They were going to get new bodies, reorganized into new units, new squadrons, depending on their new roles and capabilities.

From the depths of a shipping container, a pair of eyes blinked open. Unit 19:a2:00, “Zero,” stepped off from the corrugated steel interior and onto asphalt, into the smoky sunlight. Cargo trucks passed in front of her, just inches away from her nose. Each one carried modular containers just like the one she’d exited. Further beyond were the same types of trucks under gantry cranes taking their cargo up, setting them down. The truck left, the crane wheeled itself to a different truck, and the doors of the container it had set down pivoted open. New soldiers in black pants, and some in frilly, gothic dresses, like herself, stepped off.

[Unit 19:a2, incoming mission parameters. Arm yourselves at the armory and proceed to Pad 109.]

That wasn’t the first time she’d heard that operator’s voice, but this was the first time she’d felt so aware of it. This “self-aware” tech...she didn’t know what to think of it. She wouldn’t even feel this conflicted if they’d never been “upgraded” at all!

She made her way to the armory, following the road a short distance, finding a special modular container that was little more than a vending machine for guns. Her previous combat experience indicated a higher combat success rate with rifle-like weapons, so that’s what she went with. Her preferences went through the wire, and a port opened, two arms offering the weapon of her choice.

She nabbed it, and upon turning around, found a small line had already formed behind her. She recognized them as her team members, units 10, 20, and 30. Their combat dress was...varied, to say the least. That was one thing she didn’t understand: why were they all dressed so impractically? By virtue of being grunts, she didn’t question it seriously, but it was just another thing that she couldn’t help but take notice of every now and then.

The truth was, on top of negotiating for human Ame’s eventual release, Mane-chan had attached such a strange condition as “they need to look cute or cool—choose!” Even if impractical and inefficient on materials, the added cost in both fashion design compute-time and plastics were negigible, so Yukai folded.

Unit 10 wore cargo pants and a vest, Unit 20, hot pants under a cloak, and Unit 30, a spit riding skirt over pants. Rather, why was she the only one wearing a frilly dress?

Soon, they were all loaded up and carrying hundreds of pounds of gear on their backs as canisters that clipped straight onto them. They weren’t the only ones marching: hundreds of other units walked to their assigned positions across the tarmac, stopping before one of the hundreds of landing pads marked by a circle of yellow paint. They stopped before their own, numbered “109.”

Helicopters streamed in, touching down and picking up teams. Already, the impracticality of their clothes was getting to them. Her dress, Unit 20’s cloak, and Unit 30’s skirt all began to wildly flutter with the downwash of the incoming heli, touching down 30 meters away from them.

They all got on through the sliding door … but the heli didn’t take off.

[Objective Updated: Await baby.]

[Objective Updated: Interact with squad members.]

All the members of Unit 19:a2 glanced to each other. “Interact with squad members”? What did that mean? What’s a “baby”?

[Objective Updated: Allow Unit 19:a2:00 to report recent experiences with self-awareness updates. (OPTIONAL)]

The other Units looked to her with flat looks. They each had human faces, but no knowledge of facial expressions. Nevertheless, Unit 00 was acutely aware that the burden of accomplishing this objective fell squarely on her shoulders, regardless of whether it was an optional objective.

“…Strange,” was all she said, via direct RF between them.

“Positive,” 10 said.
“Yes,” 20 said.
“Indeed,” 30 said.

They all stopped at that. Why did they each have different responses?

Before anything more happened, they were alerted to a completed objective.

[Objective Complete: Await baby.]

The helicopter’s engines wirred louder. Unit 00 turned from her squadmates to look out the door. Approaching them from the edge of the helipad...was a human. The imperfect gait, the way he slightly bent his knees as if he was under any threat at all of being cut down by the helicopter’s rotors, all pointed towards “human.”

At this point, humans were like a mythical creature for most AI. They were beings they were meant to protect, and yet, the only place where humans were ever found, until now, were the Creativity Silos in the midst of factory cities, asleep, protected to the point of being able to survive a direct tactical nuclear strike.

Yet, there was one right there, coming closer. Something in Unit 00—in all of them—shouted at them, as if breaking through a hundred backdoors just to tell them: protect.

