This is something of a counter-fic to 'Mornings Should Be Outlawed,' which was a pre-series fic with my pre-Mega Man Gigamix The Atoner version of Dr. Light.
Then Hitoshi Ariga's version of Dr. Light's backstory and motivations was so ungodly appropriate and added so much to the overall Mega Man mythos that I just tossed out my old headcanon.
As many have pointed out, young Dr. Wily was a fox.
I've been intending to do a grad school era fic, the two of them working together on the sadbot that was later upgraded into Blues (possibly with another character getting turned on early…), but I found myself writing this in a tumblr post.
This fic will go slightly AU in later chapters due to something happening earlier than per canon because it seemed like an interesting thing to have happen (the characters share a hobby and should get to interact), and it's not going to get angsty, no worries.
When he walked into the lab the next morning, there was a custom power receiver on his desk. On top of sketched schematics! He'd have to go over them to translate them into normal-people, or at least normal-engineer, but he wouldn't have to take apart the device to try to figure out how it was made and make his own, he could get it set up and start testing right away.
As soon as he got some breakfast into his... roommate? Housemate? Lab partner?
Albert was asleep in the lab again. At least it was on the couch in the anteroom where they kept Blues, where he slept when he'd made a decision to go to sleep to remember something or get ideas, instead of still on his workchair in the main area, head pillowed on his arms as they rested on the desk on top of tools and pieces.
Thomas really didn't want to know when he'd fallen asleep. At least the new lab he'd designed had windows, even if he was worried about Blues' security. It was the only way to get Albert to get any sun.
He nudged Albert's side with his knee. When he blinked awake, he told him, "I have a bowl of fruit here. If you want actual breakfast, it's in the breakfast room." It was alright to bring food into this room, but if Albert was going to work on chip assembly or something else today, good luck trying to get food into him. They couldn't afford crumbs in the main lab – it was alright to eat in this drafting and study area by design, because eating was a social activity and Thomas wanted Blues to be included in that and Albert to eat, period.
"Why do you keep tempting me to turn off the sun?" Albert asked, rubbing his eyes before stretching. "You have a live-in maid now: can't she do room service?"
"When are you ever in your room?" he wondered, rolling his eyes as he put the bowl on Albert's worktable. There was some chance he'd see it there.
"Lab service," Albert said with an offhand wave, because in Albert's mind of coursethat was what he meant. The guest room Thomas had given him was just storage space, for things he'd collected on his travels that didn't merit lab shelf space. "I'm sure you're paying her enough."
"Speaking of which..." Thomas started to say, and regretted it as soon as he had.
"Not this again," Albert said, rolling his eyes as he got up. "I'm the one who should be paying you rent. Room, board," even if normally he didn't eat three meals a day, "all the lab equipment I want... what would I spend a salary on? And I've got spending money from the little toys you had your lawyers patent for me. I just took off to spend two months in Kyoto. What more do I need?"
Health insurance, Thomas didn't say. A retirement plan. The benefits that would come from being an actual employee of Light Labs. Yes, Albert and job were words that didn't belong in the same sentence, but Albert traveled, and even if his lack of faith in human nature meant meant he was quicker on the uptake about expected bribes than Thomas would ever be, despite Albert's general complete lack of interest in reading other people or complying with their expectations, Thomas kept expecting to get a call saying Albert had offended the wrong person and Thomas was going to need to bail him out, even if that hadn't happened since... about half a year after they met.
Having a maid meant that now clothes got mended and appeared in drawers - Albert didn't pay enough attention to anything but lab coats to notice he mysteriously had clothing that wasn't falling apart, unless he was dressing to intimidate and he hadn't really had reason to do that since grad school.
"I'm thinking of buying another house in Japan," was what he said instead. Building would be more accurate, given the need for labs. "I'm spending enough time there, and they're very interested in robotics as well as solar technology."
The solar generator that made Light Labs a multi-million dollar company. He had a few other patents, but if all went well, that one alone would give him the money to fund his robotics research. Make sure he had the time to get it right, instead of having to make promises to who-knew-who in order to get the funding he needed.
Nothing compared to Albert's fusion, of course, but Albert said (claimed?) it wouldn't work without a sapient robot, and so far there was only one of those in the world.
"What's bothering you now?" Albert asked, as if Thomas' refusal to have his baby examined and possibly dissected so the world could have free unlimited energy (at the cost of sentient AI with no impulse control being spread around and becoming very unhappy if no one kept them company, true) and his friend could be hailed as the inventor of fusion wasn't anything worth thinking about at all.
