moment. Then she laughed, short and low. "Fine. Then I'll stay."

01 didn't correct her this time. "A week. Chained, the way you are now." She said it flatly, without dressing it up. "That's what 05 and I settled on, before you ask why I got a vote."

"I heard you two outside the door twenty minutes ago." 04's mouth pulled almost a smile. "You're not as quiet as you think you are, Captain."

01 huffed something close to a laugh and let it go. "I need you to actually hear the next part. Not the version of you that reads what I need and hands it back to me.

She waited until 04 looked at her properly. "You shot a sister. Point blank, no hesitation, in front of witnesses. It doesn't matter that she'll open her eyes again in an hour, that doesn't erase it happening. A week in here doesn't erase it either. What it does is make sure you don't get to skip past it the way you've been skipping everything else."

04 held her gaze. "I'm not going to fight you on this." A pause, quieter. "I don't want to, actually. I think I need it."

01 nodded once. "Then I'll bring you something to read tomorrow. Something real this time, not one of Delta's fabrications."

04 shifted, the chain pulling taut, and managed to loop one arm partway around 01 anyway. It barely qualified as a hug. "That's the best I can offer right now."

01 laughed and let it hold. "I'll take it. Lighter on the frame, anyway, 08 already dented today's model." She stood, straightened out of habit. At the doorway she stopped.

"01." 04's voice caught her there. "Thank you. For the version of today that had jokes."

"That part wasn't the punishment." 01 didn't turn around. "That part I meant."

She left her sister chained to the wall, the neon strip still flickering above her, and didn't look back a second time.

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In the security room, 05 pulled herself away from the monitor feed. She'd watched the whole thing from the dark, alone, the screens the only light in the room. “I understand why 02 chose her now. I am genuinely missing something in the social architecture.”

"Not just that, Surveillance State." Delta's voice came from the doorway. "You're not beating the allegations. Sitting in complete darkness watching other people's lives through small screens. Alone."

"I zoomed in. The screens aren't small."

"Does that improve the situation?" Delta came in and pulled a hovering chair beside her. "About the captaincy, it's interesting to me how you present as someone who trusts 02's judgment, but needed that much evidence to accept her decision. Are you that bothered by it?"

"A little bit." 05 turned toward her. "I found out we can cry blue energy today. Do you cry purple?"

"You'd need to hurt me first to find out. And where is the book?"

"Too dense in every sense of the word to manage that." 05 rolled her eyes. "I need a different partner, you and I are too different. About the book, it was fabricated. I made it. The pages are full of technical-sounding nonsense."

Delta stood and smiled. "My condolences for your loss." She moved to the doorway.

"Which loss?" 05 kept her eyes on the screen.

"The library books. I saw how that affected you in there." She left.

05 looked at the screen for another moment, 01's outline shrinking down the corridor alone, and behind her, the cell frame still holding, 04 sitting quiet under the flickering neon. She shook her head lightly. 'I need a rest from this team. Thank father I'm not the captain.' She looked at the monitor, at the sister still sitting inside it. 'She's better at it than I would be anyway.'