"Damon! Damon!"

Losira is practically slapping her own son on his cheeks with full force before he finally growls awake, angrily shoving away his mom's arms to get her off him to sit up and rub his face with his right hand in both grogginess and annoyance.

"What's goin' on? You weren't here yesterday, and then now all this shit happens?" Losira demands to know, looking around them with deep concern. Damon eventually does too - everywhere he looks, it's just pitch darkness, but with bonfires of all sizes burning angrily and chaotically with yellow flame. They're in a forest of sickening yellow bonfires, and there appears to be no end to them, as they dot the black landscape like angrily burning stars in the night sky.

"The fuck are you askin' me for? Isn't it like this all the time?" Damon groans.

"Since when was the last time we had shit literally burning everywhere?"

"Thought it ain't nothin' special."

"Not when you haven't slept at all for the past at least thirty-six hours or whatever!" Losira snarls back, but her voice is not filled with venom as she says this. "Seriously, what the fuck is going on? Don't pretend like nothin's goin' on, I know there's something wrong with you right now."

Even then, it still takes Damon about a few minutes to gather his thoughts before letting them flood out.

"We found your address. Your old place, before the world got its ass nuked," Damon sighs through gritted teeth, briefly sounding like an ancient steam engine.

"Yeah, you told me you'd be goin' there with a few ship girls. So what? What'd you find there?"

"A cube. Think a Rubik's cube, but some of the pieces're juttin' out like stubby little knobs or whatever," Damon explains concisely out of exhaustion, miming a little bit with his hands to indicate a cube. "It's magenta. Or pink. Fuck, I'm not good with colors, let's just call it magenta, looks close enough. We found somethin' like that at your place, inside some sorta lockbox or something."

"A cube...? But we didn't have anything like that..." Losira has an utterly stumped look on her face as she tries to contemplate if she's ever seen such an item before in her life. "We didn't have anything like Rubik's cubes. Only Deimos would'a been nerdy enough to have a Rubik's Cube. And even then, given how nerdy he fucking was, he would've had one of those ten by ten Rubik's things, y'know, the ones that're a ton larger and harder to solve?"

"Story of my life right now, to be honest."

"Then what the hell else happened?"

Groaning louder, Damon continues, "I took the fucking cube thing...and it started spawning more zombies. The same ones I'd seen in Baltimore. Started spawnin' them fucking everywhere."

Losira just blinks at him, and Damon almost glares back at her in return.

"Even when we secured it and got the fuck out, it kept spawning more. I thought of goin' back to the San Pedro mili base on the off-chance that it'd have some answers, but all the fuckin' while it kept spawning more fucking zombies, even inside our fuckin' chopper..."

Damon trembles violently for a split second, like his muscles are seizing up like he's getting electrocuted. That's the first time Losira's ever seen Damon have such a dramatic twitch reaction to something he's recalling.

"So I tried getting the other girls to hold it, since I figured it was constantly spawning zombies because I was the one holdin' onto it. But then when Intrepid had it, she fucking puked her guts out all over the floor inside the chopper; when Tash held onto it, she started bawlin' her eyes out and crying about something in Russian, and when Bay took it for whatever fucking reason she had, she just had a mental blue screen and just sat there with tears pourin' outta her fuckin' eyes too. I told Jervis not to hold onto it, so I held onto it in the meantime for a while before we just ended up ditching it in the corner of the chopper so none of us would be holding onto it, and that seemed to do the trick..."

Damon buries his face back into his hand once he's done recounting, clearly in no mood to pay the fires around him any mind.

"...too bad we weren't smart enough to figure that one out until just before I fell asleep."

"...did none of you seriously think of the idea of just leaving it alone? Like, just don't have anyone hold onto it but keep it somewhere on the chopper where no one's gonna touch it?"

"Fuck off, I was under the impression that it wouldn't'a mattered so I initially didn't even bother trying."

"But you tried it after everything else got said 'n done."

"Yeah, 'cause we were all fucking sick 'n tired of havin' to kill infinitely spawning fucking zombies every five minutes, the fuck do you want from me..." Damon shrugs tinily, having shifted his face into his folded arms like he's trying to sleep inside his own dreamworld. "I finally just chucked the cube off once I was over it, and I guess it just happened to work out..."

Losira looks around, peering at the yellow bonfires all around them to give Damon some time to himself.

"But just that alone won't push you to the edge like this. Seein' and fightin' those zombies, you've done that plenty before, even if you're still spooked by 'em," Losira reasons calmly. "There must'a been somethin' else."

"Yeah, you're right. So I told you just now that we went down to the mili base too, right? See if we could find anything there to see what the cube was?"

"Uh-huh?"

"I went into one of the computer rooms, and it looked like it'd been used recently. So I got all suspicious, wonderin' what someone could'a been doin' down there while we were away, and then the computer just starts playing a video all on its own."

It's then that Damon peers up from his arms with his bloodshot yellow eyes.

