It shouldn't surprise anyone that AEGIS and my relationship was completely dysfunctional from the outset. How great my life with her was just served to illustrate how shitty my time at work felt. Which was only redoubled as with her now gone, things began piling up.

I didn't want to be there, none of us did. AEGIS was apparently the only one who took any joy or even responsibility in dealing with the agency's bullshit minutiae. But now, if I went home to get away from it, she was there, unable to tell me with words how much I was fucking up, and how badly I needed to get back to work, because she herself had already turned her back on that mess. But I could still read it off her, in her tension, the hesitation in her smiles, like it was written on her face.

She'd hem and haw and wonder aloud if specific things had gotten done, with a significant glance at me. And then apologize, and say she shouldn't meddle, and recommend me specific personnel she'd found competent who might help -- though only with reservation if they happened to be female. All the while, I was drowning, and we both knew she was withholding the one person who could help me most.

She could. But she also really couldn't. A fucking disaster.

Our first major incident was slammed on our desk in the form of probably a thousand sheets of paper, and god-knows how many digital reports. Something had gone awry during an op and the air transit had never materialized to get a bunch of strike units deployed. We had men adjacent doing fuck-all while an Exhuman tore apart a town center, killing six-hundred civilians before running off when we limped in.

Chasing down the responsible parties was like reading through a game of telephone, where if the original message was ever deciphered, the one responsible for leaking would be hanged. Everything was just blame and contradiction.

Lia's head was in her hands with folded paper sprawled in front of her. "This report says the VTOLs were scheduled for maintenance and the covering squad was Raster-406. This other report says Raster was assigned for another op. There's maintenance logs, but it doesn't look like they're for either the original group or the covering. And this report from the maintenance team says they were scheduled to work on tanks, not VTOLs. Which is not what the schedule says."

Whitney had the same posture on the opposite end of the table. "If I understand this, the strike lead was in contact with Raster, who told them they were not coming. He's the one who kicked it up the chain to alert everyone that nobody was deploying them but…" she flipped a few pages on another document. "...the escalation never made it to central, because it was routed through the nearest base, which was where the service team was, and they didn't see a reason to send the same report twice, considering they'd just sent it to the strike team minutes before?"

"Seems pretty typical to me," added Cosette, who appeared the only one not turning grey-haired before my eyes. "Someone dropped the ball and everyone's blaming whoever they didn't speak with."

"And six-hundred innocent people died," I grumbled. "That we had the manpower to save, and just...didn't."

"Events are getting more violent than ever," Cosette replied, holding up a sheet as though looking through it. "Numbers are way up. Kinda feels like a war."

"A war?" Whitney echoed.

"Sure. A guerilla war, anyway. All the Exhumans we've been encountering recently are old ones that came out of hiding for a reason. The reason...is typically to do some damage. Because they've heard others are doing the same."

"And then they get away with it half the time," I bitched. "Like this fucker. After killing six-hundred. We're an embarrassment."

"That we are. But hanging our heads doesn't do anything but give us a better view of our shriveling pricks," Cosette said, sitting up to give me an affirming glance. "Don't be sorry, be better."

"That's a Karu line."

"That's a Peregrine line. And should be the line of anyone who has to work independently, on a team. Whatever happened, happened. Our job is to make sure it doesn't happen again."

I slumped in my seat. "How?"

"How what?" she asked.

"How do we be better?"

"Next time--"

"Next time, what? Next time, one of us has a galaxy-sized brain and puts together all the pieces from reading this shit? Or what. We spend weeks digging through conflicting reports and fabricated, ass-guarding, self-interested bullshit to find the guy who did fuck up and crucify him, so that...next time there's a conflict, everyone's paranoid about being the next guy nailed to a cross, so they cross their fucking T's?"

I shouted at her. I'd felt useless and suffocated since I'd heard the news, and I was lashing out, I knew. But fucking still. Six-hundred people in a couple hours. She stared at me. They all did. Most in shock, but Cosette in irritation.

I was surprised when it was Moon who spoke up. "We instill order, Chariot. Do you think it a coincidence that the disorder of the XPCA coincides with our disruption of it?"

I stood up, kicking my chair over behind me with a crash. "So it's my fault they died. Of course."

"It is everyone's fault. Order exists only as a unified construct. If you must crucify one and instil order through fear, then you must. If you are capable of leading by charisma, then you may. But you must lead, to lead."

