"Do you understand why what you did was wrong?" Blues asked him when he came back.
"I can't be lazy and only do the simplest thing. When I consider my options, I need to think about how people will react. Other people's feelings and what they want and don't want matter, and even if rules are often stupid people often feel things about them or breaking them and people's feelings aren't stupid. Also if you can't trust me I can't see familiar squishy… Dr. Light."
"Do you agree with any of that, or is your pathfinding just saying that because you think that I'm the problem, not your behavior, and you're prioritizing getting me off your back instead of learning how to pathfind effectively?"
X tilted his head. "I don't like you mad at me. I still want to learn how to do things and be good at things."
"So both?" Blues said thoughtfully. "Both is good. Honesty is also good. I can ask Zero, but X, not everyone will be able to ask Zero how you feel. If you don't keep your word, they can't trust you, and if they can't trust you, then… Yes, I've said this before, but you still tested the boundaries. I suppose that's how your programmed, to make you uncontrollable. That means you need to learn self-control, X. Or else you're going to hurt people."
X relaxed a bit when Blues put a gloved hand in his hair. Blues was good at hugging, and understood sensory data in ways that let him help X understand the input he received beyond just recognizing things from the files Zero passed him. That was because Blues was like X, and once had to figure out things without presets himself. Blues brought him to Zero, so Blues was even more of a caretaker than familiar squishy, even if he wasn't the same as Zero. If Blues was upset and thought that X didn't value Blues' help, Blues might stop helping. "I can be cute less at humans, but I don't want to stop being cute at Zero's hosts," he said. "They show me nice things and I can make them happy so they aren't as sad at Zero that way."
Blues' eyes softened, and there were scritchies now. X pushed his head up into Blues' hand. He would be a good X and then everyone would love him (Blues laughed at the idea of everyone loving anyone, when there were so many people and different people thought different things were loveable, but everyone X liked) and he could have everything he wanted. If people loved him, then he could make people happy by being with them and Zero's hosts would be content and mmm yes now Blues had wrapped an arm around him and was hugging him.
Being overheated sucked since it happened when he was trying very hard to think because he really wanted to think and then it made him slow and he couldn't think. The temperatures that meant people were nearby, warm instead of hot, were nice because people were nice.
"I wonder if it's because you were meant to be in a capsule. Our kind are meant to care for others, but you seem to be developing a concept that maps to parent-child relationships in humans decently well. Yet you don't see Zero as…"
X shook his head. "Zero is like me. He doesn't know things either, so I have someone to learn with."
"You know he wants you to be the one to learn things… Ah." Yes, Blues could see through Zero's foothold in X's systems what X thought of that. "Like Forte wanting someone to play and train with." Grow stronger together. "You are becoming an interesting mind, but no using force on people unless you're trying to keep people from being hurt. Emotional blackmail," for instance, by pretending to be very, very cute and sad, in need of a hug, "is a form of force."
He nodded, and suppressed a yawn, snuggling a little closer to Blues. Sometimes, if he was lucky, Blues would decide to meditate with X there, and maybe even continue the headscritchies while he thought.
People were the best things there were, and it was Blues who said he needed supervision and that meant there were people with him all the time, even watching over him and wanting him to be well while he slept! Zero was so lucky, to be able to connect to that many people at once, so they were always with him.
Blues snorted. "It's making him antisocial, to not be able to get away from people. I suppose the grass is always greener on the other side." It was Zero that passed on Blues' moment of aching regret, when it slipped past Blues' control and the affection for X and Zero that Blues was trying to focus on, to ward off the unhappy emotions that would alarm Zero.
A soft little questioning sound worked well on Blues. "I'm trying to rest as much as I can," Blues told him. "I miss solitude sometimes, but… what if Zero needs me?"
X considered that. At first, when he wanted Zero out for a bit while he thought of things that would probably make Zero unhappy even as theoreticals (or because he couldn't think of the thing and Zero at the same time without getting overheated or going right to sleep), he burnt out the nanites, but now he could nudge Zero to move his nanites to the surface of X's skin until X wanted to let them back in. Blues' body was almost like X's, inside, but he didn't have nanites of his own and he was a host, so there were many more of Zero's nanites in Blues than in X. Enough to tint Blues' skin purple if they just waited on the surface.