"You know that Yukari person Sanford told us about offhandedly? I know who she is now, I guess. For what that's worth."

Losira blinks back down at her son, not knowing how to react.

"...So...she really did work with them," Losira murmurs slowly.

"Why's that such a surprise? I thought I told you that before. Might've been only once, but still, I should'a told you at some point."

"No, it's just...I guess you could say that there was still a part of me that still can't believe she'd knowingly participate in a project like this," Losira replies, crossing her arms and closing her eyes to ponder this. "Yukari always showed a fascination to the outside world - to her, our world was the 'outside world', so to speak. I never figured out why exactly she agreed to help us and our team; I can tell you right now it wasn't because she was a super altruistic person, she definitely was the 'I'm doing this for my own entertainment' kinda bitch. So that's why I'm acting all surprised right now; on one hand, yes, it makes sense for her to've helped Sanford, but on the other hand, given the nature of what Sanford and the others were working on, it's a bit jarring to know for sure now that she was directly involved with something of this magnitude. But anyways, what was the video? What'd you see?"

"It was a video that she made telling us how exactly she 'n Sanford went about makin' the second gens. Turns out, Sanford wasn't lying about the process."

"Remind me the process again...looks like my memory doesn't exactly hold up well, bein' stuck in a dreamworld all the damn time."

"Basically, they took girls in to train them as ship girls, and then amputated their limbs with Smartsteel ones that'd convert the rest of their bodies into Smartsteel to prepare them to give birth to the second-gen's, like Sanford said. From what I remember her talking about it, she said it was a...what'd she say, uh...an 'exploitative bastardization of power' or somethin' like that...but she said she was okay with it because she thought there wasn't any other readily immediate solution to whatever problem they saw coming, I guess. I'm paraphrasing right now in case you couldn't tell."

Losira is slowly nodding to herself as Damon is deliberating, like she's starting to grasp the situation.

"Messy and maybe a bit inefficient, but it's ingenious. Yukari definitely came up with that one; she had to've."

"You sound like you're startin' to get what's goin' on."

"Kinda. And I'm the one who knew Yukari the most, since I was the first one on the team who met her and talked to her and got to know her and stuff." Losira turns to her son quickly, with a look in her eye like she intends to drop a few knowledge bombs on her son. "Listen, Damon. The thing about Yukari is that she's one of those galaxy brain motherfuckers; she thinks about things on a scale that we humans ordinarily don't think about or can't think about because we typically just aren't capable of it."

"That meant to be some sorta flex or somethin'?"

"Well, yeah, I guess, 'cause she was a youkai and not human like us, so yeah, it'd be safe to say she's thousands of times more intelligent than humans. Maybe. I don't know how youkai work all that well, a'ight? Anyways, my point is this: what she told you in that video probably isn't false, despite the fact that I know her as a bit of a troll sometimes; she just wouldn't fuck around in situations like this. But it sounds like she intended to have that video get watched by the second gens, you know? So she can only talk about stuff that they would be likely to understand. What's as likely that's going on is that she knows about something that she couldn't explain in that video at the time because it wouldn't have made sense to anyone."

"So, what? It's one 'a those videos that's got a secret message in it? Like somethin' that only people like you who knew her from before would decipher and know? 'Cause I didn't know how to get the video file from that computer; I tried rippin' it but I didn't know how the damn OS worked...sure wasn't an OS I'd ever seen..."

"But the thing is, Yukari wouldn't have done something as drastic as getting girls' arms amputated, turning them forcibly into ship girls, and then impregnating them with their own DNA to produce clones of themselves to produce magical monstrosities. It's something she could've easily come up with, but not something she'd actually do; at least, that's not how she came off to us. So for her to resort to actually doing something like that means to me that she knew that something big was going to happen at the time; something that would happen that none of us would've believed and would've made no sense at the time of her making that video."

"...the nukes."

"The only question then is, how the hell did she know?"

"More to the point, why didn't she explicitly mention it, then?" Damon wonders back. "In the video that she made, why not just mention it outright?"

"Maybe she didn't want to tell the team? Sanford never sounded like he knew the nukes were coming either, at least not from what you've told me about him."

"But what reason would she'd'a had not telling? That was your team's job, wasn't it? To make sure shit like that wouldn't happen. This Yukari person seems like she knew your team well enough to the point where she'd'a told you about something like a fuckin' nuclear apocalypse, so why didn't she tell anyone if she really did know?"

Losira's scratching her head. "That's what I'm tryin'a figure out, gimme a damn break," she sighs.

"And while you're on that, do you know how well Yukari knew Hank?"

"Hank? They didn't really talk much, I don't think...? I'd never seen them interact with each other."

"I mean, we know now that there's a good chance Hank could've been the one to launch the nukes. If Yukari knew about the nukes going off, that means she also probably would've known that Hank was gonna launch the nukes. So if that's the case, then...?"

Unable to answer, Losira is left with eyes widening with silence.

0133 hours, EST.
Shenandoah Valley, Virginia.
Warlord redirected to Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center.
Friday, October 5th, 2029.