"That doesn't make any fucking sense!" I shouted at her. "Just tell me what to fucking do. Or, y'know what, just do it! We're all director here, I don't know why I'm the one getting blamed for everything!"

She stared at me with open disgust. Or, as open as Moon got anyway. "I just stated that it was all our faults. Do you need an ear cleaning?"

I was seriously about to lose it when the door opened and an aide stepped in, saluting sharply.

"Go ahead," Cosette addressed him.

"Message for the future council, ma'am."

"That's us."

He pulled a tablet from under his arm, along with another stack of papers, and handed it to her, retreating after another salute.

She flipped through them while I finished raging at Moon, seemingly unable to stop myself as I felt her estimation of me dropping by degrees with every word I shouted.

Fortunately I didn't get too many words, before Cosette lit up the table's holo and projected what looked like a map.

"What now?" I gaped, finding my chair.

"Oh, just...the Oasians eradicating another armed force," she sighed. "India, this time."

"Fuck."

"Yeah. There's...footage, if we want to see. I think the news are probably going to be on this one soon. No sense and no way to cover up an international incident."

Lia replied while chewing the end of a pen. "Not that anyone seems to consider the Oasians Exhuman in any way. So really not our business."

I began to argue, because apparently that's what I was best at. "Except it is. Because--"

"Yeah, I know," she said, her voice sharp. And I realized she and everyone else here already got it. They weren't the ones I was arguing with, really.

"And this...oh good. More bad news." Cosette leafed through the contents of the envelope, and I caught lots of red TOP SECRET and CLASSIFIED markings on it between her fingers.

"Not another event," I pleaded.

"I wish. Look familiar?"

She flipped to a sheet and pulled it out of the envelope with a grating noise like a guillotine drawing back. I scrunched up my face at the grainy picture printed there. It almost looked like…

"Soran?" I asked. And I hated her for nodding. "Fuck. Why. Why him, why now?"

"Because obviously, if everything's going to shit at the same time, it only makes sense he'd show up. Kind of a good-news, bad-news thing going on with him, though."

I didn't even have to guess. "The good news is, he's getting rid of Exhumans for us. And the bad news is the same."

"Yep."

She chewed on the silence while flipping through more papers. I didn't know how she did it, I just wanted to explode. Everything was so fucking wrong.

"So let's get him," I decided, finding that fucking chair and sitting back down. "Let's kill Soran, finally, for good. Where was he?"

"Y'know, it's not typically the purview of the director to decide on individual ops," she said. "More of a big picture kinda position."

"So where the fuck is he? So I can shove a big picture up his ass?"

"Georgia, from the look of it."

"And the local units--"

"Already mobilized. Already deploying." She shook her head as she read. "Already likely to get their asses beat."

"So stop them. Send...send shadow ops. Send us, for fuck's sake. Moon, have a VTOL prepped for us."

"Shadow ops are deploying. You do know that people in this agency are capable of doing ops without your personal intervention."

"Apparently fucking not, because six-hundred people died earlier today and it was somehow all my fault."

Moon cleared her throat.

"All our fault. Whatever," I clarified.

"Well, if you want to micromanage even more, and give yourself more work, have at it," Cosette declared. "But you can't possibly make it, and then when everything goes tits-up, it really will be your fault, instead of just landing on your desk."

I glared at her, and hated her some. Not just for arguing with me, but also for being right. We'd already had one case of the agency failing because nobody had been here to do AEGIS' job. If I pulled more onto our collective plate, if I fought even harder against delegating to the rest of the uniforms and shirked my own responsibilities more, how many times would that multiply?

It was straight-up fucked, that somehow, not doing anything was the right thing to do. I'd thought leadership meant I could steer things, but I was fucking dead wrong. Things had a way they went on their own, and leadership just meant being at the head of it. The XPCA wasn't the agency I really wanted to be in control of. That was...I dunno...humanity. Destiny. Something I could build from the ground-up which made some fucking sense. Not this bloated, bureaucratic bullshit.

It wasn't even an hour before the next aide gave us another two pieces of news. One reported that the Indian forces had been wiped out by the Oasians. When they'd come forward to negotiate terms and try to figure out what the hell they wanted, the Oasians had responded with only one thing they desired.

War.

Nobody fucking understood because how the hell could you understand? What was there even to comprehend about a force which existed only to fight and kill as many others as possible? World powers were openly talking about emergency joint ventures to send Oasis back to the glasslands, but nobody seemed to want to be the first to raise the nuclear question again. Not after the Sino Wars, and how much that had devastated the Earth..