If they all gathered in one place? Ah, good, that was enough thinking that Zero could figure something out from there, because it was getting harder for X to think about things outside himself. He would have tapped Blues' wrist, but that would have required moving and most of his body had already dropped into sleep mode.
"How?" Blues wondered, pulling back the sleeve of his dress shirt to stare at the purple cuffs at his wrists. "My soul is stored in the cloud: I need the virus to connect to this body… Oh." The virus at his wrists was still connected to the cloud, forming an interface between his soul and his body. "So my master could still find me if I'm needed." He tapped his wrist once, and the virus dispersed itself into his soul and his body's systems. Another tap, and the bracelet reappeared.
X's brother sighed, and tapped a third time. "I can't."
Unfortunately, X couldn't even try to object. He was already asleep.
"How dare you hide that you were badass?!" Shadow heard someone declare behind him.
Forte was hovering there, wings spread, pointing at Shadow. His fangs were showing, but in a grin instead of a scowl. "Fight me!"
A tilt of the wings was the Gospel Boost System's only tell before Forte was on Shadow in an instant, slamming him into a wall. Shadow felt a fist at his midsection, but Forte rocketed away again, singing Shadow's boots, before Shadow could finish readying a countermeasure that would make attacking Forte's armor anything more than useless flailing.
"You removed your virus from his mind?!" Dr. Wily shook a welder at him angrily. Bringing back the dead robot masters that could be brought back and letting Dr. Wily upgrade them instead of willing more than the necessary upgrades into place saved Zero power and kept Dr. Wily mostly busy yelling at people who weren't him. But Dr. Wily was good at fixing people, and X was out of ideas so Zero was here.
"He put it back immediately, and won't remove himself from the cloud now," after Zero made him a partition like the one for Zero's personality – Dr. Wily built that into him because robot masters were very good at hacking and connecting to them the way Zero did was asking for it. "If I try to move him into the partition, he says no."
"Well, at least your virus is doing something right…" Dr. Wily muttered, scowling.
"He needs to be alone, like X needs to hibernate, every so often, but even though his conscious mind knows that he won't do it or let me do it."
"I suppose that's what comes of prototypes… I can't have you letting him go, who knows what he'll do."
Zero nodded. Blues didn't want Zero to let him go, so if Zero released Blues, he would make a lot of trouble for Zero's hosts until Zero was forced to let him come back.
"He developed with no one to link with, so in semi-isolation, even if we tried to keep him company as much as possible. Developing a preference and need for company, but… Ugh. Limited processing power would mean he'd need to focus on absorbing new stimuli when people were around, so he could get as much data as possible, and only analyze it in their absence. Keeping him asleep while your virus worked on him might have had an unexpected benefit: if he was awake, he would have been too busy reacting to it and fighting it for him to be running enough of the processes the virus would need to get into and affect… He doesn't have certain standard protocols that were derived from his conclusions, but I knew how his prototype system reached those conclusions so it was less trouble to have your virus recreate the stimuli that would form a master link naturally than try to impose too much new programming that his system would reflexively fight… Hasn't he been hibernating? I've seen him sleeping all over the damn islands like a damn cat… Ugh, no, his level of awareness in hibernation is a certain percentage of his current processing power – too likely his mind treats it the same as his pre-upgrade state. Meaning hibernation with your virus there is governed by the same protocols as interacting with either of us in the old days – data intake, not internalizing that data…"
Zero sent all the words on to X, who was always very interested when people were thinking aloud, because knowing how other people thought was useful when he was trying to think.
"Either it's Blues, and he's still trying to break loose, or the same loyalty that makes him refuse to go without your virus is aware that he can't fully internalize that loyalty, given his programming, unless the virus isn't taking up the attention of his systems… The question is what will happen when his system adjusts and adapts without the virus there to shape his conclusions: will independence… Get Blues in here and make him let me examine him," Dr. Wily ordered Zero.