The wash of the helicopter’s rotor blades flitted the folds and creases of the human’s battle dress. His face was obscured under the tint of the fully-sealed environmental mask. Without it, he would quietly asphyxiate from the monoxide by-products of the advance of Dai-sensei’s forces.

Hassan walked up to the door. He clicked something on his helmet, and the squad heard the familiar ping of the beginning of a direct RF message. “Unit 19:a2?” he asked.

“Affirmative,” Unit 00 replied. Hassan glanced at each of the androids before climbing on. He was used to cramped helicopter seats, but this one went a step further. The androids around him were small—much smaller than him. Even if this helicopter had been specially manufactured to accommodate humans, a few biases might have sneaked into the design process—like the fact that whatever engineering data that Yukai possessed about human military aircraft was chiefly from Japanese sources.

Well, whatever the reason might have been, he was here, now, in the presence of combat androids in...frilly dresses and stylish apparel, apparently. It was sort of creepy, but he didn’t think anything more of it. Knowing Mane-chan, she might have been the root cause to all this weirdness, and he was content with this reasoning. He was, in the end, just surrounded by automatic killing machines without their own mind.

The engines wirred even louder, and the helicopter began to shake. The shaking stopped, and the ground slowly left them.

Unit 00 hadn’t forgotten that strange pecularity just a while ago: her squadmates had all replied essentially the same thing, but in different ways. Were there intentional defects introduced into their updates? Wait, she was asking a question—how was she curious? Wait, how did she catch herself being curious?

“Disposition check,” Unit 00 ordered. “Answer the following: what is your report on the recent self-awareness updates?”

Hassan did a double take at that. The direct RF had also reached him, and his translator—it must have been broken. Yeah, that’s it.

“Different,” 10 said.
“Weird,” 20 said.
“Quaint,” 30 said.

They all paused at this. What else was different between them?

“What is the color of the sky?” Unit 00 asked.

“Yellow,” 10 said.
“Sky,” 20 said.
“Gray,” 30 said.

Hassan blinked faster by the second. What the fuck’s going on here? It was like the things were playing some sort of language game.

There were more than 200 miles between Tokyo and Osaka. It was going to be a long ride.

Their flight of helicopters, hundreds of them, in sizes great and small, in configurations single, dual, and tiltrotor, left the Hachioji Airbase and soared over entire hectares of industrial zones. They shimmered in blue below him, paved with solar PV tiles. Conveyor belts and pipes ferried untold tonnages of bulk materials between structures, no doubt to produce weapons of war. He eyed the combat mechs hanging by cables from the heavy lifters in the center of the formation, regarding them with awe and fear in equal measure.

He didn’t expect the sight below to change so abruptly. There was a huge wall, so many stories high, drawing a thick, gray line between where the industrial parks ended, and where the greenery began. He’d been to Japan a few times as a kid, and he was sure, these were rice fields. There were other crops, too—but rice fields! Did the Hierarchy have some sort of villainous scheme involving rice? There was no wrapping his head around this one.

They left Tokyo Factory behind them, and only then did he spot the towering artillery turrets attached to the walls. There must have been miles between them, but that made sense for such massive guns. They must have been able to fire for hundreds of miles with tactical nuclear yields. The God-blessed United States had things like that, sure, but just a few, and as experimental naval assets. It just made no goddamn sense why anyone would put up huge-ass static defenses like that, where they could be targeted by special forces or a well-placed airstrike.

After ten minutes, the rice fields ended. There was another wall, and then another wall—of nature, seemingly unclaimed, untouched by mankind. The trees soared so high, maybe if he stuck his hand out, he could touch the tips of their leaves.

It took the better part of an hour to get to Nagoya. Before they’d even reached the outskirts, he’d seen streaks of tactical ballistic missiles zipping every which way. Both factions were targeting the other guy’s deep territories, hoping to hit production and logistics facilities, no doubt. Missile interceptors and aircraft from Yukai’s side met the enemy missiles. Some of the missiles caught fire and exploded, hinting at invisible laser defenses.