Damon's weary yellow eyes that are plagued with red cracks of exhaustion in their whites peer out the side window of the Banshee beside him. His posse of ship girls, having slumbered during the flight, have since woken upon the Banshee's automated PA system informing them of their imminent landing at their destination. No one is talking; Gambier Bay is shivering as if uncontrollably, with one arm around her courtesy of a bleary-eyed Intrepid.

The interior of their stealth tilt-rotor helicopter is nothing short of a bloody nightmare. Black char marks are plastered against the seats, the gear, the roof, walls, and whatever else is inside the passenger bay, as is blood. The bodily remains of the zombies who'd spawned inside the helicopter and have since been disposed of have evaporated into ethereal dust or whatever the hell it is that they turn into, thankfully cleaning up after themselves, conveniently enough - though of course they haven't gotten rid of everything on their own, so only the char marks and the blood are left behind, for reasons that defy modern understandings of physics and whatever else relevant field of knowledge.

Having spent the day at the San Pedro military storage base, specifically inside the underground base that Damon's mother and the rest of her Seal Team Six had previously occupied, Damon and co. have received an order from the President to rendezvous with him to a particular set of coordinates once they were done with whatever Damon needed to do there. After having figured out why the cube was constantly spawning zombies, Damon convinced the ship girls to spend another half a day in Tierra del Illamas to further investigate, to see if they could find any more clues, but that search yielded nothing else, other than the grim knowledge that the initial zombie spawns that Damon had triggered had wiped out the bandit population that they'd run into upon first entering. Even if that were to be expected, Damon doesn't feel like dwelling on that.

So now all they've been able to bring back is the cube. To be fair, it's better than bringing back or having found nothing, but Damon feels terribly uneasy about it, not surprisingly. Less so that it has the obvious problem of potentially spawning even more zombies, but more so that it's just bringing in more questions into the already convoluted situation at a time when he already has a handful of big questions that need to be answered. And now Eagle's bringing them in to talk to them about something else, too. At least from what the message they received from him seemed to indicate, Eagle's got something that Damon would want. Of course, that could mean any myriad of things by this point...

Damon quickly rubs the sides of his eye sockets with one hand, using his middle finger and thumb. His headache is god-awful, no thanks to all these hours staying up. Ordinarily he'd be looking forward to some well-earned sleep to get rid of it, but as of late, he's afraid not even sleep can cure this. He'll just have to soldier on like he always has...

The Banshee touches down, the rear loading ramp lowering down with it so that it hits the ground at near the same time as its landing gear wheels do, and Damon motions silently to his small detachment to move out. President Clinton, backed by a pair of Secret Service agents and another girl whom Damon doesn't recognize, is already waiting for them as the Banshee's rotors power down and a small maintenance crew on standby nearby quickly rushes over to administer much needed maintenance.

"Good work out there. You look like flattened shit," Eagle remarks darkly, nodding slightly at the blood splatters on Damon's person.

"Not exactly like 'Nam, but...we'll manage," Damon shrugs tiredly.

"'Nam, huh? Kinda hard to believe that was fifty, sixty years ago at this point."

"Well, neither you nor I were alive back then."

"I've been told my grandfather fought in it. So I guess he'd've been the most appropriate to say that." Eagle turns to the girl who's been standing next to him, motioning to her. "First things first: your final reinforcement."

The girl on the right takes a confident stride forward, snaps off the crispiest salute Damon's seen in a fat while, and announces with a slightly high-pitched tone:

"U.S.S. Johnston, Fletcher-Class, Taffey 3, reporting for duty, Admiral! Anything you want me to do - recon, escort, vanguard - I'll do it all! I'll be the best you've got!"

Everyone around her just stares at her in silence. Except for the maintenance crew, of course.

Damon slowly turns to Eagle.

"...you didn't make a construction error at some point? Pretty sure we already got a Johnny," he mutters quietly.

Johnston, who's been slowly burning up red from her neck up at the silent treatment out of embarrassment, can't stop herself from blurting out,

"I-I know y'all already have another Johnston, it's not my fault they decided to make another one, goddamn it!"

Eagle is trying really hard not to laugh in Johnston's face so as not to hurt her feelings further.

"It's, uh...it's complicated," is all he can say at first, so Damon glances back at this...second Johnston. Her overall appearance is drastically different than the first Johnston, which is probably a good thing so that they can be easily differentiated - this Johnston is wearing a distinctly navy blue sailor uniform top with black folds on the collar and sleeves but exposes her shoulders and the upper half of her chest, held in place from slipping off entirely by black straps connected to the black choker-collar around the base of her neck. She's got a black pleated short skirt which exposes her gracefully long legs, which are her other defining bodily feature: a considerable thigh gap covered only by a pair of garterbelts, one on each leg, while the rest of her legs downwards are clothed by black stockings and, perhaps even more surprisingly, protected with flexible armor plates that even fit into the boots that she's wearing, probably covering the rest of her feet too. She wears a single black glove on just her left hand that doesn't quite reach her elbow, and on both of her sides hang a pair of white pouches like ammo bags, except they're too small to be carrying conventional ammo of any kind, unless she's carrying low-capacity 9mm magazines for whatever reason in them. Also on her choker-collar hangs a silver star that looks suspiciously like the Medal of Honor underneath a smaller bronze star that decorates her choker itself, and this Johnston has large, attentive auburn eyes and long light brown hair held up in twintails, housed in part by two sets of small metal plates that have their own little blue ribbons hanging off them. Damon is tempted to nickname her Amy II.