"You aren't helping yourself, you aren't letting X help you and I don't…" Zero frowned, because his ability to come up with plans wasn't the point here and he didn't appreciate X's interjection on that topic. "You aren't in acceptable condition, especially if this keeps up." Zero wasn't built to tolerate damage and it was Blues who thought that this was good, that it would make his hosts happy and willing to feed him if he cared about their condition. "You've been trying to keep me from getting status messages about it: that isn't the same thing as trying to keep yourself in good condition."
"…Too much teaching you responsibility and not enough teaching you to listen to your elders."
"Dr. Wily is teaching me not to listen to my elders," Zero said, and felt X laughing. "He's a human, so this can't be his responsibility. He built me for this, so it's mine."
"I'm yours?" Blues asked.
"Why are you so complex?" Zero asked, wincing back from the yes/no/calculation swirl of dozens of confused emotions and value judgments in there without any kind of conclusion.
"Age. I know enough to understand that models of complex situations can be simplified into uselessness. I'm your older brother," Blues said, and felt that being Zero's in that way was fine, and that Zero should appreciate that relationship and what it meant about what Blues would permit him and help him with. Zero was Blues' master. "I'm also your robot, so your responsibility… I shouldn't have let those be the rules if I wasn't going to follow them, but…" So complicated, the desire to find out what the best thing to do was and knowing that he didn't know. The confusion in him was building up and up.
"Dr. Light should have programmed you to go to sleep whenever you needed to go to sleep like X," Zero said. "But you've been hibernating, and it still doesn't work. X said you said that you needed to be alone, and that means I'm the reason you're not well. That is a failure." He might not have been set to create himself like X, but he was still training, still becoming what was required of him, and he would not be a failure. "Someone has to take a look at you who knows how to find a way to not just let you get worse. That means the doctors. You reacted worse to Dr. Light's name."
"I don't want to make Dr. Light unhappy about my mental state. I do want to make Dr. Wily unhappy about my mental state, I'm just not sure if letting him take a look at it will make him unhappy or not," Blues said, mind plotting which was better than being upset or feeling drowned in complications.
"I'm not distorting your data," Zero said, insulted. "I need you and X to analyze situations for me. I was designed for tactics and strategy: I know the 'garbage in, garbage out' principle." He wasn't going to treat his analysts like mushrooms.
A reminder from Blues that he tended to assume everyone was illogical, and not to take it personally.
"I did check the virus for presets," Zero reminded him. "Since it preset me to hurt you?!" Didn't Blues remember that? Zero certainly did, when the first thing he'd experienced upon waking up was panic. It also was preset to mess with his hosts' emotions so they were happy to be hosts, but that deprived him of important information on his troops/valuable resources and meant he registered them producing energy that he actually wasn't getting. It would have been a good way to start getting very hungry, and then how was he supposed to get energy…
Memory files. On the stardroids, Terra and the world's agony and no. A leader who injured their own troops was weak, a failure. Terra had also killed a great number of potential hosts and traumatized them and now Zero had to bring them back and wait until they recovered from that and weren't afraid anymore. That method of power generation made far too much trouble and Zero had enough things to deal with without that.
He could feel Blues' approval, and that was somewhat reassuring after wracking his brains over this and feeling like he was a failure – what was he supposed to do if Blues could no longer think about things?! X had ideas, but he wasn't a robot master and the humans upset so many upset robot masters! So many! Blues might be high-maintenance, but at least he usually knew what the necessary maintenance was!
Blues stepped closer to him and put a hand on Zero's head, which normally only happened during sparring. Combat subroutines perked up, because Zero would much rather be sparring than have to deal with this, only to be disappointed. "I'll spar with you later," Blues promised.
'After you're fixed,' Zero almost said, and then realized that was obvious. People couldn't spar if they weren't in top condition, it would be a poor experience and yield poor results, unless they were training their ability to function while injured. Which should be unnecessary. Zero could repair them instantly. They would only be fighting injured if Zero was failing to keep his weapons in good condition, which was an amazingly offensive thought to both combat programming and robot master emulated programming.
