My Hero Automata

Chapters 137-139

Novus Peregrine

Obvious Disclaimer: I do not own My Hero Academia or Nier! Both stories would be very different if I did...

Chapter 137: Perspective

Yaoyorozu Kiyomi was both incredibly proud of her daughter, and incredibly bemused by just how she’d turned out. Not any one thing, mind you. No, it was how the entirety of little Momo’s existence seemed to be some sort of self-perpetuating circle powered by sheer will and a healthy dusting of genius. Like many children, Momo had decided she wanted to be a Hero. Normal enough, certainly, and she and her husband had been more than willing to indulge her. She did have the Quirk for it and, even if she gave it up, she’d gain the training needed to help her survive having that Quirk. A Quirk that half the world would cheerfully kill her or, much worse, kidnap and imprison her dear daughter for.

Life had proceeded apace, Momo showing Kiyomi’s own stubborn will in sticking to the Hero thing despite also keeping up with her training as the Yaoyorozu heiress. Then, when she’d already been pleased and proud of her daughter, Midoriya Izumi had hit all of their lives, less like a wrecking ball and more like five shots of espresso and an existential crisis. Within just a few years, somehow, her daughter and Izumi, along with 2B of course, had started shifting the bedrock of the entire world by introducing the HSN.

That alone had been a confusion circle of sorts. Momo had abruptly shifted gears to bring an entirely new company and worldwide industry to reality with a speed that still sort of boggled Kiyomi. For a time, she’d thought the two of them would give up on the Hero thing and focus on this massive new project…only to discover that they’d somehow still been making time to train. Then, just for good measure, they’d started getting themselves certified for various first responder situations and actively going out to start helping people at disaster sites.

Kiyomi and her husband had been unspeakably proud but equally baffled by just how their little girl was managing to balance training, running disaster relief efforts, and altering the fundamental underlying technology of the Hero System, all at the same time. While also, just because of course that wasn’t enough, discovering she was in love and lust with Izumi and embarking on a whirlwind romance that almost made Kiyomi jealous! Despite, she might add, the fact that she was incredibly happy with her husband, who was a horrible softy of a romantic and pampered her shamelessly!

So, daughter of industrialists, turned hero obsessed child, turned inventor, turned disaster relief coordinator, all before the age of 18. Kiyomi had legitimately thought that going to UA of all places might actually slow the two forces of nature that were her daughter and her daughter’s girlfriend down. Nope! Of course not! Instead, they’d been swept fully into the Hero world in just a few months, repelling major villain attacks, taking down major criminal enterprises, and becoming so monstrously strong that they were compared frequently to All Might!

Why, it was enough to make one wonder if their real Quirks were actually ‘be the protagonist of a superhero story!’

Of course, now the circle had once again spun, as a literal alien invasion decided that her daughter needed to be an industrialist after all, and the two of them were building an entire new industry in space. In the process, she and Izumi just incidentally becoming possibly the two most important people on the planet, since half of the things keeping the planet going against the invaders were their work! For once, she was actually slightly glad that things had gone a bit wrong with Momo’s birth and she couldn’t have any more kids. Because if, somehow, she’d produced another one like Momo she was fairly certain reality would have just packed it up and wandered off rather than putting up with another one of them.

So, yes. Very proud.

Also very baffled.

Also, also, very, very busy.

After all, her daughter, Izumi, and 2B were all three the sorts of geniuses that tended to randomly create world-altering inventions, then forget about them on a shelf. Literally, actually. When the two were younger she’d started to make routine checks to make sure they hadn’t accidentally invented something insane again, and on seventeen separate occasions had ended up filing patents for devices the pair had simply forgotten about as ‘not important enough.’ Yet which were, in reality, the sorts of things that normally changed entire industries and made their creators billions of yen. Worse, or better, it was hard to say, those handful of patents she’d filed for them didn’t even cover the dozens of additional major patents that they did remember.

The vast majority of which fell firmly into her purview.

What all too many people didn’t realize when they looked at the pair’s accomplishments was that, for every shiny new toy, the genius trio of Momo, Izumi and 2B tended to produce a dozen entirely new component parts. New chemical processes, new metamaterials, vastly superior microchip architectures. Occasionally, entirely new fields of science. For every new product released by Aegis Inc, there was a need to figure out just what else could be done with all the shiny new things that had made it possible.

Which, of course, was where Yaoyorozu Industries came in.

Her husband was the head of the entire Yaoyorozu Group, it fell to him to manage their widely dispersed assets and the dozens of subcompanies that fell under the overall umbrella of the Group. Kiyomi, who had originally been a brilliant researcher working for one of their R&D companies when a much younger Yaoyorozu Hideki had met her and promptly fallen head-over-heels, had eventually ended up as the head of Yaoyorozu Industries. It was the largest single company under their umbrella, the original manufacturing company that had been founded while the world was trying to pull itself back together after the Quirk Wars. Large enough to have its own subsidiaries, Kiyomi hadn’t really wanted to end up in charge of it. She’d just sort of ended up needing to, when her daughter and Izumi kept rewriting the rules for numerous entire industries worth of materials science.

Now, there was barely a single division left untouched by the changes in processes and advances in materials that had come about from filtering Izumi and Momo’s successes into the company’s production lines. Something which was proving a new level of hell now, as the slow process of trickling those materials and processes out to the rest of the world needed to be accelerated. Originally, even aside from retaining their own edge, they just hadn’t been able to provide all of what the girls made to the rest of the world without crashing a dozen different industrial sectors and wrecking havoc on the world economy.