"Do you know when Blues went into sleep mode?" Dr. Light asked. If it wasn't that long ago, he didn't want to wake him up by putting music on. If there was someone in the lab, Blues wanted to stay awake to watch them and see if they'd pet him or play music for him, but he needed plenty of hibernation time.
Albert raised an eyebrow.
"Never mind." Thomas chuckled. Right. Albert, keep track of time?
There was a soft little peep, and Thomas brightened. So Blues waslearning to recognize his name? He went over to his desk and patted the little dear on the head. "Let me get put on a record for you," he said.
His little robot was humming and making sounds, trying to learn how to sing along, so of course Thomas lost track of time until Albert tapped him on the shoulder.
He turned, and blinked down at the plate. Eggs and bacon on toast, a makeshift sandwich. "I fled in case you started to sing," Albert explained, taking his own plate with the remains of a sandwich and a few extra strips of bacon back to his table.
Albert had left the lab, actually had a real breakfast? Perhaps he actually had gotten a decent night's sleep. The fact he'd remembered to bring something for Thomas wasn't unusual - Albert was the one to bring food to the lab to share first, when Thomas was too worried about crumbs. That was how they'd ended up with a cupboard of exotic candy bars and bagged snacks from around the world.
"Careful not to sing," Albert reminded him, thankfully not noticing Thomas' surprise. "You don't want to traumatize him and make him hate music, do you?"
"Perish the thought," he murmured, smiling first at Albert and then down at Blues.
His robot quite deliberately blinked at him, a hopeful 'Pay attention to me?' and of course he had to work on his most important project until Albert's shoe hit the back of his head.
"No singing," Albert insisted half-jokingly, hefting his other shoe in case more persuasion is needed. "I finished your beamed power receiver, now I want to get back to my projects without being distracted by your caterwauling."
"Sorry," Thomas said, looking sheepish. "Oh," he remembered. "Thank you for the receiver."
Albert waved it off.
Thomas glanced at Blues.
"Your dad has to get back to work so he can put electrons on the table," Albert said, looking at Blues.
Thomas coughed, a little embarrassed. "At least I'm a stay-at-home father most days?" Even if he had a meeting with the head of the patent application staff later.
"And you're practicing to be a mother hen. Don't think I haven't noticed you fussing over me," Albert said. "Don't spoil him."
"Getting to spend time with their parents isn't spoiling a child," Thomas said firmly, and then had to suppress a wince, thinking of how Albert never mentioned his parents.
Mr. Ito looked up from the schematics. "You realize this is why everyone thinks he's your lab assistant, right?"
Thomas chuckled. "Shouldn't they think I'm his secretary?"
"He's not the one with a multi-million dollar energy company," his patent lawyer pointed out. "He acts like it's still the seventies." Laid-back, refusing to wear a suit.
Thomas had preferred the seventies, but here they were in the Eighties, age of materialism. At least the expansion of Japan's economy and their interest in electronics meant moving more operations over there was an acceptable option. Given all he'd heard about the military-industrial complex, he'd rather be off American soil when he revealed that he had robots with the intelligence (and hopefully by that point physical abilities) necessary to be effective warbots and wasn't going to let anyone, even his own country, use them for the purpose of war.
For sapient robots to be introduced to the world not as people but as things that killed people…
Japan's constitution made it illegal for them to attack other countries. This was still future contingency planning, best viewed as mainly theoretical. The world had changed so much in less than ten years: who knew what it would look like by the time Blues was ready to be upgraded and Thomas had finished developing the necessary technology?
"You publish your own work," Mr. Ito added when his boss didn't respond. "Every time anyone gets schematics or papers about his research, you're the one who drew them, or wrote them. It's a fair assumption that you're doing at least part of the work and only giving him full credit because everyone knows that you're nice like that."
Access to cheap energy technology made it fairly easy to be a philanthropist. Dr. Light's main goal was ensuring that robotics would help the world, but he did have other projects. Rather like how a great deal of the technology NASA developed for space missions turned out to have other, major, beneficial applications.
"Well, if you want to try to interpret and translate what he does write down…" Dr. Light offered.
Mr. Ito laughed. "No way, man. I like to think I'm fairly good at what I need to know to do my job," about science and technical writing, "but I'm not that good. It works out anyway, doesn't it? Otherwise, given how many of the solar generator components he's designed, you'd have people trying to hire him away."
"Albert and job do not belong in the same sentence," Thomas said.
"That sounds like something you've said before."
"I first heard it from one of the undergraduates. We went to a research university for our doctorates, but even so Albert wasn't exactly the person you wanted to be teaching your lab section."