It's not that duplicates of the same ship girl identity hasn't been done before; on the contrary, given the fleet now and its circumstances, there are quite a few duplicate ship girls, and there hasn't been a major issue between any of them so far. It's just that...at this point, both Johnstons have been constructed by Lukenstor, and that's a first.

"Yeah, you're gonna have to fill me in on what's goin' on," Damon sighs. "'Cause, like, I'm no expert on ship girl construction or whatever, but...we already had a Johnston, and you went off and made another one? And it's not like she's a Japanese ship girl or whatever where maybe building a dupe would make sense..."

"Right, I'll explain, but before that..." the President clears his throat rather loudly. "Johnston, take the rest of the girls into reception, I'm sure they're all very tired from their mission just now. The Admiral and I'll catch up in a little bit."

Johnston snaps off another salute. "Sir!"

As Johnston escorts the four weary and bloodied ship girls into the main building on site nearby, Eagle offers Damon a grape candy cigarette, which the latter silently but gratefully accepts and immediately starts smoking.

"First off, I'm gonna need you to keep this between the two of us," Eagle begins rather ominously.

"Oh boy, great way to start."

"If I had a choice in the matter, I'd rather not start like that, because here's why: remember how I said that Johnston's your last reinforcement? That's because I mean it."

Damon pulls the cigarette out of his mouth.

"As in, no more ship girls?" he asks, just to clarify, and Eagle nods slowly.

"We put the rest of the resources we had into building the second Johnston. Repairs and all that're still fine, of course, but as for entire ship girls, she's going to be the last for the foreseeable future."

"Then we'll just have to shift our focus over to securing Guinea."

"I wish it were that simple, but it's not. See...it's not just resources that we need in order to construct a ship girl, Damon."

Turning his cigarette over and over with his fingers, Damon narrows his eyes down at Eagle. "Explain?"

And so Eagle turns swiftly to him, with a brooding look in his eye.

"Here's the cold, hard truth put very simply: ship girl technology is an impossibility for us. It's too advanced for us to be able to produce on our own. We have the resources or can obtain the resources necessary to construct ship girls, yes. We can repair them, upgrade them, maintain them, but as for how to build them in the first place...that's what we lack."

Damon just looks dumbfounded, a facial expression he hasn't made in a long time.

"But you just made like a dozen or more ship girls for us! And you're tellin' me now that 'oh, we can't make ship girls anymore, haha, you're fucked aren't'cha'? Who's your dealer, Eagle? 'Cause it sounds like he's sellin' you that real good shit, and I could probably take some to sell when I get my ass back to New Chicago."

"Can't do that anymore when we're crackin' down on that shit," Eagle chuckles. "Maybe if Blackwood were still around, you could get away with that. Not when I'm here though."

Damon clicks his tongue.

"What's it to you, though? I'd never heard of you doing drug runs back in the day, unless there's something you'd like to share."

"Nah, I'm just sayin', I used to know the drug runners and their routes even if I had nothing to do with 'em personally..."

"Right. Well, drug running aside, what I meant by what I said earlier, the whole 'how' to build part of the ship girls, specifically, what's going on is this: every ship girl has a unique blueprint that enables their construction. This blueprint is a cube, or something that resembles a cube - I don't know if you know what a Rubik's Cube is, but it looks a little bit like that - "

Damon's eyes freeze, locking themselves onto Eagle.

" - and when activated, the cube deploys itself and constructs a ship girl chassis on its own," Eagle continues. "And by 'chassis', it produces a skeleton, quite literally. In fact, this exosuit we built for you was based off these, uh, 'wisdom cubes' as we've come to call them for now...not sure if we'll change the name later since it honestly sounds a bit corny. But anyway, they build the bare skeletal work and the organs like they're some kind of DIY kit, and it's up to us to fill in the rest, so to speak."

"And you're tryin'a tell me that's how you've been 'building' the ship girls? Like that, all this time?"

Eagle nods grimly. "Telling you this isn't the problem, as you might imagine; it's the other countries that I'm not sure at the moment how to deal with. While they don't know the exact processes by which ship girls are produced, or at least they shouldn't, they do know that we've been reinforcing our own fleet with additional constructions, and since I've formed the Transatlantic Alliance with them, we've promised them more reinforcements."