Not willing or able to just shove it all out there on the internet, they’d focused on those new materials and methods that would make the biggest difference and slowly filtered them out by licensing out production to various other manufacturers. Several of the new alloys and the means to make them cheaply had made their way into various industries as a result, without upsetting the apple cart too far. As had new completed products. Things like vastly improved solar panels, better cybernetics, and several major improvements to the microchip manufacturing process. The last of which had caused the biggest worldwide upset. Izumi and Momo had designed a chip twice as powerful as the previous best on the market, that could be made with facilities that cost a tenth of what the previous best had. The scary part, of course, was that Kiyomi new their own in-house-only designs they used for the HSN were five times more powerful than that.

Sighing as she forced herself to stop reflecting on how ridiculous her life now was, she got back to work on figuring out how to give more technology away faster. Something she’d never thought would be a problem. Turns out that trying to manage an uplift on all of humanity in the middle of an alien invasion? Significantly more difficult than just helping run what was now the single most successful and profitable company on the planet.

Still not as hard as teaching Momo how to cook had been, at least. That girl might be a genius, but she’d been even more hopeless there than Kiyomi herself had once been in the kitchen…

… … …

Inko was delighted that she was finally getting to meet her little girl’s other paramour! Kyoka had joined them only after the Invasion had begun, and thus they had all be quite busy, but she’d certainly heard plenty of lovely things about the young Heroine! She was positively adorable, too! It might have been better if they’d found a young man they were willing to be with, so she’d get grandbabies to spoil, but she’d long since realized that her own Izumi had no real interest in men. Dear Momo was a bit more open to such things, but entirely loyal to her Izumi. As she should be!

Ah, well. Since Izumi and 2B were effectively immortal-until-killed, it perhaps wasn’t as terrible that they didn’t want to contribute to the next generation. She had little doubt her daughters would find a way to extend Momo’s life as well, and perhaps it was for the best not to create an entire family of immortals just so she could spoil grandbabies?

It would be worth it, though…

Well, never mind that! All three of them seemed happy together, and that’s what really mattered. Even if poor Kyoka was clearly less comfortable than the others. That wouldn’t do at all, but she had the cure for that.

“Kyoka, dear? Do you want to see pictures of Izumi and Momo when they were younger? They were both adorable.”

Ah, the look on her daughter’s and Momo’s face was perfect. This, too, was a mother’s duty…

… … …

Akira hadn’t realized who had been in her and Kiki’s not-so-little street shop until Kiki had cheerfully identified them afterward, causally stating they were surprisingly nice for ‘such important people.’ An explanation later, and a disbelieving search on the ‘net, had made Akira freak out just a little. Not that she was going to admit that to anyone but Kiki, or mention to anyone ever that the famous duo who owned Aegis Inc had been slumming it among the night crowd of the Neo Ge Market. She supposed her own disbelief at the two increasingly famous Heroines/Inventors being there was, most likely, the reason that they hadn’t been recognized and swarmed in the first place.

They and their apparently second lover had been remarkable normal.

You know, aside from the whole lesbian threesome thing they apparently had going on. Which, you go girls! Kiki was enough for Akira, but damn if all three of them hadn’t been gorgeous. Doubly so once they’d gotten them all fitted out in proper style. She hadn’t been kidding with that comment she’d embarrassingly let slip. That leggy, muscly ravenette could ride her face anytime and she was sure Kiki would forgive her. Doubly so if Kiki got a chance to join in. Pity they seemed to be exclusive.

Not really the point though.

Actually, she wasn’t sure there was a point. Other than the fact it was sort of nice to see that some of the big shots handling the whole Alien Invasion thing were actually super cute and down-to-Earth. The world was changing in a lot of ways, and unlike Kiki, Akira paid attention. She was smart enough to keep her fool head down, her Compressed Space Quirk that let them take down and put up a larger shop than most. Her Quirk was good by almost any standard, it allowing them to store most of the shop in a single trunk, but she sure as hell wasn’t a combatant. She kept on top of the underground news feeds, though. The shadow feeds that told it like it was rather than trying to frame the war outside the city in as positive a light as possible.

She was pretty sure the world wasn’t going back to the way it had been before the monsters.

Not anytime soon, and maybe not ever. Secretly, guiltily, she thought that maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing, though. The world before was…okay. A hell of a lot less dangerous and way better than the Era of Chaos, but…well, nothing like the Neo Ge Market could have happened back then. In a lot of ways, it seemed like her homeland hadn’t learned anything from two hundred plus years of chaos and horribleness. Under All Might’s protection, the government had tried to go right back to how things worked before the Quirk Wars.

Which, okay, that was sort of good in that it meant the economy had stabilized and most people had regained a pretty decent standard of living. The villains honestly hadn’t been that much worse, most of the time, than pre-Quirk Yakuza, really. Not for the average person, at least. Yet....

Yet, they’d brought back the bad with the good, too.

They had, for some god-awful reason she didn’t understand, tried to bring back Japan’s tradition of societal conformity along with all the other stuff. Quirk usage laws in other parts of the world were way looser than here in Japan, just for one thing, and discrimination against those with ‘Weak Quirks’ or the Quirkless like Kiki? Absolutely awful. All Might had managed to usher in an Era of Peace, all right, but it had been a horribly stagnant one. One in which the powers that be had actively tried to crush counter-culture movements like their own.

The Era of Chaos had induced a deep-seated fear of change in the powers that be.

As horrible as the monsters were, as terrible as the death counts were, a guilty part of Akira was aware that she considered life better now than it had been before the Invasion started. At least, with an obvious enemy to all mankind at the Gates, there were a lot less people willing to fight over the small differences that, as far as Akira was concerned, made humans people. She didn’t know if it would last, humans could be awfully terrible to each other no matter the circumstances. But for now, at least, most of the world had fallen into an ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ mentality that left the most unlikely of people helping their fellow man out.