"Yeah, I can see that," Mr. Ito said. "Having seen a few of his drafts." Ones Dr. Light had passed on to him when Mr. Ito said that for legal purposes, he really should claim the correct percentage of credit for the inventions he was submitting, especially since leaving it in his old school friend's name meant Light Labs might end up having to pay punitive fees for several key generator upgrades, ones that made Dr. Light's solar far more compact and/or robust, if he and Dr. Wily had an argument or the scientist was seduced away by another company in the name of industrial espionage, even if they didn't understand the true value of Dr. Wily's brain.
"I still don't like Albert not getting the proper credit in the scientific community, but there's only so much I can do," to represent him, when Albert had no interest in speaking the jargon and schmoozing any more than necessary to graduate.
"You do realize that companies do tend to have some percent ownership of research people do in their labs, even if Albert isn't on the record as your employee?" Mr. Ito reminded him. "If Light Labs ever goes public, trying to get control over his patents in self-defense as well as denying them to competitors is an obvious move, and without your backing he doesn't have the resources for that kind of legal battle. Putting your name on there would reassure stockholders and make it clear that those patents aren't easy targets." They'd be picking a fight with Dr. Light, father of the green energy revolution, as well as some eccentric nobody.
"If I can't get him to accept a salary, then he needs to have income that's under his own name instead of mine."
"You could buy some percentage of the intellectual rights off him."
"He invents me these things – the ones of use to Light Labs – as his way of paying rent, or thanking me for letting him use my lab and resources. He'd let me take full credit for legal purposes if I said that was a good idea, but I wouldn't be able to get him to accept payment for gifts."
Mr. Ito looked incredulous. He'd asked awhile ago if Albert had any idea of Dr. Light's net worth, and yes, it wasn't as though Albert didn't know how much lab equipment and computers cost – it was much of why he'd built his own computing power and more exotic devices back in grad school, experience which came in handy when he decided to help Dr. Light build Blues. Thomas belatedly realizing that he really should get Albert's chips patented for him since he wasn't going to do it himself had advanced the field by several years even almost eight years after Albert created those chip designs for Blues. Thomas hadn't quite grasped how spoiled he was, getting to use Albert's technology for his inventions, until he looked into getting his solar power generators manufactured and there was nothing on the market with the specs he'd taken for granted when he designed them.
"He'd get swindled. They'd eat him alive," Mr. Ito said finally. "Should I explain to him how this works?" Mr. Ito was quite willing to take the time, especially when Dr. Light would insist on Mr. Ito billing him for it. He understood the value of a professional's, of anyone's time and assistance, even if other people would rather not pay back the value they received.
That was something he'd have to think about before bringing his robot masters into the world as well. He wanted them to learn to value people, to understand why they should help them, but the kind of people who refused to pay the people who made the food they needed in order to live enough to live on themselves…
Well, that was one of the advantages of black boxing Blues. No one was going to be able to create robot masters without a copy of programming that Dr. Light was going to lock down any way he could. If other people couldn't figure out how robot master sapience and willingness (ability!) to obey humans and solve problems worked, then they couldn't reproduce it through programs they'd written themselves and create knock-offs just different enough they couldn't be sued for it.
Everyone he'd known back in grad school knew that Proto Man was a test unit for robots with emotions, but Dr. Light had let them think that it was more of a toy or a pet. When Dr. Light revealed more robot masters to the world, he wouldn't reveal that Blues was the source of their code, that robot masters weren't and couldn't be made quickly from scratch, not without copying from a development unit like Blues. If no one realized that it took years of lead time to create something like Blues, then they wouldn't be able to start their own soon enough to have marketable results for decades.
If he could create and hold on to a monopoly long enough, so people had to pay for the time and effort of robot masters instead of letting them be bought and sold, if… Well, for now this was still al theoretical, but he was going to need to understand intellectual property laws in order to keep them from being used against robot masters. Having money of his own instead of working on someone else's contract meant he could afford lobbyists, public relations, professionals like Mr. Ito.
Of course this was something he should spend years working on. This was the future of his children (and the human race) he was talking about. His parents spent a decade and a half saving money away for their son's college education. For Blues' sake, he couldn't rush these things any more than he could rush the technical side.
"I'll see if I can make him sit still for that," Dr. Light responded. If he pointed out that it was research, studying a system, for Blues' sake… It wasn't as though Dr. Wily hadn't gamed the school administration and bylaws to get away with things without actually being expelled (from the labs) back when they were roommates.
Roll compares the Noise Crush to Dr. LIght's singing voice. Sad for someone who clearly values music.