"Then why'd you agree to those promises in the first place when you knew you'd be screwed? I mean, you had to've known long before you built Johnston, the one here, that you'd run out of, uh, what'd you call them again...?"

"Wisdom cubes."

"Right, those things. You should'a known about that, no?"

Eagle nods with discomfort. "We did, but the thing is, without that promise, the other nations wouldn't have considered entering the alliance. Queen Sarah and I have a good relationship, so with some diplomacy I'm confident that Britain would've allied with us either way, which is good. But I can't say the same about France and Italy, and most certainly not about Russia."

"Ugh. I know this probably isn't my place to give an opinion, but did you really need to make that alliance right away? 'Cause it sounds like all you're doing is delaying the inevitable, that sorta thing."

"Remember, Germany's our big question mark right now. If we knew that Germany would agree to be on at least neutral terms with us, the need to form the alliance wouldn't have been as urgent. But because they've been denying our requests at diplomacy, we don't know what they're doing or what they intend to do, and forming the Alliance now means that for now, Germany doesn't have any other potentially powerful allies to help them out in whatever they're up to."

"I thought the fleet was over in Germany while I was out cold, helpin' 'em out and stuff..."

"Again, remember that that was when Blackwood was still in office, so I assume he and the German President or Chancellor or whatever the hell she calls herself, Retia Wedekind, were on good terms. Now that someone like me's come and replaced him, and obviously I don't quite share the same positions as Blackwood did, Retia's very suspicious of me and the United States now."

"Just curious, has Retia ever contacted you?"

"We tried opening communications with them, but it seems they've shut themselves off."

"Yeah, I don't envy your job, after all." Damon takes an extra-long chug on his candy cigarette.

"It's not as bad as you think. But that's probably because I have a competent cabinet that I can rely on," Eagle chuckles briefly again. "Besides, I could say the same about you and your work."

"Hmph."

"But in any case, that's the situation right now, with the, uh, wisdom cubes and ship girls and whatnot."

"But all this time I thought Lukenstor had the tech to be able to build their own ship girls?"

"We actually don't; ship girl technology is still too advanced. Specifically, I'm talking about their cognitive capabilities and their sentiences; their hardware like Smartsteel, armor, weaponry, and all that, we get that, we can produce those on our own; and in fact, it's from studying the ship girl techs over the last decade or so that's allowed us to start building stuff like HAVOC, the Slug Gunner, the Banshee, and the other stuff we're cooking up in the meantime."

Eagle, noticing that Damon is already three-quarters through his candy cigarette, offers him another in the middle of talking, which Damon takes again.

"But notice that our inventions aren't quite fully sentient on their own. HAVOC isn't sentient at all, just technologically advanced. Slug Gunner isn't sentient, per se, it's just got an extremely advanced speech recognition and response system that allows it to be able to communicate with humans to an extent by listening to orders and whatnot, and the Banshees just have auto-pilot systems and Cloaking fields and not much else. But ship girls...they have their own sentiences. They have their own identities, and they have the capacity to demonstrate them. They act exactly like regular humans would. And that's what we can't replicate: the ability to give machines the ability to act exactly like us."

"So you're saying that specific tech is too advanced still?"

"Exactly; we just haven't gotten to that point yet, and the worst part about it is that I'm not sure if we can even get there. To be fair, studying ship girl techs has drastically accelerated our knowledge of science; our boys over at the R&D departments have been able to make lots of significant breakthroughs in prewar and modern technology thanks to studying what the ship girls have to offer...for example, thanks to Smartsteel, we've been able to develop a similar material that we're just calling Biosteel, which gives machines made of it to regenerate on their own and thus repair themselves if they're damaged; we've studied the way ship girl bodies react under stressful conditions and what kinds of hormones their bodies produce during them and developed Stim packs that simulate those conditions in a way that's relatively safe for humans to mimic, and the list goes on. But we still haven't been able to figure out how to give a machine its own identity."

"I mean, I'm sure in the future we'll be able to program AI and stuff like that, right? Yeah, it probably won't be for a while until then, but still..."

"Well, no, I'm not really talking about AI and stuff like that, since we can make AI already. And yeah, like you said, later on I'm sure we can make some pretty humanly realistic AI, but that's not quite what I'm talking about."

This time, it's Eagle's turn to lock eyes with Damon's, with an intense, almost sinister glint in his eyes.

"How do these ship girls know everything about their own histories? Have you ever wondered about that?" the President asks quietly.

"Uh...I'd imagine they're just programmed with whatever we know from history and such?" Damon guesses.

"Maybe. But have you ever asked your ship girls about specific parts of their service histories? Parts where we're not sure what happened just from the records that we had back about them back in the day?"

Damon hesitates. He's talked a lot with them, sure, but not a lot of it was about their own histories.

"Well, I mean, I didn't really, since I figured it'd be kinda rude to bring up something about them that they probably wouldn't like talking about..."