She just had to hope that, when the dust settled, assuming they were all still alive, that it was people like those three girls left in charge of whatever remained of Earth…

Chapter 138: The Forge

It had taken almost a month and a half to get the Forge fully online. It was still an amazing, and expected, time frame. Even a somewhat useful one, truth be told. Mostly since it meant, by the end of their work, some basic gravity plating had been worked out by researchers on Orbit 1. The vast majority of the manufacturing space of Forge 1 would remain Zero-G, of course, it being a boon to many of the processes they wanted the Forge to handle. But the parts of the 1.2 kilometer-long space station that would see regular traffic by people now had crude gravity plating capable of producing roughly .57 gravities. Still nowhere close to a the standard 1g of Earth, but far better than trying to work in Zero-G, or even the .16 gravity the moon had. It was projected as enough to allow longer-term occupation of the stations, so long as the crew did some basic exercises, and the people still working on the grav plating project would undoubtedly get a better model working in time.

Strictly speaking, it had actually only taken them three weeks to get the majority of Forge 1 built. The other three weeks of their time since had been spent working with multiple teams, troubleshooting how to make manufacturing work in space. Some things were obvious, even easier to do in Zero-G than on Earth. But there were a whole host of tools and processes that had just flat-out never been intended to work without gravity keeping everything together. Anything with fluid needed to be pressurized, for example, just to keep the fluid flowing, since gravity wasn’t there to do the job for you. Likewise, a conveyor belt couldn’t count on gravity keeping its cargo where it was supposed to be, Zero-G molds always needed to be fully 3D and sealed lest what you were pouring into them wandered off, and so on.

They had, of course, put as much thought into such things as they realistically could, down on the ground. There had, in fact, between several entire teams whose job it had been to try and predict all the problems that their highly-modular production lines would face once they got Forge 1 up and running. Those teams, however, hadn’t had nearly long enough to find every issue, which meant they’d expected from the start to need to do a great deal of troubleshooting as they started installing things and testing their designs.

They’d been right, of course, but they’d also had the people in place already ready to tackle the problems as they were found. Some of who had already been experimenting aboard Orbit 2 with simple version of the mechanisms and refining what they had. With Momo to provide custom parts for the solutions to each problems, they’d eventually gotten all of Forge 1’s production bays up and running, already starting to turn out test runs of things like RADS arrays and munitions that there was no end of need for.

That part of things was no longer in their hands, though. Other people would be prioritizing what to make and figuring out how to do so most efficiently. An ever-shifting target that would radically alter as they brought more and more capacity online. Thankfully, there were experts for that, as Momo, Izumi and 2B had other projects in mind. Important ones that were the reason one entire, sizable, deck of Forge 1 was theirs. Given that they had funded and built the station, no one had been able to argue with them about getting it, particularly when they’d rightfully pointed out that the reason they wanted it was for advanced R&D that would help against the Empire.

There was only so much time budgeted before they would need to get working on Refinery 1, of course, but they were intent on making the most of it.

“Okay, run it again 2B! Hopefully that loose connection was the issue!”

Izumi had pulled away from the incredibly complex set of servers, having engaged in the age-old solution of Emergency Percussive Maintenance to not-so-gently encourage two components to properly align. This really should have been the job for an entire team, and she had only 2B and Momo to help. The entire thing wasn’t quite jury-rigged, the precision needed for the complex servers just too tight for anything like that. But it was thousands of components put together by too few people in too little time. The attached single-unit assembler had worked once, already. Something evidenced by the fact that 2B was currently inhabiting a barely-altered version of her original body.

As in, fully up to spec and only modded to the tiny degree needed so that 2B could link with it remotely instead of embodying herself into a Black Box. For better or worse, 2B was a Quirk now, not her original android self. Which meant that one of the things they’d needed to do was invent a Quantum Entanglement Comm using Momo’s own utterly bullshit Quirk to create material that was already Quantum Entangled in specific ways. Something that had taken them years of work to produce even a single working set of units. 2B’s body was very non-disposable as a result. While 2B herself would survive, if the QEC wasn’t recoverable, it would take them additional years to make another for her to inhabit the body remotely with zero latency again.

Then, of course, there was the body itself.

Their previous best efforts had been able to produce an android body for 2B roughly on par with what the Resistance or main line Army of Humanity units used in her old world. Far better than a baseline human, but a significant qualitative drop from even the most basic of YoRHa Units. Even that level had only been possible with Momo providing some of the parts, since the tools to make the tools to make the tools just didn’t exist on this Earth. Their personal workshop had the most advanced tools they’d managed to produce so far, but those were still five or six generations short of being able to make even the cruder Pre-YoRHa android models.

Being in orbit changed that.

A lot.

YoRHa had possessed far more orbital infrastructure than just the Bunker. The original reverse engineering to make YoRHa Black Boxes, for example, had taken place Pre-YoRHa on Kaguya Station, the Army of Humanity’s sixth orbital base and research facility. Of course, humanity was long extinct by then, so it was previous android generations that had been doing the reverse engineering, and that particular orbital base had been destroyed in the attempt. An entire new orbital base, called simply the ‘Lab,’ had been created five years later and eventually succeeded in completing the Black Boxes that would enable YoRHa to operate as it did. A combination of micro-fusion powerplant, made stable with Maso tech, and an uplink that prevented the android intelligence from truly dying, it was the Black Box that had made YoRHa-type androids actually possible.

They could also only be made in space.

The same was actually true of the unique metals that made up a YoRHa combat frame. Though, thankfully, the process of making those metals was actually far easier once you had space in, while, space, to do so. Meaning that, once they had a lab which could freely access a Zero-G environment and be placed in vacuum at will, they were suddenly able to make 2B’s original combat body for the first time. They had, of course, promptly and secretly done so. Then, they’d run off a second set of parts, for a body that was currently resting in the assembler.

“Connection is reporting green, Izumi. Are…are we sure we want to do this? We don’t know how she’ll react. Not with the changes that we’ve made and little knowledge of what happened after my death.”

