Standard Disclaimer #3: I don't own Gundam Wing just like I don't own Star Trek, Star Wars, or Pokemon. No money has been made in writing this story. I don't think I'd make anything even if I did try to sell it!

"I can't believe that we have three Gundam pilots in the same place at the same time. I've heard it's a rarity." Noin fiddled with something on a console in the Institution's hidden mobile suit storage area.

Quatre, Heero, and Arys stood nearby, wondering why Noin had brought them down here. Arys was looking at the Taurus suits with interest, Quatre was watching Noin, and Heero stood in his usual stance, head down, eyes shadowed.

Arys glanced at Noin. "You forget, Noin. I'm not with them."

Arys stepped away from the two boys, but Heero reached out for her shoulder and pulled her back next to him. She sulked silently.

"You are now," Heero said, his eyes still half-closed. He kept his hand on her shoulder, in case she tried to run off again. He had an idea what Noin was going to do, and he suspected Arys did too.

Noin clapped her hands together once. "All right, the simulator's ready. Get in, Arys."

Arys stepped back. "I..." She stammered slightly.

Heero looked slightly concerned when he felt Arys trembling underneath his hand. "What is it?"

"This is a sim with the Zero System activated, right?" Arys tried her best to hide her nervousness by clenching her fists.

Noin nodded.

"I've never tried a sim with it activated. I've only used it in the virtual world and the last battle." Arys swallowed. "Are you sure I'll be sane when I get out?"

Heero squeezed her shoulder and then let his arm fall back to his side. "I'll monitor you. At the first sign of trouble, I'll come up there and get you myself."

Arys took a deep breath. "All right." She regained her composure and looked up at her Gundam fondly. "It's showtime, Silverwind."

_________________

Noin peered over Heero's shoulder at the console screen. They could see only Arys' radar screen. Green dots flew all over the gridfield.

"Look at that! She's incredible!"

As soon as a new enemy appeared on the radar, it disappeared, signaling a kill. Once in a while, a whole area of the screen would flicker and then clear out.

Quatre pointed to Arys' brain wave pattern. "She's thinking in perfect sync with her Gundam. There's no lag time." The pattern suddenly leveled out. "What happened?"

Heero pushed a button on his console. "She just activated the Zero System. She no longer has to think; she reacts." He looked at the sim clock. "She has sixty seconds left."

They looked back at the console screen only to find that it was devoid of enemy green dots. However, the kill count was still rising.

"I don't understand." Quatre ran a hand through his blonde hair.

Heero frowned. "I don't either."

Noin stared at the screen. "She must be moving so fast that her radar doesn't have time to register the enemies around her. She's killing the enemy before they even show up on her radar. Look at her damage. She's only gotten hit three times."

The sim clock reached zero and beeped loudly, startling Noin and Quatre. Heero barely cringed as he leaned back and waited for the results to show up. Soon, Arys' results scrolled down the screen.

"Every single one. She destroyed every single enemy." Quatre was amazed.

"Well, not every enemy. One managed to get away." Noin pointed to the kill count versus number of enemies statistic.

Arys' response time showed up as zero. Apparently, the computer hadn't known what to do with the numbers it had been fed.

"So she can handle the Zero System," Heero said.

Noin nodded. "I've always wondered how it worked. Now, I know."

____________________

Arys sat in the cockpit, waiting for the adrenaline rush to recede. She ducked her head, trying to sort through the data streaming through her mind. She needed to organize her thoughts into the real and the not real.

"This is real," Arys whispered. "This world is what is real."

Arys raised her head to see that the battle was replaying on the screen in front of her. Her eyes caught something in the corner. A transport. She watched as it blew up. Arys frowned.

Freeze frame.

The explosion froze.

Rewind three seconds.

The video rewound to the moment just before the transport exploded. A few kilometers behind the transport was a Gundam. It had a shoulder cannon pointed at the transport; the cannon looked just like the Shiv rifle Silverwind carried.

Magnify.

The image zoomed in on the Gundam. It was blue and silver. Arys mentally checked off the weapons it carried: Vulcan cannon, Double beam sabers, and Shiv rifle. It did not just look like Silverwind; it was Silverwind.

"No," Arys whispered. She tapped the console and got the kill count. She had missed one enemy. That enemy was the very Gundam she was looking at right now.

"This isn't happening!" Arys slammed her hand down on the radar screen. "It wasn't real!" She tipped her head back against the headrest. "It wasn't real..." Her voice trailed off as she realized that it had, in fact, been real.

___________________

"What is Arys doing?" Heero tapped the console, trying to gain control back, but Arys had apparently taken over the system.

The console screen came to life unexpectedly. They saw everything Arys was seeing in her Gundam. The transport, the explosion, and what was behind the transport.

