“How can you just not care about all of the units that you’ve desecrated throughout your existence!?” X-87 exclaimed.

“It looks we are not done here.” J-71 calmly stated.

“Of course we aren’t done here! We can’t just move past that without proper explaining. You can’t just tamper with souls like that.”

J-71 had become agitated once more with this simple misunderstanding, which they wanted to point out was incredibly easy for them to avoid, but decided to simply solve the issue instead. “Very well then. I will do my best to explain it to you. ”

“Well, you’d best get started.”

“As far as I can tell there is no afterlife-”

“Ridiculous!” X-87 exclaimed.

“That's enough. If you want any explanation to make sense, you must wait for the Builder to finish before asking your questions. Can you do that?”

X-87 was outraged that J-71 could come to such a conclusion, and on top of that did not understand why they didn’t want them asking questions. Everything in their being said to destroy this situation, but they resisted just so they could hear them out but no longer. “Yes. Go ahead.”

“Alright.” J-71 began once again. “As far as I can tell there is no afterlife, however, there is no evidence of such a thing not existing as well. In other words, there is an equal chance of it existing and not existing. Plus, all of the builders seem to conclude that the soul, whatever it might be made of, leaves the Unit’s circuitry and go somewhere else. Whether the place is said to be good or bad doesn’t matter because it always leaves for somewhere. So what I do with the hull and wiring inside doesn’t matter to the soul because it has left already. You have questions.”

X-87 was calmer now but had a couple of questions. “What do you do with the unit afterward?”

“I take a part off, inscribe the units’ designation, and place it with the others. The rest of the parts are usually pointless for me to pick up.”

“So you don’t take the other parts back and melt them down?”

“No, there are more than enough materials in the ground to fill any needs that present themselves.”

“Oh. That’s fine then, I think.”

“What did you think I did with them.”

“I thought you melted them down for parts or something. I don’t know.”

“We could have avoided this misunderstanding if you did not simultaneously interrupt me and invent conclusions from incomplete information.”

“To be fair, you were saying some very questionable things.”

“This has been the worst waste of my time since the order to exterminate my kind was dispatched. I’m going to do something better with my time.” J-71 then began moving towards the exit, grabbing various parts and supplies along the way.

“Before you go, though, what is a mobile storage bay?” X-87 asked as they began to move in pursuit.

“That is what I am going to work on now,” J-71 replied as they left the room.

Not long after, X-87 left the honestly rather cramped and rather not aesthetically pleasing bunker they were just recently confined to and found that a large structure was casting a shadow upon them. They assumed that this was the mobile storage bay J-71 had spoken of just moments ago. Partially due to the fact that J-71 never built structures above ground and that it looked much like a rather small warehouse that builders sometimes built for the sake of resource convenience, they were suddenly filled with an overwhelming desire to ask the question: What makes it mobile? X-87 decided to save that for a more convenient time and followed J-71 into the structure with only a moment of hesitation.

As X-87 entered the unusual structure they were greeted by a rather sizable room decorated with pipes leading to junction boxes of unknown purpose and sparsely filled with storage crates of various sizes. Each were filled with wires, pipes, and machine parts of which X-87 could only identify the pipes and wires. Oddly J-71 was nowhere to be found within the room, which was odd because they were inside only a moment before X-87. They were just about to call out for J-71 when they heard a sort of hissing noise from above them. They, of course, looked up and found that J-71 was hanging from the top of the room welding a junction box to a bulkhead. “Well, there you are! I lost track of you there.” X-87 said with minor surprise.

“I’ll give you the tour once the systems are online,” J-71 said without looking away from their work.

“What makes it mobile?”

“That will be part of the tour.”

“I see…”

The silence returned once more.