The next bit of news was equally bad. And Cosette read it with a stoic blanch.

"Another...mishap," she suggested, and offered me the papers. I tore them from her hands and read.

"Mis...hap? Fucking…" I had to focus to keep my eyes from jumping all over the page. "Why the fuck did we have people stationed there?"

"Where?" Lia asked.

"A courtroom in...Atlanta or something. A whole shadow ops team, just wiped out by Justice."

"No!" she said, her brow furrowing. "Let me see."

She bounced up, bare feet sticking out of her uniform and clung to my shoulder as she read over it. "That's like, provoking him, practically."

"Lots of people are scared," Whitney suggested. "I don't think putting XPCA in places where Justice is likely to go is a bad idea."

"Except they just die. We can't just throw away handfuls of our strongest troops...or their arms. We need a coordinated attack. And shadow ops as guard detail, who the fuck authorized this?"

Cosette shook her head as she read from her computer. "Looks like...wires crossed? Some captain using an old policy that we were stationing guards in the courtrooms. But that was changed forever ago. Was he just an idiot? Or was he seriously trying to glory-hunt the world's biggest Exhuman threat?"

"And what the hell is a captain doing with shadow ops under him?"

"Base administration...maybe he didn't even know who they were, just...sent everything he had? They shouldn't have responded to his orders, should have had a handler. Where the fuck was he this whole time?"

"He was recalled," Lia sighed, pointing out another report on a different page than I was on. "Mishandling an operation...he was being rebuked for misplacing arms."

"And they weren't given another handler?" Whitney asked.

I held my head. "Apparently not in this case, since they were supposed to just be based. What the fuck."

"Twice in one day," Cosette sighed, sounding as defeated as I felt. Somehow she kept sitting upright. "We can't keep doing this."

"Is every day just going to be like this?" I asked aloud. "More news of Exhuman events we can't do anything about? More things going wrong we can't fix? Is there even any point to us being up here?"

"We're...changing policy direction in New Eden," Whitney confirmed. "Though...relaxing the authoritarianism there isn't...making things better. It seems to just be provoking more incidents. And the staff are becoming nervous and unruly as a result…"

"We have successfully responded to most of the smaller events," Moon added. "Though with a higher mortality rate than previously accounted. Possibly due to new policy. But...also possibly the Exhumans are just bad."

"So basically, everything we're trying is failing," I confirmed. "We can't run a more peaceful XPCA without the Exhumans taking every inch we give them and fucking us with it."

"It...it can't be that way," Whitney argued. "We have to try. I think the establishment of a mediation-ops is inspired. And...they did very well. That...one time. Before--"

"Before they died," I finished for her. "Because some fucking Exhuman just saw black uniforms and ripped them apart."

"...yeah. But...it also worked once. So that's fifty-fifty."

I closed my eyes and held my head. I felt insane. I felt like, some genie had granted my wish in the most literal and twisted way possible to give me everything I'd asked for, and nothing I wanted. Here I was, top of the XPCA, and I was more powerless than I thought possible. And if today was any sign of things to come, without AEGIS, things would just keep falling further and further apart.

What the absolute fucking hell was I thinking, that a bunch of random people could run an entire branch of the military, and one of the largest government agencies in the world? We'd just fail, until, what? The generals were mentally incapable of seeing us as the incompetents we definitely were. Eventually, either the United States President would see our idiocy and either disband the agency, or we'd get to mind-fuck the most powerful man in the world. Or the grunts would lose all faith in the institution, absolutely, and we'd be facing an unmanageable mass. Maybe even a mutiny.

Because of us. Because of me. Because of AEGIS. If she were here, plugged in, I knew there would have been at least two fewer incidents today. And a thousand hours less paperwork for each of us. But she couldn't, and I understood.

But still. Fuck.

The next hour continued downhill, going as smoothly as a dumpster on fire might navigate a sharp cliff. Reports and updates were constant now, and were twofold gifts: More documentation for us to process and comprehend and sign, and more awful news.

The Oasians had finished up, but Soran was moving openly now, as much an Exhuman event as any we'd seen. There were special precautions in place on account of his classification as a mutable, and his absurdly dangerous Prather Index, but even so, he wiped out the strike forces and the recon teams after him without apparent effort. Justice was done slaughtering our shadow-ops and, as usual, just disappeared into the sky.

And the paperwork for the two disasters just kept pouring in. In impossible quantities. It felt like every single fucking XPCA there was had decided if they didn't weigh in on the matters, they'd be blamed for them, and so an excruciating number of reports were coming through.