It wasn’t Izumi that responded, but Momo, who was standing beside 2B’s body. She reached over to squeeze the android’s shoulder, knowing that 2B was conflicted about what they were about to do.

“We’ve trodden the philosophical and practical grounds over and over, 2B. You know the conclusion we all reached together. There’s no going back at this point. It’s both the practical and the right thing to do.”

2B nodded and, with manifest reluctance, began physically entering a number of command codes. This system was air-gapped and shielded in such a way that not even she and Izumi’s cyberpathy could interface with it. For damn good reasons. There were other cyberpaths out there, after all, and anyone other than them getting access to this system could create a catastrophe on par with the Invasion already happening. After all, they were about to do something that Izumi and 2B had debated the ethics of since Izumi was a child. With it being Izumi, as a child, who had questioned the ethics of what they’d realized they might, someday, be capable of.

Whatever entity had saved 2B from the Void and plugged her into Izumi as a Quirk, had turned 2B into an Ark. It had taken them half a decade to even realize it and, to be honest, they weren’t even sure that the entity had meant to do it. The data had been buried deep in the giant repository of everything YoRHa had known, prior to 2B’s death.

Including the final uncorrupted backups of other YoRHa androids.

The data’s inclusion seeming almost incidental in the large picture, yet that little detail had caused thousands of hours of debate between Izumi, 2B, and eventually Momo. They were the only three people who knew about it. Izumi and 2B hadn’t even told Inko, so unsure had they been about what to do with the complex topic and not wanting to burden her with something so…ethically complex. Part of them, of course, had wanted from the start to let those people exist again. Yet, there were issues with that, as all the data belonged to YoRHa androids.

Unlike more normal androids, the ethics that had gone into the creation of YoRHa was sketchy as a lizard with tits. The ‘emotions are prohibited’ thing that Inko and their psychiatrist had needed years to unravel and deal with regarding 2B was, just as one example, YoRHa specific. The people behind the ethically dubious YoRHa project had specifically done so do prevent the now-quasi-immortal androids from acting like the ‘venerable’ humanity all androids were meant to serve. Essentially, they had come so close to reproducing human everything, that they were legitimately afraid that the YoRHa androids would cross some invisible line and start acting fully human. Something that was outright heretical to the androids who designed them in the first place. The need to serve mankind was hardwired in all previous android models. With the YoRHa units, they were afraid that they would be able to overcome that need. Something doubly dangerous since they were intended to eventually be sacrificed from the start.

That fear of them becoming a bit too human wasn’t even misplaced. Not based on the number of times that 2E, 2B’s real model number even if she didn’t choose to identify herself as such, could attest from painful experience. She’d had to execute her partner 9S, 47 times in just a three-year span. Each time because he’d gone ‘off the reservation’ and started self-actualizing in an erratic, destructive way that was very, very human. He’d discover that humanity was extinct, self-actualize into trying to do something about the lie by destroying YoRHa, and then need to be executed.

Those executions were, themselves, unethical as hell. It had taken years for 2B to understand that she hadn’t been the one at fault. She’d literally been created and programmed with the purpose of doing that job, with far less freedom to defy those orders than a Scanner Unit like 9S, with his type having far looser restrictions in order to do their job. It had taken even longer for 2B to come to terms with the fact that her feelings for 9S were inextricably linked to her guilt. Perhaps, had she not been his handler, it could have someday been something healthy. As it was, there was far too much emotional baggage to ever have anything like a stable relationship with the other android.

Nor was the potentially unstable nature of the YoRHa Units limited to that order about emotions. All combat models had been designed to take pleasure in combat. All androids, period, had been designed to take orders from humans, any humans, period. Recreating any of them using the backups that had come with 2B’s data dump of YoRHa’s total, combined knowledge was…problematic, at best. Very problematic. Nor, unfortunately, had YoRHa itself known how to create new android intelligences. That ability had rested elsewhere, on purpose, in case the YoRHa project went fully rogue.

The conclusion they’d come to, in the end, had been that the only way they could realistically bring any of the other YoRHa androids back was to alter their programming. To go in and manually strip out the forced service to humanity, to remove all of the emotional limiters and AI shackles…then hope for the best. Even then, doing that was sufficiently morally dubious that they’d originally decided not to open that particular can of worms.

You know, before an Alien Invasion had forced them to reconsider everything and debate the morality of the issue again.

This time, the result of that debate had come down in a different direction. Tentatively, at least. Strictly speaking, removing the limiters and giving the YoRHa operatives a new lease on life, one where they could make their own choices on whether to help or not? That much was fine, morally and ethically speaking. The problem, of course, was that YoRHa Units weren’t always all the most stable of individuals, and it was possible they’d end up producing near All-Might level Villains instead of allies of humanity. They could even end up with a Rogue AI of the ‘protect humanity by imprisoning them so they don’t run with scissors’ variety. An unfortunate possibility which had, combined with the fact they were very arguably creating life, been enough to stay their hand without a very good reason. The problem, of course, being that they now had a very good reason.

Which meant they needed to be careful who they choose and do them just a few at a time. Which is exactly what they were doing right now, in a nice, isolated lab well away from Earth. With, moreover, three people present who could suppress even any combat model they transferred over as a test case, if they went crazy. All three of them tensed, watching the servers as 2B finished the long sequence of command codes and Izumi physically plugged in with a wrist-mounted cord that led to her own Quirk-created augmentations. This time, instead of crashing mid-startup, the data transfer from the repository in Izumi’s Quirk began properly. The massive rack of high-capacity, custom servers needed to house an AI Hub of android backups lighting up like a blue-and-white Christmas tree.

“Core Hub is…stable. Backups coming online…now also stable. Tertiary standbys reporting powered. Data uplink in progress.”