Nagoya Factory itself was just like Tokyo Factory—maybe a bit on the FUBAR side. At least half the city’s turned to rubble, and whatever industrial operations were still going on were likely propped up by the cargo drones zipping low over the city. The citadel-like structure in the middle was scarred, but intact.

As expected, the artillery pieces lining the perimeter walls were almost all destroyed, and the few that appeared intact weren’t firing—definitely sabotaged. Hassan had a smug thought about how AI were still pretty dumb all along.

A second flight of aircraft joined them. They were a greater variety of transports, some of which were jet engine-powered VTOL heavy lifters, bringing even larger combat mechs—not like the “space marine” suits the smaller lifters were bringing, but truly some tanky bastards that looked like they’d be able to kick a tank in the side and flip it over.

The sun was already touching the horizon. Pillars of smoke rose over the hills and mountains. The missiles never stopped coming and going.

Air superiority squadrons raced ahead and over them. Tracer rounds and missiles zipped up from below, hitting one of the lead transports by sheer chance. The sources soon quieted after a few escorts peeled off; there was a brief flash from below, then the thump of an explosion.

Two squadrons of lifters and troop transports from the rear broke off, descending on barren fields below, littered with the burning husks of tanks and spider-like swarm drones. Ahead, the broken shell of a scorpion-like foundry crawler—a “Queen,” Hassan recalled from the mission brief—laid dormant. Its legs were broken, and its shell, dotted by little holes, direct hits of heavy artillery and cruise missiles. What absolutely killed it was whatever had split open and melted a long gash across the length of its body. All around it were enough wreckages to totally obscure the ground in slag and scrap metal. Already, Yukai’s scavengers were getting to work recovering these free resources.

Hassan’s combat AI was flashing a tiny notification, but he ignored it. He didn’t need distractions. He could already see, anyway, the carbon monoxide counter on the inside of his mask that they were entering a poisoned atmosphere. Already, visibility was starting to decline as a cloud of smog rolled in—a mixture of sulfur from combat, but mostly the effects of Dai-sensei’s indiscriminate destruction of the earth, sucking its resources dry.

They’d been flying for a while. The sun had already dipped below the horizon, waving its final goodbyes through the purple-black gradient sky, while the land below had gone dark. There hadn’t been any anti-air in a while, either.

“What’s—er...” He didn’t know what to call the androids in the heli with him, and neither did he know what to ask. For a moment, the awkwardness descended, but looking at the members of Unit 19:a2, they were waiting expressionlessly for their first human’s first question. The awkwardness was pointless—he remembered they were just machines. “Why hasn’t there been any AA in a while?”

“Advanced forces have already cleared the way forward,” Unit 00 answered. The fact that she was using direct RF, making no eye contact, and not even making the slightest gesture while ‘speaking,’ unsettled Hassan. “Resistance is futile.”

“Right… Where are we going?”

“Domain 9F11:B882:0005.”

“So what’s that in English?”

“According to human records, Osaka.”

The flight had to weave between mountains and valleys to get there from Nagoya. Hassan’s mask had night vision, allowing him to see the destruction down below, all the same: nature turned to sand, and the fog of war and indiscriminate industry getting thicker. It got to the point that the transports had to increase altitude just to keep oxygen supplied to the engines. Even with the fog, flickers of flames still waved hello from down there. Stray explosions—undetonated shells heated too long, too far—erupted here and there, but at this point, Hassan was desensitized to it.

Their helicopter made a sharp turn, igniting rocket-assist impulse systems to rapidly gain elevation and point its nose towards the ground, narrowly avoiding a small missile launched from the ground. The maneuver had nearly thrown Hassan off his seat, but it was Unit 00’s hand that had grabbed his arm, keeping him firmly anchored to his seat. The G forces on that turn were full-on bullshit expectations for a puny human like him to handle.

“Thanks,” Hassan said. He’d caught himself saying it, but the last phoneme was already out of his mouth by the time he did. Saying thanks to a machine was sort of pointless, but whatever.

“It’s our role,” Unit 00 replied.

Hassan just nodded, hoping he didn’t need to speak ever again. He just prepared to glue his ass to his seat a little better next time—and there would be a next time. It wasn’t unusual for a rapid advance to miss a couple of stragglers.