I was just about ready to cry when I heard the door open again. Another aide with another wheelbarrow of papers. Just bury me in them and call it what it was -- an early grave. Paperwork could do me in where dozens of Exhumans had failed.

So I was pretty fucking shocked when our visitor walked up behind my chair and rested their head atop mine. Bizarre, and I struggled for a second before seeing copper strands of cable-hair draped on either side of my face. That, I had to blink at for a moment, wondering.

I looked up, and upside-down, saw her smiling.

"Heyas," she said.

"AEGIS? Oh thank God. I thought you were never coming back. We've got such a mess here and need you so badly."

She chewed on her lip for a moment. "Well. Yes. Also, no. I figured something out. Also, did you investigate General Morales for that VTOL debacle? I was working on that when I...left."

I shook my head at her. She had no idea. And her little laugh only confirmed it.

"Um, anyway, be right back. I've been working on this all night and all day. You'll like it."

She left, and the rest of us sat in silence. After maybe fifteen minutes, we'd settled back down, though with a looming air of is she coming back?

And then I heard it. Familiar mechanical steps. Heavier than AEGIS' ballerina feet, by far. I couldn't place where I'd heard it before, until it emerged through the door and I felt my heart crumbling.

The doorway was too small for the hulking metal frame, and it shuffled through on legs which bent the wrong way, spindly needlelike feet that seemed to stab the floor rather than step on it. After it passed through, it stretched to its full height, eight feet tall, and shiny and black, looking like glossy metal plating, insectile in its hunched pose and inhuman proportions.

Its fingers twirled around the hand-paddles, floating manipulator drones, unattached. Dancing, seemingly, just for the fun of it. It's limbs were narrow and long, it's torso too thin, it's shoulders too thick.

And right, smack in the middle of its front, a pixels, displaying a crude approximation of a face. :)

"AEGIS...why?" I asked, dragging myself out of the chair to stand before the black machine. "Why?"

The face on the pixels changed at my approach. Becoming a scathing > at me. Which was about the second emotion crossing my heart, after incomprehension.

"See, this is what I like about you, Athan," it said, its voice a synthesized approximation of AEGIS', but colder, harder. More calculating. Crueler. "Your endless capacity for compassion."

"I don't…" I shook my head and stared at her in disbelief. "I don't understand."

She replied >:D "I'm only kidding. There's actually nothing I like about you."

My confusion was completed when AEGIS walked through the door, sidestepping around the metal cockroach as though nothing were amiss. I gaped at her. She gave me a little smile.

"Like it?" she asked.

"I like you. I hate it," I told her.

"Aw. You're sweet. But one of my issues...why I needed to plug in so much...was Rua is just lacking in processing power. Úaine has a ton more under the hood than I do. She's way more capable than I am of helping out around here. And...I just thought...with how much you're struggling…" she shifted uncomfortably. "What you...what I really needed most in the world right now...was...more of...well this sounds egotistical but...more of me."

Úaine stepped forward with a mechanical lurch and put its fingers reassuringly on AEGIS' shoulders. "That's right," her synth-voice said. "All the world needs more of you, darling."

"Oh you," AEGIS blushed, and swatted at a finger. From their rapport, you'd think they were playing. I was just...in shock.

"Wait. So. You...you broke your rule?" I asked. "You put...yourself...in there?"

AEGIS frowned. "No. I would never break my own rules like that."

"Then who?"

"What, you don't recognize me?" Úaine asked, > drawing its hands to its hips, fingers flaring violently. "Maybe try breathing through your mouth and see if that gets some oxygen to that lonely brain cell."

I turned away from the abuse to stare at AEGIS, who blushed and gave a little shrug. "I didn't break the rule. I just...bent it a little. She already existed. I just...cleaned her up a bit and put her in. And I think she'll work out fine. After all, it's what she was made to do."

I turned and blinked at the smug :), which still didn't explain who I was looking at.

"I guess I can spell it out. Otherwise we'll be here all day, and I'd hate to deprive some village of their idiot."

I glanced at AEGIS but she just shrugged at me and spoke to the cockroach. "Try to be nice?"

Úaine's disposition changed in a heartbeat. It stood up straighter and then offered me a hand...of floating fingers, in what was probably a handshake gesture? I took it, not knowing what else to do. Or think. Or say.

"TARGA," she said. "And it's not at all nice to meet you again, Athan."