A long few minutes went by as two progress bars appeared, the first showing the transfer from Izumi’s Quirk to the Hub, which would house the new backups. The Hub they’d constructed could handle a solid four dozen YoRHa-units. Which, frankly, they’d be doing good to find that many who were stable enough to ‘wake up’ out of the database.

2B thought most of the Operators would be fine, and they would be invaluable in helping take the growing strain of 2Bs attempts to connect various worldwide logistics networks. Not to mention in providing overwatch for any YoRHa field combat teams, as well as for elite groups of Heroes who still lacked very many trained individuals capable of that sort of person-in-the-chair support. Of the combat units, 2B was far less certain. Though it was one of them that they would be waking first. A specific unit that 2B had found a great deal of classified information on in the repository. If there were any of the combat androids that could adapt it would be her. After all, as a prototype model, she’d never actually been subject to the emotional suppression rules in the first place…

It was the second progress bar that they were really watching, of course. It was showing transfer of the initial copy over to the android body. Inside the Hub, the backups weren’t really ‘awake.’ It was just data at that point. At least with YoRHa units, it was only once their current backup was synched into an appropriate body that they ‘woke up.’ Why there had even been a backup of this particular android was a puzzle even 2B had no answer for, as she’d been disconnected from the YoRHa network for years. Though, considering the database she’d been provided including other information that would have only been known to specific mostly-disconnected androids? The odds were that the entity in the Void had simply done something like copy ‘All YoRHa knowledge,’ instead of copying a specific database.

Two progress bars finished one after another.

The android body in the assembly cradle twitched to life.

A2 opened her eyes and took one look at Momo before speaking.

“Damnit, 2B. Couldn’t you find humans that weren’t being invaded by aliens? At least there’s no machines this time. There aren’t any machines, right? I’m really done with fighting those. Oh, and if you wake Commander White up, you better let me stab that bitch.”

Nonplused at the string of statements, eventually 2B managed a reply.

“We are not intending to awaken anyone from Command. They are too complicit in the things that were wrong with YoRHa.”

A2 nodded.

“Good. Now, when to I start killing stuff? At least this time, there are really humans to protect…”

Momo and Izumi looked at each other. This had gone…well? Probably? They both supposed they’d find out in time. Though it was going to be very awkward to answer questions about where the hyper-advanced combat Androids had come from. Hopefully, it would take a little while for anyone to notice. Better to ask forgiveness than permission. Right?

Chapter 139: Some Adjustments Necessary

A2 had only been alive again for a week, and she was still getting used to the idea that humans weren’t just alive, but that they were everywhere. Despite her desires to get right to defending humanity, this time a humanity she could see and touch, her new…bosses? Friends? Allies? Honestly, she didn’t even know what Midoriya and Yaoyorozu were to her. She’d woken to find that the supposedly hardcoded requirement that she serve mankind was just gone. But that didn’t change the fact that, for the entirety of A2’s existence, that had been her purpose.

In the very last days, before she’d struck down the crazed 9S, she’d learned from him that it had all be a lie. That humanity had long been extinct and they were fighting for...not quite nothing. But almost nothing. Their makers world, she supposed. For the last orders of their creators and the defeat of those that had erased them. In truth, she hadn’t really lived long enough after that to have come fully to terms with it. Which made the fact she was now dealing with billions of humans, at least in the abstract, rather thoroughly overwhelming.

Honestly, as much as she knew that having 2B take her around, introducing her to humans that were ‘in the know’ or at least wouldn’t care what she was, made sense? She really sort of wished they’d just given her a sword and dropped her somewhere with a lot of monsters to kill. That would be way easier than trying not to fry her new body’s central processors working through just what being in a whole new reality, with plenty of humans everywhere, was going to mean for her personally.

She was, at least, fairly content with the idea of protecting them. Honestly, while she’d come to hate most of YoRHa for her betrayal by Command, she’d never once extended that hatred to humanity. She supposed she might have, without the built in reverence for them and belief that they were alive, but she’d had those things hardwired into her code until after she’d already learned they were gone. Meaning she’d leveled her hatred equally at the Machines and YoRHa, not at humans that had been long gone before she’d ever been assembled.

So, yeah, defaulting to ‘protect the humans’ seemed like a good place to start to her. She just wished that doing so wasn’t going to be so complicated. The two operator units, Operator 21O and Operator 60, were going to be the first introduced properly to other humans, rather than pretending they were human themselves. The two were going to be presented as ‘sisters’ of 2B that were intended to help with logistics control and overwatch guidance for elite teams. A2 herself, once she’d gone through all this familiarization nonsense with 2B to make sure she could interact with humans properly, would be similarly introduced as the sole ‘combat test unit.’

The humans here were leery of Artificial Intelligences. Rightfully so, as far as A2 was concerned, given that the Machines had been a runaway version of the same thing. But it meant that they were likely to be uncertain what to do with A2. She’d been warned that some of them would likely try to treat her like a lesser being. Which she was supposed to be, it had been really disorienting for her to have two humans firmly telling her that such wasn’t true. That she was just as sentient and just as important as they were.

She was still trying to process that.

Heck, she might not have made it off the Forge station without frying her CPUs without 2B transferring her a lot of data from her own time effectively growing up with humans. That data was a hell of a head trip, particularly given she still had most of 2B’s pre-transfer memories stored as well, and could compare the wildly different mindset that she had slowly grown into to who she had known 2B as. Of course, the fact that her humans, or 2B’s humans at least, were so amazing just made the idea that they were worth protecting more true. Even if there were also plenty of examples of bad humans in the provided data transfer.

Which was another weird thought.