"Well, we have. Now, to be fair, many of them are a bit fuzzy on the exact details, so don't get too excited now, but still, our researchers have written evidence of conversations that they've had with a few ship girls that know parts about their pasts that we'd never known and we could never know. And to push the point further, let's take Haida for example. The ship that she's based on still exists as a museum ship up in Ontario, in Hamilton; so when she was initially constructed, we took her to go visit it, since we thought it'd be appropriate. She looked like one of those World War II vets who'd been in D-Day, walking around on Omaha Beach again seventy years later when she walked around on her own deck. We asked her how she felt, and she said it felt surreal that she was walking on herself, like it was an 'out-of-body experience' for her."

Eagle takes a moment to slowly cross his own arms.

"I know you've spent a ton of time with the ship girls by this point so maybe you won't find that as surprising or even think of it as something to consider, but if you really think about it, how mind-boggling is it to hear a ship girl, who's basically an android, say that she finds something to be 'surreal'?"

"I mean, I'd think that if you recreated memories accurately enough - "

"Memory replication isn't everything, though. You can have the exact same memories as someone else but not feel a damn thing about them because they're not yours. So for all the ship girls care, they could've chosen to give not one shit about the memories they've been given, if that's really what's going on. But they all do care, right? Since without those memories, they wouldn't be who they are. Those memories are theirs, and it's not just simple memory replication."

"So what're you tryin'a tell me, Eagle?"

Again slowly raising his arm to lift up a finger, Eagle thinks aloud,

"This could be a ridiculous stretch of logic that...probably has nothing to do with logic, but...is it possible, that these ship girls...are actually originally human?"

Silence ensues between them.

"...but if we develop AI's to be advanced enough to the point where they could also act human, you could start saying that about them, too," Damon slowly points out.

"But that's different; AI's are a tangential matter here. Because remember my Haida example: if all it is is that Haida got the memories of her ship self and that was it, she wouldn't have bothered telling us that visiting her own ship was a surreal experience. Given her personality, she'd probably react like, 'oh, this is cool', or something along those lines. But no, she acted as if she really was visiting herself, like an alternate version of her from the same timeline. She didn't go, 'oh hey, this was who I was from before', she went, 'This is me'."

"But I don't see why that's so mindblowing. Not Haida being on her own ship, I'd imagine that'd be pretty surreal like she said, but the whole us knowing that she finds it surreal part."

"Like I said, maybe you personally won't find this a big deal because you've spent so much time with the ship girls already, but I'll repeat myself: the reason why this is so significant is because there's something about the ship girls that make them more human than machine. So that something might be the reason why we can't construct ship girls on our own."

"And you guys haven't been able to find that out on your own?"

"Nope. It's not to say that we're not trying still, but all we're getting are dead ends, and our research isn't going anywhere on this topic."

Eagle unfolds his arms and, perhaps unexpectedly, points his fingers towards the main administrations building at the center of the site in finger-gun fashion.

"And that's why I've called you here," he concludes without a single hint of shift in tone.

It takes a moment for Damon to understand what Eagle means by this, probably a result of exhaustion caused by sleep deprivation, but it eventually clicks.

"So you found something finally?" he asks, straightening his back and briefly holding his second candy cigarette without actually smoking it.

Eagle drops his out-of-character finger guns and quietly clears his throat to resume his usual air of brooding professionalism.

"You could say that. But...it's not what you might expect."

"I dunno man..." Damon first takes a quick puff on his cigarette before running the same hand over his hair, after having removed his cap to do so, of course. "Past couple 'a weeks...not sure what to expect at this point."

"For situations like that, personally, I feel like it's better not to expect anything and just roll with whatever comes your way."

"Ah, so you're one of us."

"Takes one to know one...however the saying goes, something like that..."

The two men start heading over to the main admin building, flanked by the Secret Service agents, and within a few minutes, they enter the building through its front doors, with Eagle leading the way.

"So why here? What even is this place?" Damon asks, following Eagle's lead as they head through the main lobby and reach the elevator lobby of only two elevators.

"You never heard of this place? Thought you would've," Eagle replies with puzzlement as he pushes the button to call up an elevator. "This site is a civilian government operations center. Basically, in the event of a catastrophe, a lot of the government's highest ranking civilian authorities will relocate here if they can to continue government operations to keep the country running. Pre-war, it doubled as a radio control station and served other government functions, but when the nukes hit, the government finally used it for its intended purposes."

The elevator arrives while Eagle is providing some exposition about the operations center, and he, Damon, and a pair of Agents enter, with the other Agents standing guard in the elevator lobby. The elevator navigation panel has quite a few buttons for the upper floors, but there's only one button to go underground, and the President hits the underground button.

"This was the main headquarters for the Eastern Seaboard Operations Department, or ESOD for short," Eagle continues. "It was supposed to facilitate cleanup and rebuilding of the East Coast, but obviously that didn't really happen. So it went back to being a radio station for the government, but it also became a refueling point for helicopters for a while and a secondary training facility for special forces. But it has one more function besides all those..."

