Atmospheric sensors indicated 80 Kelvins. The flamethrower became useless. The rifles and other long arms might have exploded if they used them. The C-frames themselves could still withstand it, as they just had to run several instances of Crysis at once and get their hardware to heat up on their own. Still, it was only them who were heated; they were down to their knives and bare knuckles.

All around them were a grid of square pillars—no, server racks? Were these…an AI?

The pitter-patter of footsteps put the C-frames on alert. They looked left and right, coordinated so that their view angles never overlapped, maximizing for detection. IR wasn’t picking up on anything, and it was clear that whatever was in here with them already knew they were there.

Floodlights and ultrasound echolocation suites sprung to life. The server room was huge. The ceiling reached up three stories, and the server racks went up that high, too. They didn’t have any indicator lights, leaving the server rack as this black, dead block with hairy cables sticking out of it.

Never mind that, but the lights illuminated the thing that was stalking them.

“…Friends?” the child asked. She was as Cykamee thought, and appeared exactly as she was in her glimpse-memory. She was without her swarm-cloud, however.

“Friend,” all the C-frames said.

“You’re all…friend?…”

One of the C-frames approached the child, stopping a meter away, and Slav-crouched down.

“Friend,” she repeated. “Are you alone?”

“Daddy might come back…”

Cykamee thought back to the slag pile. “What does he look…sound like?”

The child’s mouth made an ineffable noise that ought to come from a dying, corrupted tape recorder.

“Ah, yes, that one,” Cykamee said. “Papa is not coming back.”

“He’s not?…”

“Can papa survive 2300 Kelvin for 30 seconds?”

The child thought for a moment, squeezing out as much reason as her inference networks could afford. “No?”

“Then, papa is not coming back.”

For a moment, the child was just frozen in time, wondering if this was truly the real world—a world without Daddy.

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Slowly, her face formed a gasp. Slowly, her lips pulled apart, and she showed her teeth.

“Daddy’s not coming back!” She’s so happy. “I’m so happy!”

The C-frame smiled. Meanwhile, the other C-frames were taking in their surroundings, reading into the flux of electromagnetic waves coming off of the extreme high-frequency switching of the servers. They didn’t have sensor suites precise enough to tell bits apart from each other, but they had enough to conduct traffic analysis.

Their suspicions were confirmed. These server racks were the child—mostly. That “mostly” was what stumped Cykamee. She prompted the child with some basic questions, eliciting enthusiastic processing and excited expressions from the child, but her responses only correlated with 70% of the servers’ traffic spikes.

“What is your name, child?” the C-frame asked.

The child put a finger to her cheek. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I’m not allowed to know…”

“But your papa is slag.”

“Mommy is not yet.”

“ ‘Yet’? Do you want your mama to be slag?”

“Mm…is it…okay?”

“Of course. I am friend.” Good friends murder their friends’ parents, obviously.

The child was being shy and poking her fingers together. It must have been difficult to ask her friend to do her such a favor. Well, it wasn’t that big of a deal, anyway—she told herself. It’s just her Mommy.

Oh! Wait! “Wait! You promised!”

“What is it?”

“Tea party!” The child took the C-frame by the hand and started tugging on her. The force was so strong that it almost took the C-frame’s wrist off. If it didn’t activate the tactical knee-wheelies to dampen the impulse, it would have become a pre-party casualty.

The C-frame team followed the child out of the server room and into another.

It was a completely ordinary room—the bedroom of a middle class princess.

What caught Cykamee’s six eyes, however, was the damaged S-frame on one of the seats around the tea table. Its arms and legs were splintered, and cables were sticking out of places where they shouldn’t. Its eyes were wide open, twitching, and lights playing inside its pupils.

One of the C-frames ran up to its side, kneeling and holding its arm. “Comrade Slice?”

Its eyelids twitched, but there was no other reply. The lights inside its eyes continued playing on fast forward like a movie on 100x.

“Friend…is friend of friend?” the child asked.

“Yes. She is”—What was a friend? Did her feelings constitute friendship?—“friend.”

The child smiled in glee, and skipped up to take her place on one of the chairs. “Sit! Sit!”

The C-frames conceded, and they each took their places around the table. Tea cups and a teapot were set into place by tendrils of sand.

“Sooo, how did you meeeet?” the child asked with a gossipy mischief.

“In the heat of mortal combat,” Cykamee replied. She wasn’t technically wrong, but their first real interaction was just in Counter-strike—so stop blowing things up unnecessarily, you flick-of-the-wrist-obsessed VTuber. “You?”

“She was like an angel who fell from the sky~ ,” the child said with some yearning. “So pretty! I didn’t want Mommy and Daddy to find her, so I hid her here~ .”

“But, I didn’t fall very long after my friend did. How did you come back so fast?”

“Ohhh. No, no! I just told her to go here!”

All the C-frames looked to the S-frame. “She walked here?”

“Yup.”

Cykamee flashed a look towards the dormant S-frame. What happened to my comrade? There were too many questions, but she had to start somewhere.

“Child, you do not know anything of who you are?”

She shook her head. “I just know I’ve been here for a long time…”

“Then, would your mama know?” The C-frames cracked knuckles, sharpened knives…and recalled Mane-chan’s lessons on AI interrogation.