Humans had always been held up as the perfect, honorable, creators. She’d known, intellectually and from bits and pieces of recovered human lore as she’d traveled alone for years, that some of that was propaganda. Yet being faced with a society of humans that, while mostly good, also had both Villains and corruption was more than a bit disorienting and disappointing. Thankfully, there was enough good among them, including these ‘Heroes’ that were so important in their world, that it hadn’t truly shattered her beliefs about humans. It had just…rearranged them a little. Made them seem more like androids, really.

Which, she supposed made sense. The humans had made them in their own image. Even if Yaoyorozu had winced and told her it probably would be better if she didn’t phrase things exactly that way. Something about an Earth religion that wouldn’t take it well? To be honest, religion wasn’t one of the things that androids had retrained a lot of information about. Though the fact that separating the soul from the body had gone so very wrong for the humans of her reality might indicate that the they might have wanted to pay a bit more attention to such things.

Doubly so for androids, come to think of it, since 2B’s story about what could only be some sort of afterlife meant that they might have souls. Though, if she was still the same A2 that had died…she didn’t know. She wanted to say ‘yes,’ since there shouldn’t have been a backup of her at all. Meaning something, that entity that 2B had encountered most likely, must have somehow copied her data without a working uplink or a server hub to send the data to.

…

…

Okay, yeah, that was one existential crisis that she could safely put on hold. She needed to learn how to deal with humans better first. ‘Mama Inko’ had been an…interesting experience. Now, 2B was taking her to someplace called the Neo Ge Market? To meet some sort of sub-variants of humans? How many more could there be?! These ‘Quirk’ things already made them come in such weird shapes and sizes! Really, more strongly than ever, she was hoping someone would just give her a sword and tell her to kill something…

… … …

2B’s feelings, as she showed a very clearly bewildered A2 through the Neo Ge Market, introducing her ‘sister’ to Akira and Kiki and watching A2 panic a bit under Kiki’s energy, were mixed to say the least. Admittedly, she was taking a certain amount of quiet amusement out of watching the previously-rogue android get overwhelmed by the enthusiastic human girl who was playing dress-up with her. Yet, at the same time, she was being shown rather painfully starkly just how…broken…she herself had once been. How all of YoRHa had been.

It, thankfully, wasn’t nearly as apparent with the Operator Units as it was with A2. It had been good, if very strange, to hear Operator 6O’s voice again. It was only now that she’d experienced so much more as part of Izumi’s world, that she understood Operator 6O’s incredibly upbeat and personable everything had probably been all that had kept 2B sane in her original world. At the time, she’d never quite understood why she put up with the annoyingly extroverted Operator’s blatant disregard of the ‘emotions are forbidden’ rule. Now, with years of therapy and ‘growing up’ in a human environment, she understood that her past self had clung unconsciously to 6O’s friendly bothering of her as a lifeline. 6O had, routinely, called to chat with her between missions, even crying on 2B’s shoulder when another Operator turned her down for a date of all things.

It had been…normal.

A sort of normal 2B hadn’t even known or understood was normal. Even more critically, Operator 6O had known, as 2B’s handler, what 2B had done. About all the times she’d been forced to kill 9S. Yet she’d been friendly anyway. Had cared for 2B, done her best to connect to her, and never treated her as…well, as the murderer and assassin she had been. Through all the executions, through the resets of 9S, through all the close calls, Operator 6O had been her only consistent companion. One whose cheerful outlook on life had been a balm to the soul 2B hadn’t even been sure she had.

In retrospect, 6O’s loss to the logic virus had been more painful than any of 9S’s deaths, despite having had to kill 9S so horribly many times herself. That was…something she was going to have to unpack later, with Dr. Tsumaki’s help. Actually, she probably needed to try and get both Operators and especially A2, their own appointments with said therapist.

Their still-instinctive reflex to trust humans would probably help her sort them out more easily, even if it would mean they’d probably need to make some more explanations to the psychiatrist. It was probably a very good thing that they’d decided to just put the woman on retainer after the Invasion, the woman becoming the therapist for Kyoka, along with any of the R&D team members that had breakdowns under the pressure of trying to save the world through ‘Science!’. They might need to find their therapist a therapist of her own at this point, though. Even if the woman seemed remarkable stable, 2B wasn’t sure how much of that was an act at this point, given that the whole world was in crisis…

Regardless, amusement and sadness were only two of the many emotions 2B was awash with as she watched the befuddled A2 get dressed up in a various styles of ‘neo punk’ clothing. Fear was there, too. Fear that history would repeat itself. That by introducing the same tools her world’s humans had attempted to fight the enemy with, she was dooming this world’s humans too. The ache of old failures. Trepidation that she’d have to face some who truly knew her past, though Operator 6O’s reaction has soothed that at least a little. Pity, longing, resentment.

The ghosts of the past were bringing with them so many conflicted emotions now that they were no longer ghosts. Yet…determination, hope, and a sort of peace were all there too. It wasn’t all bad, not even remotely. She was determined to make her fears fail to manifest, hopeful that her sisters of YoRHa would be able to serve and save this humanity when they’d never had a true chance of saving theirs. Peace that those like Operator 6O, and even A2 who had so hated YoRHa for their betrayal of her, did not blame her for what had come to pass.

Pandora’s Box was open now, she supposed, and it only remained to be seen if hope was greater than any evil they might have unleashed in opening it…

… … …

Operator 6O was so excited! There were so many humans. Humans everywhere! Even ones that didn’t mind her asking about all the things humans did on Earth! She’d been afraid that, waking up in a Space Station again, she’d be stuck there! But nope! As soon as she’d asked, Izu and Momo had taken her straight down to meet Kiyomi! Momo’s mom was totally awesome! Sure, she’d seemed a little overwhelmed at first, but then she’d introduced 6O to heatpats!

Headpats were the best.

6O’s brain just shut off and basked in the sensation when she got headpats! And then Kiyomi would answer all the questions that she’d asked! It was the perfect system! Oh, oh, and 2B was here, and she’d done all sorts of interesting things! She’d even made sure 6O got to see actual flowers! It was so nice that 2B had remembered she’d been interested in what flowers were like!