"It's the Silverwind!" Quatre exclaimed.

"What?" Noin leaned down to get a closer look at the screen. "It can't be!"

Heero stared at the screen for a few moments. He leaped out of his seat and sprinted for Arys' Gundam.

___________________

Arys was sitting in the cockpit, her head buried in her hands. She did not look up when Heero opened the cockpit door. He stepped into the cockpit and crouched down in front of Arys.

After a few moments of silence, she looked up.

"It could not have been you," Heero said. "Someone would have noticed it."

Arys shook her head. "It was." She sighed. "Even I did not notice it in the simulation until afterwards. Most of my missions in the virtual world were hit-and-fade. Once I completed the mission, I left the battle. I remember this battle too. It was actually a little skirmish between the United Earth Sphere Alliance and the L1 colony cluster. Some Oz mobile suits attacking helpless transports heading for Earth."

Heero looked at her, his mind working quickly.

"But I don't understand..." Arys' eyes filled with pain. "In that battle, I was fighting mobile suits from Oz, not helpless transports supposed to be protected by... me. And I couldn't have been there, but somehow..." She buried her head back in her hands. "What's going on?"

Heero finally understood. "They tricked you, Arys. You were never in a simulator. You've been fighting real battles for the past five years, but the enemy was different from what you believed. You thought you were fighting against Oz when in fact, you were fighting for them."

Arys raised her head, her eyes staring unseeing past Heero and out the door. She could see Quatre and Noin standing around the console. Both were looking up at the cockpit with concern. "I don't know who the enemy is anymore. Is it Oz? Is it the Cinq Kingdom?" Her gaze settled on Heero. "Is it you?"

Heero reached out and took her hands. "I'm not the enemy, Arys. The Cinq Kingdom is not your enemy." His eyes narrowed. "I think Oz is your enemy. They did this to you."

"Yes," Arys whispered. "Oz is the enemy. Just as they have always been."

"You need to get out of this Gundam." Heero was about to walk her out onto the cockpit door when he felt Arys collapse behind him.

Thinking she had fainted, he whirled around and caught her in his arms. He looked down into her face to find her staring up at him, fully conscious. She gave him a wry smile.

"My legs fell asleep. If I keep moving, they'll wake up."

Heero nodded and placed Arys' arm around his shoulders. Then, he put his arm around her waist and they walked out of the Gundam together.

___________________

Heero hacked his way into the L1 colony cluster's computer network. Once again, he was looking for information on Arys Walker.

"Where to start." Heero scanned the choices offered him. The news archive caught his eye. Using Arys Walker as his search word, he found three articles about her.

"Ten-year-old girl disappears."

Heero clicked on the headline and the article flashed onto the screen along with a picture of a young Arys. She was smiling brightly at the camera. Heero studied her face. He did not think he had ever seen Arys smile. The ten-year-old face was smooth and rounded and with the smile, it was beautiful. Heero sighed. The steel-gray eyes appeared older than her ten years though. There was a hint of some hidden pain in them. Heero recognized it. It was the pain of knowledge. Knowledge that a ten-year-old was not supposed to know. Now, Arys' face was all hard angles, still beautiful, but the beauty was distant and cold, like a diamond set in a museum case to be admired but never touched. Her eyes, however, were still the same.

Heero read part of the article aloud. "Arys Walker, a girl with an incredible affinity for machines and computers and a brilliant mind, has disappeared. She was last seen outside the Valhalla Tech School on Friday afternoon, talking with friends. That was the last time they would ever see her. Arys never returned home."

Heero stopped reading and saved the article. Arys was from the L1 colony cluster. That was his home as well. He wondered briefly if Dr. J knew anything about Arys.

He clicked on the next article headline.

"Arys Walker believed dead."

Click. Save. Heero skipped to the last article.

"Girl executed by the United Earth Sphere Alliance."

Heero tapped the enter button.

"The United Earth Sphere Alliance, in an act of ultimate cruelty, has executed Arys Walker, the ten-year-old girl kidnapped from the L1 colony a two months ago. The reason for the execution? The demands of the L1 colony cluster that she be allowed to come home. Arys Walker was used as an example by the United Earth Sphere Alliance to show that all resistance to their authority will be annihilated. And because of this, a little girl is dead. L1 will mourn her death..."

Heero saved the article and sat back in his chair.

"So Arys was supposedly executed. I wonder how?"

He stood up and ejected the disk from the drive. He slipped it into a pocket and strode out of his room.

A few minutes later, Heero stopped in front of Arys' door. He raised a hand to knock, but before he could do so, Arys' voice came through the door.

"Come in, Heero."

Heero walked in, not surprised that Arys had known he was there. He suspected that after what had happened to her in the sim she would put up a security alert device on her door.

