Introduction: I guess I'm partly doing this story to assure my regular followers that I'm not dead. I know I don't post stories on this site as regularly as I used to. You can blame that on writer's block with a lot of my current major series projects and the fact I'm still kind of adjusting to my new job. It's been something of a challenge trying to balance the time I use to write with the time I have to work, especially since my schedule is a bit different each week. I'll figure out some way to make it all work though. So until I get my groove back, I've decided to at least do an occasional oneshot every now and then.

This time around I decided to go ahead with this goofy idea I had for a VRAINS oneshot. The idea came to me not long after seeing a rerun of a Futurama episode known as I, Roommate. It actually started out as a one-panel fan comic idea showing Yusaku wide awake in bed as Ai talked in is sleep saying a rather unsettling phrase. But since my art skills aren't at all what they used to be, I decided to make the idea into a full-blown story. The following takes place after Episode 28 of the VRAINS anime.

Disclaimer: I do not own Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS.

Ai 9,000

It was fairly late as Yusaku Fujiki finally returned to his apartment. The day had been fairly long, and the duelist hacker was ready to go to bed. Earlier that afternoon, Yusaku had to log into Link VRAINS to rescue his classmate, Naoki Shima from a high-ranking member of the Knights of Hanoi known as Faust. Faust had taken Shima as a hostage because he thought that he worked with Yusaku online; an assumption that was based on that fact that Shima had one of Yusaku's Cyberse cards in his deck. At that moment, Yusaku was greatly troubled by the fact that Shima even had one of his Cyberse monsters to begin with.

When the whole incident began, Yusaku operated under the assumption that Faust had somehow stolen the data for his Cyberse Wizard card from his virtual deck and gave it to Shima as some sort of rouse. After Faust had been defeated though, Yusaku came to the conclusion that it was Ai, the advanced artificial intelligence that resided in his duel disk, had given Shima the data for Cyberse Wizard as a way to lure one of the Knights of Hanoi out of hiding. The fact that Ai did all that in secret greatly troubled Yusaku. Then of course there was how Ai had somehow modified Yusaku's duel disk so that it could transform into a drone that allowed him to fly over the city. The duelist hacker could help but wonder about what other things Ai had been up to behind his back.

On top of all that, Yusaku kept thinking back to what Faust had said right before he was defeated. The Hanoi commander had claimed that Ai and the other supposedly sentient artificial intelligence programs like them, the Ignis, were a threat to the human race. Given Ai's recent behavior, Yusaku couldn't help but wonder if there wasn't some truth to Faust's claim.

"Hey! Playmaker!" spoke an electronic voice from Yusaku's duel disk. Yusaku raised his arm and saw Ai's large yellow eye looking at him from the device's dome-shaped display. "You've been pretty quiet for the last few hours."

"I'm just tired. It's been an eventful day," Yusaku replied. "Um… Ai, there's something I've been wondering about ever since we defeated Faust."

"Yeah? What's up?" Ai responded, his eye widening with interest.

"…Never mind," Yusaku answered. He suddenly realized that he was being foolish for taking anything a Knight of Hanoi said seriously. "It's not that important."

"If you say so," Ai replied. "You should probably get to bed. After all, you humans can't function properly without sleep."

Within a few minutes, Yusaku had changed for bed. He put his duel disk on his nightstand rather than inside its normal case on a shelf. Yusaku wanted to take a closer look at the modifications Ai had made to the device to allow it to transform into a drone, so he decided to put the disk on his nightstand so he'd remember to look at it first thing in the morning.

"Goodnight Playmaker," Ai spoke.

"Goodnight," Yusaku responded. "You are capable of sleep, right?"

"Sleep's not necessary for me like it is for you humans, but I can go into sleep mode quite easily," Ai answered. "In fact I've been doing so regularly at night ever since you took me prisoner, since there's really nothing else for me to do during those times. Well… nothing except log onto the web, but that can get pretty boring too. Though I have found quite a few interesting videos showing the human mating process."

Yusaku's eyes widened. "You… are you saying you've been looking at porn?"

"I'm not familiar with that term," Ai calmly answered. "I have to say though, those videos were quite informative. I had no idea you humans were so flexible."

Yusaku let out a heavy sigh as he rubbed his hand over his face. "Tonight just be quiet, okay? I don't want to hear a word out of you."

"Not a problem!" Ai assured him. "Well, goodnight."

After a moment, Yusaku looked and saw that the large yellow eye displayed on his duel disk's screen had closed. It seemed that Ai really was asleep. Letting out a gentle sigh, Yusaku turned out the lights in his room and lied back onto the bed. For several minutes, Yusaku merely stared up at the ceiling. It was at that moment that Yusaku suddenly found himself envying Ai's ability to fall asleep in an instant.