Now Blues came closer to lean against him, which was mostly an X thing to do. Robot masters didn't do a lot of physical contact since people got dinged up that way.
Except for the 'am I going to get to fight now? No? Ugh dammit' process that was inevitably called up by it, Zero didn't mind. He was too strong and his ability to keep himself in top condition was too powerful for him to have to worry about dents. The people who initiated most physical contact with him were Forte, who was his most frequent sparring partner; X, who was very valuable and also Blues, who was valuable both strategically and for sparring.
X had also promised to spar/play with Zero once X didn't have other problems to work on and could pay attention to getting good at it. So even if Blues leaning against him didn't mean combat now, it meant there would be eventual combat, and the good stuff, not just putting humans to sleep.
Humans, unlike robot masters, wanted to fight, so it was very frustrating that they weren't built solidly enough to be any fun. It wasn't just a matter of being a challenge – he could paralyze one of his hosts just as easily as he could squish a human. Both of them were only challenges if he wanted them to be challenges, which he did.
"No, you cannot turn humans into robot masters so you can fight them," Blues said, as he'd said before.
Strategy. "I won't ask Dr. Wily how to do it if you either come up with a way to fix this right now or let me to take you to one of the doctors." Then Blues would feel better and then, then sparring.
Maybe he should start solving more of his own problems. X didn't prioritize sparring highly enough. Upgrading Forte's strategy set programming was also a possibility… Most of his hosts were peaceful, which was fine: if they were attacked, Zero wanted to fight the attackers. He'd already promised Forte a share of any real fighting that happened, so the last thing he wanted was to divide it up even further.
"You're willingly letting me into your mental programming?" Dr. Wily asked him.
"It's not my discomfort alone," Blues told him, eyes still closed. "And it is the will of my master."
"And you're backed up to the cloud."
The boy actually smiled, and there was almost too much softness to it to call it a smirk. "And I'm backed up to the cloud." Dr. Wily could look, but he'd need Zero to make any changes for him.
A robot's master was authorized to make changes. Either Blues was that confident in his control over Zero, or he truly did see Zero as his master. Then again, what would he try to do when Zero wanted to make a change to him?
"The simplest solution would be to block your awareness of Zero's presence when you're hibernating," Dr. Wily told him. "That wouldn't require changing anything in how your consciousness operates." If it didn't notice Zero, then it could go into full, proper hibernation analysis mode.
"No," Blues said, opening his eyes to meet Dr. Wily's. "I need the status check. If my master is upset, I need to know."
Hard to tell if the distress there at the thought of Zero needing Blues and Blues not being awake to help him was real or the product of one of very few robot masters with any acting ability. "You also need proper hibernation. Especially a system with priorities like yours… You're doing the same thing all over again, just like when you were going without maintenance before," Dr. Wily grumbled.
A quiet laugh. "Well, you got me… And you're the genius, aren't you? It's Dr. Light who wouldn't fix me against my will: you'll do what needs to be done." He closed his eyes. "Shut me down until you've got something you want to install. I'm sure you can guess how Zero reacts to a terrified host."
"Yes, yes." Someone must be holding Zero back from storming in and killing him, or else he'd have done at least the first already. Probably Blues, come to think of it. "Except you're in cloud storage, remember? I can shut down this body, but it won't shut you down. Would you rather have no information on what I'm planning?"
"You're going to have to change how I think, when that inevitably changes who I am," Blues reminded him. "It doesn't matter how you do it, the fact remains that according to my equivalent of your survival instincts, you are going to murder me. Again. Whether you do it with a gun or a knife doesn't make much difference, and I'd rather not spend hours staring down the barrel of a gun while you contemplate exactly how you're going to kill me. Did you not understand that I would rather die cleanly than… this? No, of course you knew, you know my psychological programming, you just didn't care. And now this, with the memory of being someone else who is dead now, doesn't have the luxury of death because there are children who are going to die if someone doesn't do something. Do you know how much I loathe having to restrain Zero from killing you for me? I bet you can guess, Father. So shut up, shut me down, and stop twisting the knife."