The timing between the end of this part of Eagle's exposition and the elevator arriving at its destination floor is impeccable; the doors slide open just a few seconds after Eagle finishes, and he steps out first into the underground level beneath the operations center.

Damon steps out with him, peering cautiously around him. What he's just stepped into is something akin to a titanic warehouse with darkened blue walls, the jagged roof supported by dozens, if not hundreds, of large pillars of the same hue. Perhaps all the years of living underground in New Chicago has jaded Damon to the effect of stepping into such a huge open space underground, and in fact, the place is giving him a strong New Chicago vibe, just without any of the hustle-bustle of the underground city. Despite this, there is still quite some activity down here, with forklifts and other small utility vehicles working around the underground warehouse floor sorting pallets of supplies like food, water, fuels, ammunition, and anything else a military base might need. The operations center doesn't even have its own proper runway, yet Damon recognizes one of the forklifts carefully lugging jet fuel intended for fighter planes.

"This is also a major storage facility. Currently we use it for housing military supplies that're intended for other military bases but don't need to be there right away - usually it's fresh supplies hot off the factories we've got built into the Appalachians."

"But I assume it's not the supplies we're here for..."

"Excellent deduction, Watson. Before the nukes, one of the protocols in the government's Continuity of Operations initiative, or COOP for short, ordered that in the event of catastrophe, the nation's founding documents - the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution - were to be secured from the National Archives in D.C. and flown here to be safeguarded, which actually did happen once the States started getting attacked. And in fact, to this day, they're still here, in the center of this floor. And that's where we're headed."

Eagle leads them to the center of the massive underground warehouse, where a large warehouse building sits in an isolated zone where the forklifts and trucks aren't roaming around in, though their engines and gears can be heard from well within the vehicle-free zone.

"This is one scuffed-ass warehouse you're running," Damon comments offhandedly, looking around at all the smaller warehouses built around the big one that towers over the rest of them in the center. "Warehouses in warehouses...there was a prewar meme about this that I'm forgetting..."

"Yeah, well, letting the country basically fuck itself for twenty years does that to government management, believe it or not," Eagle snorts sarcastically. "This won't stay like this forever, though - we'll get the nation's docs outta here at some point to a quieter location, but for now, since this's actually our most secure location for government safekeeping for about six states around, it's not going to happen for a while."

"Also, why does this place have basically no security?" Damon wonders aloud as they approach the front doors of the large warehouse.

"What, you didn't notice all the cameras?" Eagle asks while he submits his biometrics to the handprint, thumbprint, and eye scanners for clearance.

"No, I did, I'm just wondering why there aren't any actual guards."

"Don't need 'em; we've already got armed security outside in the storage zones, and the only way in and out of this place are either the elevator we just took or the freight elevator on the other side, if we were to keep walking in this direction. Both of them are heavily guarded. Plus, this site itself aboveground is heavily defended, with restricted airspace, guards, and cameras all over. You're not getting all the way here without someone knowing."

"If you say so..."

"If it'll make you feel any better, we're planning to station a few Slug Gunners here once we figure out how to mass-produce them."

"Now that sounds more like it."

"Glad to see you're liking 'em."

Once the President administers his biometrics, the doors unlock and slowly open like vault doors, allowing them access inside. Eagle and Damon step into a large white hall containing many pieces of American history within, some recognizable but most of them obscure. And clearly visible even from the doors are three separate bulletproof glass cases, one for each of the nation's founding documents. The pair of Secret Service guards who've been escorting them quietly stay outside to remain on guard as the vault doors close in behind them.

"So what is it that you wanna show me?" Damon asks, once he's done with a surveying glance of the hall.

"This."

Surprisingly, Eagle doesn't go over to one artifact or another to retrieve what he wants to show Damon - and in fact, he simply reaches into his pocket and produces a humble, somewhat crumpled piece of paper that Eagle neatly unfolds for him and tries to crease out as best he can without damaging the paper itself.

"Read it."

"Why'd you have to bring me all the fucking way here if you already had it on you this whole time?" Damon almost shouts incredulously.

"It's something I only want the two of us to know about for now, and this vault's the only 100% soundproof room in this whole damn place."

"Won't the boys outside be nervous that you're alone in a room with a guy wearing a superpowered exosuit?"

"You let me worry about that. Though, it did take a lot of talking to get them to allow it. They know that you've played a big part in why I'm President now, and if it weren't for that, the two outside would be in here with us, which I'm not so comfortable with."

Unsure of what to expect, Damon takes the paper from the President to start reading.

I don't know who'll find this document - I'm just leaving this here at Mt. Weather since it's likely someone who knows I'm going to be talking about will find it, if what I think will happen does happen.

I don't have much time so I'll get to the stuff I think's most important to be written. Yukari's up to something. I never trusted her to begin with, but because Losira did, I kept my mouth shut, and now here we are. I still don't have conclusive evidence that she's plotting something, but just know that I've been the one working to try to stop whatever she's trying to do.