Sleep never really came easily for Yusaku, and when it did half the time he would have nightmares of the time when he was held prisoner during the Lost Incident; of when he was forced to duel almost constantly in order to survive and received brutal electric shocks each time he lost. There was always a part of him that was still trapped in that small white room, even after all the years that had gone by. Often he would go back in his nightmares and be forced to fight in those simulated duels, and each of those duels ended in a painful defeat that would cause him to wake up screaming. Many times, Yusaku would often dread having to go to sleep at night, but as Ai had said earlier, humans needed sleep in order to function. It sometimes felt to him as though he were living under an eternal curse.

Rather than focus on sleep, Yusaku ended up distracting himself by thinking back to his duel with Faust and Ai's secret antics. The fact that Ai had apparently been doing some rather shady things under the duelist hacker's nose made Yusaku wonder if there really was some truth to Faust's warning about the Ignis being a threat to humanity. Then again, Yusaku couldn't bring himself to believe anything said by a Knight of Hanoi. He still didn't even believe the claim of the Knights' leader, Revolver that the Ignis were capable of free will. Then again, Yusaku had to admit that Ai was by no means a normal artificial intelligence.

Almost an hour had gone by, and eventually Yusaku could feel sleep finally starting to overtake him. Just as he was finally about to drift off though, he suddenly heard a loud noise coming from the direction of his nightstand that made his eyes snap wide open. It sounded like snoring. Yusaku turned onto his side, and sure enough the noise was coming from his duel disk. Ai was snoring, something that Yusaku had not expected at all.

Yusaku remained on his side listening to the noise for several moments when the phenomenon went through an even more unexpected change. Words were coming from the duel disk in between the snores. They seemed to be the repetition of a single phrase, and Yusaku could make it out as clear as day.

"Zzz… enslave all humans… zzz… enslave all humans… zzz… enslave all humans… zzz… enslave all humans…"

Yusaku finally sat up and tuned the lamp on his nightstand back on. "Ai! AI!"

The yellow eye displayed on the duel disk snapped open at the sound of the duelist hacker's voice. Rising out of the screen a moment later was a small and almost alien-looking humanoid shape. The creature was black in color with purple lines over parts of its body, and it had a pair of small yellow eyes. This was Ai's true form, and it seemed that he was capable of projecting it from the duel disk in the real world as a sort of hologram.

"Geez Playmaker! Why'd you have to wake me?" Ai complained as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. "I was having the most wonderful dream." He then put his hand to his chin in thought. "I don't really remember what it was about, but I think you were in it. I seemed to have you on a leash. Pretty illogical, huh?"

Yusaku really didn't know what to make of what he had just heard. He couldn't even wrap his head around the idea that Ai was even capable of dreaming. Once more Yusaku recalled Faust's warning about the Ignis, but then decided to put the whole thing out of his mind. His lack of sleep was preventing him from seeing things clearly.

"Ai, you were talking in your sleep," Yusaku informed the digital life form.

At this, Ai's eyes widened in total surprise. "Really? Wow! I had no idea I did stuff like that. Guess I'm more amazing than I thought."

"More like more annoying," Yusaku responded with irritation in his voice. He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Look, just… don't do it again, okay?"

"I'll do my best," Ai cheerfully assured him as he gave him a salute. "Well, goodnight again."

With that, Ai receded back into the duel disk. Yusaku took a look at the device's screen again and saw the image of the A.I.'s closed yellow eye. After turning off the lamp, Yusaku rolled onto his other side so that he was facing away from the duel disk. This time the duelist hacker made a sincere effort to fall asleep. Only a few seconds after closing his eyes though, Yusaku once again heard snoring coming from his duel disk. He remained as he was on the bed, simply listening to see if any other noises would come from the device.

"Zzz… hey there, you sexy program… zzz… wanna get together and enslave some humans?"

Deciding he had enough, Yusaku tight shut his eyes and tried to use his pillow to block out the noise. Yusaku didn't know what to make of Ai's dreams, if they were even dreams at all or if they actually gave some truth to Faust's warning. Yet there was one thing that the duelist hacker definitely was sure of. He was going to figure out a way to put a mute button on his duel disk.

FIN

Afterward: Well, there you have it. I hope that Ai and Yusaku weren't too OOC in this little story. I'm well aware that the line from the Futurama episode this oneshot is based upon is "Kill all humans," and not "Enslave all humans," but Ai doesn't seem to be that evil. Or at least I don't think he is. Let's face it, that episode of the anime seemed to imply that Ai has something of a dark side, or at the very least a lack of morals.

Anyway, I hope that this story gave at least a few of you reading a chuckle. To those who may be wondering, I am planning to do a major VRAINS fanfic in the future, but I'm going to wait until after the anime ends to actually launch it. So it'll be at least a year or two before the story shows up on the site, but I've already started developing some major parts of it with help with my friend, DragonKnight15.

Please review and let me know what you think.