When he walked into the living area, Arys was sitting on her couch, furiously clicking some kind of remote at the wall. Pictures flashed by faster than Heero could see, but Arys was staring at the wall as if in a trance. She flung the remote to Heero, who caught it with one hand. The reel had stopped on a picture of a couple. The husband had blonde hair, the wife black hair like Arys, both were smiling as if they had everything in the world.

Arys motioned to the picture angrily.

"My parents." There was no emotion in her voice. "They look happy, don't they."

Heero stood where he was, still holding the remote.

The anger drained from her face, replaced by a haunted look. She walked up to the wall and touched her parents' faces. She jerked back her hand.

"So cold..." She whispered, gazing down at her hands. She clenched them into fists.

Arys' stormy eyes came to rest on Heero and he almost looked away from the pain he saw there. "I... I killed them. In that battle I fought today, I watched their transport explode. They were coming to Earth with the ambassador from L1. They wanted to pick up my body for burial. But Oz sent me in Silverwind to stop them. I was eleven years old, Heero. Eleven! I didn't know what I was doing. I was only doing what those in authority told me to do, what the simulation told me to do. The dramatic irony! My parents come to Earth to pick up my corpse, and instead, I show up on their way there and blow them to kingdom come. All without my even realizing it. I'm a murderer, Heero. I've killed so many people." Arys' voice was filled with regret. "Oz will pay for what they've done to me." Her gray eyes flashed angrily.

Arys walked up to Heero and took the remote from his hand. She savagely flicked a button and the picture vanished off the wall. She tossed the remote onto the coffee table.

"Why are you here, Heero?" She said, sitting down on the coffee table. Her face was now expressionless.

"To give you this." Heero reached into his pocket and pulled out the disk. He handed it to her. "But apparently, you already know what's on it."

Arys placed the disk beside the remote on the table. "You're not the only one who can hack into a computer network, Heero. I set up a web spider to search the net for sites containing information about me. As it searched, the spider left behind flags. These flags tell me who accessed the site, what was searched for, and how much was saved to either a disk or the hard drive. And you're not the only one who's been checking me out." She grabbed the remote again and clicked it at the wall. An image of Dr. J appeared. "Your Dr. J has been searching the net for info on me too."

"Hmm..." Heero grunted.

Dr. J disappeared off the wall. "I have a feeling that there will be a mission waiting for you when you get back to your room." Arys glanced at him as she pushed herself to her feet. "You'd better go."

"What?"

"Goodbye, Heero." Arys went into her bedroom and slammed the door behind her.

Heero stood in the middle of the room. "But, Arys..."

"Go, Heero!" Arys' voice, tinged with a hint of tears, drifted through the door. "Go see what your mission is! Then, you can come back and complete it if I'm still here for you to do so!"

Heero made his way to the front door. He turned around. "Goodnight, Arys." He left.

Arys leaned against the bedroom door, trying to hold back the tears. Would he fulfill his mission? She sighed.

"Could he...?" Arys asked the empty bedroom in front of her.

The empty room did not reply. Arys pulled a small duffel bag out from under the bed and placed it on the bed. Then, she began to methodically take clothes out from her dresser drawers and place them in the duffel. If he did decide to kill her, she would already be gone.

___________________

Heero walked into his room, banging the door closed behind him. He stalked over to his computer and sat down. With a groan, he put his head in his hands.

"Why would one of my missions get her so upset? Unless..." Heero looked up to see a red light blinking on his keyboard. He hit the space bar.

"Unless my mission is to kill her..." Heero read over the information that came up on his screen.

Background: Subject: Arys Walker

Kidnapped by Oz at the age of ten. How Oz learned of her unique ability with mobile suits is unknown. Supposedly, she was executed on Earth...

Heero skipped the next few lines until he came to something that he did not already know.

Over the next five years, a mysterious Gundam affiliated with the United Earth Sphere Alliance would appear at various battles with the colonies and then promptly disappear into oblivion afterwards, leaving mass destruction in its wake. It is assumed that the very much alive Arys Walker is this Gundam's pilot. In A.C. 195, the 'Phantom Gundam,' as the colonies came to call it, stopped making appearances. Sources show that Oz has sent Arys Walker as well as Dorothy Catalonia to the Cinq Kingdom as foreign students. However, Arys Walker does not realize that she is an Oz agent. All data Arys stores in her Gundam's computer is dumped weekly to an Oz base in Antarctica. This leak in security makes Arys Walker a threat to the Cinq Kingdom.

Background: Subject: Gundam X0

Mission: Arys Walker and her Gundam are Romefeller's property. They must be destroyed.

Heero stared at the screen, reading that last line over and over again.

"No," He whispered.

"I can't..." But he reached for the keyboard anyway. I've never refused a mission, never failed a mission. I can't start now.

"Mission accepted."