Hank's gone dark. None of us know where he went. He's always been a quiet guy but he'd always let us know where he'd go, what he'd be up to, and now this is the first time he's gone off without telling anybody. Yukari's missing, presumably over in Okinawa with Sanford, but both of them have gone dark too.

I've been studying ship girls on my own after I convinced one of the core staff members on Moebius to send me a sample of what they've been working on over there. Initially I just wanted to see what they were up to out of curiosity, but the dude ended up sending me an entire sample ship girl's worth of data, so with that, I was able to see exactly what they've been doing and even use some of their work to complete the Metal Slug that I'd been working on in my spare time.

About the ship girls - they're much more human than what people'll give them credit for. I'd imagine that they'll be advertised as "androids" or whatever, but no, that's not quite accurate. When I say that they're "much more human" than people will think, I mean that there's a chance that they might actually have souls, if we're to assume that the Soul Theory is correct, which I personally believe in.

I've only been able to read some of the code that they've been using to program these ship girls with, but from what I understand, there are parts of their mental coding that shouldn't work the way they do. It's like a human eyeball still being able to see even though its retina is damaged - or I guess in this case, it's entirely missing. It just shouldn't work, yet it does. The most compelling case of this is the part of the code that handles consciousness - it's almost completely devoid of any code. Why would you include a portion of code for something that handles consciousness when even to this day, we still don't know exactly what part of the human brain or any living organism's brain handles and controls consciousness? And more to the point, if ship girls are going to be seen as androids, so more machine than human, why bother going through the efforts of giving them code that's supposed to control consciousness? Sanford isn't stupid, I know he'd've figured this out, yet he hasn't told me about it or shown any evidence that he's questioned it, so I assume he's on board with whatever's going on over there - or that Yukari threatened him to cooperate or die.

The way it looks like the ship girls are going to be structured mentally is that they're going to be able to remember everything about their memories as warships. Because if there weren't, there'd be evidence of memory modifiers that would imply that their memories are what are dictated by history, or at least what we know of it about them. But there are no such modifiers. So I'm inclined to believe that Yukari's behind all this, because if Sanford or someone else were in charge of coding, there would be clear limitations of what they can do because our own current technology can only go so far. This means that there's a chance that the ship girls Moebius is constructing actually don't end up how Sanford and the other staff want them to, but rather they end up how Yukari wants them to be because maybe their memories might not actually be what they should be. And given all the crazy shit Yukari's capable of doing and whatever the hell she's been doing on the other side, it's anybody's guess as to how the ship girls'll actually turn out once they're deployed.

It's impossible for me to know what Yukari's exactly up to. I've relayed this to Losira, who knows her the best out of all of us. She trusts her, and while she's listened to what I've had to say, she finds it hard to believe that she'd be doing any of this maliciously. Which, in all fairness, she might not be, but the fact of the matter is that she's a youkai from the parallel world screwing around with things that she has no business screwing around with, even if it is to help us out.

I'm pretty much convinced that Yukari's involved herself with Moebius so that she can play a decisive factor in how the ship girls will turn out. That's the whole reason why Losira asked Yukari to go help them out, because she knows that Yukari can figure out something for them, and the kicker comes in the fact that Yukari's been at work ever since. Losira described her as someone who's normally too lazy to put in work if she can help it, so the fact that Yukari's actually bothering to pitch in is extremely telling.

The one chance that Yukari isn't trying to be malicious with the way the ship girls are turning out is if she's doing all this because she genuinely feels like something big's going to happen. A.A.H.W. coming up with whatever they're doing by itself doesn't warrant Yukari getting involved in all this, so if she's not working to control the ship girls herself, she's doing it because she's seeing something that we don't, knowing something that we don't.

Normally I wouldn't even bother writing this down but I have a really bad feeling about everything that's been going on, and I can count how many times I've ever said that with one hand. Figured if my gut feeling's become this bad, I should at least write it down and keep it somewhere safe. Then again, no one's going to come all the way over here to Mt. Weather just to find this. And even if they do, it's probably too late.

hope it might still be useful for something, though.

Damon looks up from the sad, slightly-less-crumpled piece of old paper once he's done reading.

"Where'd you find this?"

Eagle, as if prepared for him to ask, raises up a browned, faded envelope, an ordinary mail envelope that's been neatly opened, presumably with a letter opener.

"One of the ladies at reception who's been working here for the past twenty years - she's still working there, I met her the first day I visited this place - showed me the letter when I asked her if there'd been anything strange or out of the ordinary in their archives that she happened to know about, and she showed me this. She said it'd been inside their archives even before they relocated here after the nukes, and staff didn't bother opening it since they figured it was something important and no one gave them any jurisdiction to do otherwise. So I asked to see it, opened it, and read it. And now I've had you do the same."

Glancing down at the old envelope in his hand, Eagle raises it again to eye level with two fingers.

"By the way, I assume you happen to know this name, right...?"

The President flips the letter around. On the bottom left corner, scribbled almost incomprehensively but still barely legible, is a small name.

-deimos