Sure, there was a whole Invasion thing going on. But, really, that was just how things went, wasn’t it? Operator 6O was cheerfully running background processes helping streamline the hackjob of an information network 2B had made! Oh, it was passable, better than this age’s humans had managed on their own. But, well, trust a combat model to just brute force everything. 6O and 21O had already improved network traffic flow by 17 percent, and they weren’t even officially working yet!

Now, she just had to find out how human horoscopes worked! Oh, and maybe get a date! Wait, would it be wrong to date a human? That seemed like maybe it was too high a standard for her, but Kiyomi had said she was cute? She’d see what her horoscope said! Maybe it would have a hint if she should try and date a human or not? She could ask Kiyomi, too!

Ahhhhhhhh, this was sooo awesome! She was giving 2B all the headpats! Now that she knew what headpats were like, she knew 2B needed a bunch of them! The poor combat model had always been way too serious and stressed out! Even if she was better now, she was still all stoic and uptight. Hmmmm, maybe she could get 2B onto that dating thing. Yeah, that was it! Surely two androids dating a human would make it more equal, right?! Humans might be better and stuff, but she bet there would be some that would accept it if there were two androids to the one of them to make it more equal! Now, she just had to figure out how to get 2B to agree to it!

This was going to be sooooo awesome…

… … …

Operator 21O was, she had to admit, both impressed and overwhelmed. Unlike her flighty colleague who was already likely causing havoc for the humans with her airheadedness, 21O had chosen to stay on Forge 1 to build her understanding of this new world she’d found herself in. The Quick Start Archive that 2B had provided to bring new androids up to date had been surprisingly comprehensive, at least for something made by a combat model. But then, unlike her own erratic charge, 2B had always been remarkably competent at whatever she did.

That didn’t mean she’d done things the way that 21O would have, of course. Even just basic optimization of the brute force methods that had gone into this HSN network had already significantly lightened the strain that it was under. Admittedly, the network itself was quite well done on the hardware side, at least. Sure, it was archaic by her standards, but she’d compared it to what the humans were using and found that her colleague’s humans had done an excellent job in bridging what they’d already had and what YoRHa had been using. It wasn’t their fault that this whole dimensional travel thing had apparently placed them thousands of years behind the technology curve. Really, the humans and the oddly competent combat model had done pretty good with what they’d had to work with.

Of course, pretty good wasn’t nearly enough. Not when this was 21O’s second chance to save a version of humanity. This world still had plenty of them around, and they’d even gotten an upgrade so that some of them were more survivable than others. Now she just had to figure out the best way to optimize keeping them alive. Without, of course, falling afoul of trying to control them. Hmmmm, she had once been offered a position at the Lab, working on prototype YoRHa units. She’d only declined as she couldn’t bring herself to force anyone else to take up her role in watching 9S get his fool ass axed repeatedly for being too curious.

Yes, she could work that angle. The humans had done quite a good job with this Shieldmaiden mech that they’d made, given the time crunch they’d been under. But none of them, not even Ms. Midoriya and Ms. Yaoyorozu’s team, actually knew how to properly work with the materials they could now make at Forge 1. So she’d just open this design file here, set some parameters, and…

A nearby holoscreen flickered to life as the rough projection of a new mech titled the Prometheus began to take shape…

… … …

-Lemon Starts Here-

Izumi moaned as the rapid beating of Kyoka’s heart thrummed sonic vibrations through the specially made strapon that Momo was slowly fucking her with. Their punk lover was herself floating weightlessly, anchored to Izumi at the lips as they made out, moans slipping from her lips too as Momo ate her out. With Momo holding onto Izumi’s hips, using Float to anchor her in the Zero-G space of their deck on Forge 1, the trio made a floating triangle that would have been nearly impossible in proper gravity.

Momo, the only one of them who had leverage via her Quirk, was using Izumi’s body like a sex doll, pure muscle power pumping her pussy up and down the shaft of the vibrating toy that was pulsing inside both of them in time with their mutual lover’s heartbeat. Meanwhile, Kyoka herself was held in place by wrapping her legs around Momo’s face, the ravenette teasingly eating her out even as she womanhandled Izumi. The punkette has anchored again to Izumi by wrapping her arms around Izumi’s shoulders as they made out.

Sex in Zero-G was turning out to be a fun experiment. Though Izumi had already promised herself she’d find a way to maneuver better so she could take charge of their next attempt. Perhaps some sort of tentacle rig she could control with her technopathy? A problem for when her mind wasn’t hazed over with pleasant pleasure. As it was, she was content to let Momo set the pace this time, her first lover slowly picking up speed as her self-control started failing under the onslaught of her own pleasure.

Kyoka whimpered, even as Momo started more harshly thrusting into Izumi. Despite her usual ability to split her attention, Momo tended to start hyper-focusing when she got close. Despite her own distraction as Momo pounded her, Izumi helped the punkette out by finding her pierced nipples and tugging firmly, replacing the pleasure lost from Momo’s distraction with a new source. The abrupt new form of stimulation was enough that Kyoka was the first to lose it, lips pulling away from Izumi’s and arms tightening around her as she came, hard.

The wild, erratic heartbeat that Kyoka’s orgasm sent pulsing through the double-ended strapon kicked Momo off next, and the extra harsh thrust of the toy that hammered at Izumi’s womb, hitting extra deep, set Izumi off right after her. All three of them howled their ecstasy to the otherwise empty deck, before releasing each other subconsciously and starting to float apart. There was a particularly lewd noise as the strapon slid out of Izumi, causing all three of them to mentally reboot a bit. Izumi, once she regained her wits, grinned as she started figuring out how to use the fact she was drifting toward a wall to her advantage. She’d need to angle it just right to push off an capture Kyoka, who was still connected to Momo by her jacks in turn.