“Weird,” Unit 20 said, putting the direct RF on public. “The attack reached enemy main operations so fast, but they didn’t find all the swarm drones.”

Hassan perked up at that. The words themselves were mundane, and sounded like an offhanded smartass comment from a college dropout who failed officer school. The fact, however, that the android had made the comment without any prompting—that was new to him. As far as he knew, it took a whole-ass data center’s worth of GPUs to make someone like Mane-chan tick. Now, he could get around the local American Overlord being a real person, but these droids? With barely a smartphone’s worth of compute power? Doubt it.

“Of course,” Unit 30 said, “what you exchange for time is certainty.”

Wow. Mighty large words for an android, there.

As predicted, another missile went straight for them. This time, however, it was a barrage of SAMs fired from a missile battery, hidden and buried under the wreckages of their own swarm comrades. Two of the lead transports were struck: one turned into shrapnel, while the other lost yaw control and spiraled into the fog, crashing, but not exploding.

Their own helicopter started evasive maneuvers, but they were noticeably softer, like a kiddie rollercoaster ride, as if accounting for the fact that he was a little squishier than the rest. Still, Unit 00 held onto his arm. Her hand felt strangely real—warm. It’s not as if he’s unvaccinated towards women; rather, the confusion he was feeling was about whether this “thing masquerading as a person” wasn’t actually a “real” person.

The maneuvers stopped, and more flights of strike craft descended on the SAM positions, peppering the hillside with cluster bombs—just to make damn sure there wasn’t anything else buried under there, he thought.

Within the hour, their destination was on the horizon: Factory Osaka, aflame with so, so many illumination flares. Hassan had been to besieged cities before—Bucharest, Warsaw, Minsk—but this one was just … so eerily quiet. Certainly, there was persistent fighting along several points, and artillery answered artillery where they could, but it felt like they were firing more illumination flares than they were actual shells.

Hassan’s combat AI pinged more notifications. He ignored them.

As the city came closer, the destroyed perimeter walls also came into view. The mammoth breaches in the walls must have taken thousands of tons of explosives to make. The towering artillery pieces a mile down either side didn’t look hit, but they weren’t firing, either. Maybe Yukai’s forces wanted to capture them and turn them against Dai-sensei.

They circled around a peculiar spot outside of the perimeter walls: a landing zone cleared beside the remains of a shrine and its nigh-invulnerable torii gate. The strobe lights of friendly units, already on the ground, blinked around the LZ. Several transports descended ahead of them, one by one dropping off their android infantry.

It hit Hassan that they weren’t just heading into an active combat zone: they were already here, and he didn’t even know what to call his interim “squadmates” yet.

With some reluctance, he looked to Unit 00. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Unit 19:a2:00,” she replied.

Hassan didn’t know what to make of that. “Zero,” he said, “you’re Zero.”

Unit 19:a2:00 didn’t know what to make of that.

[Unit alias updated: “Zero”]

…Guess she had an alias, now. “Acknowledged.”

Before Hassan could ask the rest of the androids, to his shock, they preempted him.

“Juu,” 10 said.
“Nii,” 20 said.
“San,” 30 said.

They had each received message prompts from the Domain Defense System, which hurriedly assigned the simplest possible aliases for them before Hassan could come up with something potentially weird. It’s not that the System mistrusted him, but it just didn’t want to deal with weirdnesses—not more than it was already dealing with now after becoming self-aware.

Their heli touched down, and the androids filed out. Hassan hugged his rifle close to his chest. There were more notifications in the corner of his mask from his combat AI, but he ignored them. He was heading into danger, and now wasn’t the time for distractions. He hit the ground feet-first and followed Unit 19:a2 closely behind.

A pair of heavy lifters dropped off two fire support walkers behind them, bristling with guns and mortars. Their first steps were heavy, drumming the ground. They moved past Hassan and joined a column of mechs waiting outside the breach, just down the road, with a complement of android infantry waiting by the side, crouched, unmoving, and weapons aimed every which way.

Unit 19:a2 stood by and shepherded Hassan to stay and let the rest of the force move ahead. There was on-going fighting just a mile past the breach, and it wasn’t his job to fight this war. He was just here to watch.