“Well, that was a nice round one! Now, lets see what other fun we can have with this experiment!”

Getting her feet under her, she pushed off, aimed for Kyoka. Those jacks of hers were going to be key to the next round. They were more than strong enough to act as bondage cord, after all, and that would keep her and Momo anchored together nicely for Izumi to have her wicked way with…

-Lemon Ends Here-

… … …

“So, what do you two think of our new friends?”

Gravity had been turned back on some time ago, even if it was only the .57 gravity that the new grav plates could create. That was more than enough to keep them all snugly down on their shared bed, created in their private section of Forge 1 by Momo. Their experimenting earlier with the various ways to have sex in Zero-G had been a much needed pressure release after working on their secret project and doing the first set of missions for the construction of Refinery 1. Said secret project had taken up what were supposed to have been their previous set of mandatory rest days, leaving them to push through the next week with all of the stress piling up. Otherwise, people would have wanted to know just what they’d been ‘wasting time’ on.

That said, it hadn’t been too bad. Particularly as Operator 6O and Operator 21O had already offered a few suggestions to ease construction of Refinery 1, despite not even officially being assigned jobs just yet. Operator 21O, in particular, had been a boon there, as she’d apparently had engineering cross-training of some sort. Likely, it had to be said, because she’d been overwatch for a particularly troublesome scanner unit that kept doing crazy things that referenced that skill set. Even Izumi didn’t know all that much about 9S, it having been too touchy a subject for 2B for the vast majority of their time together. But what she did know painted him as almost suicidally stubborn and possessed of both the best and worst luck ever.

“6O is a riot and seems to be good for 2B somehow, not sure about 21O. A2 is…something?”

The comment had come in dry tones from Kyoka, the last bit causing Izumi to snort.

“A2’s a lot like 2B was, when she was a lot younger. I’m not too worried about her, other than the possibility that the changes might overwhelm her.”

Momo nodded at that, having met 2B young enough that she’d still been a little like A2. Though by the time she’d met Izumi and 2B, Inko had done a lot to level 2B out. She spoke up next with her own observation.

“We chose those three for a good reason. 2B had the most contact with them out of nearly anyone in YoRHa, and expected them to be the least troublesome. Well, in some ways at least. 6O is obviously her own unique flavor of handful. Honestly, my own largest concern was that 21O would want to bring back 9S. Which…”

Momo trailed off, but she didn’t really need to finish what she was saying. All of them, even 2B, had agreed that doing so was just a flat-out horrible idea. Frankly, none of the YoRHa Scanner units were actually all that useful. They’d been intended for hacking and intelligence gathering against Machines. Given that nothing on their Earth had good enough cyberwarfare suites to keep even 2B out, who hadn’t been particularly skilled as a hacker by YoRHa standards, the primary use of the Scanner models was pretty much irrelevant.

That wasn’t the reason no one was willing to bring him back, though.

Thankfully, not even 21O, who had admitted that, despite having admired him, she wasn’t unaware of his flaws.

No, it was because 9S always, without exception, turned into an unstable psycho. The very first version of him was the one that had created the backdoor into the Bunker that eventually destroyed it, all because he was furious that he’d been lied to about humanity’s survival. His reaction to finding that out had been so extreme, attempting to destroy the Lab station and kill all of YoRHa, that 2E’s existence had been determined needed in the first place. The very last version of him hadn’t been any different, going psycho immediately on realizing he’d been lied to and attempting to destroy everyone and everything. Frankly, he was just flat out too fundamentally unstable to bring back. Not with the amount of damage he could do to humanity if something set him off.

“How do you think everyone else is going to react to them?”

That question, voiced by Izumi, was the real problem. Because, even as she asked it, she knew that none of them could really predict the answer. Momo, tone weary but firm, shut down the line of discussion again.

“What will be, will be. We’ll do our best to introduce them at the right time and in a positive light. With all the other good will we’ve earned, if this first small group is as successful as we hope, we can bring more of them back. Frankly, I think the major pushback is going to be from our refusal to give them AI shackles.”

Izumi sighed, knowing Momo was right. If they’d left them with the need to serve mankind, it was likely that the military would sign on shortly after they proved effective. It was something they had all three of them had discussed and determined unanimously to be unethical, however. 2B was, without question, alive and fully sentient. Putting shackles on the YoRHa androids would be a form of slavery. No if, ands, or buts about it. Which was a line they wouldn’t cross for any reason, not even survival. Kyoka, surprisingly, had a slightly more upbeat perspective.

“Oh, come on guys. There are laws protecting sentient Quirks, right? That’s already most of the way to artificial intelligence, and it’s not like they are self-replicating. We literally don’t know how to make more of them than we already have data for.”

That was…sort of true. Effectively true, at least. They could technically seed more than one of every model based off the backups, but that had been considered a terrible idea even by YoRHa, who had been unethical as heck themselves. Suffice it to say, they wouldn’t be doing that.

“True. Well, as Momo says, what will be will be. Besides, I’m pretty sure Operator 6O is going to end up being the crush of every NEET fanboy on the planet the first time she opens her mouth and cheerfully identifies herself as an android. The internet will probably demand she be protected.”

Momo and Kyoka both snorted in surprise at Izumi’s comment, then Kyoka broke down into giggles. When they both looked at her, lips quirked into smiles at seeing her laughter but clearly not quite sure why she was giggling so hard at the idea, Kyoka managed to explain between fits of laughter.

“I-I just r-rember-ed tha-t old meme! W-warning, S-afety Fir-st! Do Not Fist Android Girls!”

There was an instant as they processed that, then both of her lovers joined Kyoka in fits of half-hysterical laughter. YoRHa androids were anatomically correct, after all…

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