"Well…" It really wasn't the intent behind this system, but… "I suppose it's good that you understand the difference between fiction and reality, and want to do it here because you know it's really not something you should do in real life, where people will get hurt." Die, if a warbot this powerful decided to attack a military base for fun.
The stardroid nodded eagerly.
"Far be it from me to say that people shouldn't play video games," when that was one of his hobbies, at least in the copied memories. "As long as you understand that this isn't something you should be using to learn what you should do in real life, just an unrealistic game."
Shoulders drooped.
"I'll keep the combat simulation part realistic," he reassured the boy, because it didn't take being patched with robot master programming to be weak against adorable, sad little newbuilt robots.
Zero perked up again.
"Well… alright." Still, since he had the opportunity, he really should include some educational value… "Since you wanted multiple opponents, I'll also set it up to handle multi-player… I mean, multiple participants." Teaching a learning system the benefits of cooperation was educational, right? Perhaps he could even try to script stealth missions and other situations where Zero could experiment with problem-solving options besides violence even within the game scenarios…
"You don't remember what happened?"
"Obviously not. How the human brain writes to memory… Well, it's fantastic at writing to memory, the technical problems lie in the conscious mind building connections to access those memory files," when most people's conscious minds were idiots that didn't use the information they had, so it wasn't as though letting them access more of the brain's stored information would help any. Building a decent file access protocol for the human brain was a solved problem: it was just an irritating amount of work since the human brain wasn't user-friendly and it was far simpler to retrieve or access data from an external drive like a diary, accounting spreadsheet or online wiki since computers other than the human brain were searchable.
"Until that boy does some actual studying, at least he has the sense not to tamper with unfamiliar systems," Dr. Wily said, blithely not making the connection that he'd tried to program Zero to tamper with robot master emotions and value systems, to override how their minds handled weighing various factors with his idea of how their minds should work. "Imagine if he'd tried to copy the memories a robot master would have formed of a timeframe like that over in the same format…" Well, his Zero would have the capability to undo the screw-up, at least. Once he figured out what he'd done wrong, and who knew how long that would take.
"He didn't change you back until Blues booted up fully and Zero could confirm that the changes you made left him operational. I couldn't hear the conversation, but I believe…"
"Blues told him what to do? Good." 'Put him back the way you found him' was probably involved in that conversation, then. "He might be trying to restrict Zero's actions, but at least some of that is going to be because master or not, Zero is young and therefore stupid." It wasn't in Zero's best interests for him to go around screwing things up because he had more power than sense, just like Dr. Wily's other children. What temporarily converting someone into a robot master with a robot master's worldview would do to a human… "Well now." Given Blues' opinion on significant personality changes? He hadn't talked Zero into sparing the WRU members, he'd talked him into murdering them in a way that wouldn't bother robot masters who didn't share Blues' opinion of mental editing. Murdering them and replacing them with an equal number of obedient little robots, and leaving them that way long enough for a new baseline to develop, then turning them back and, unlike with Dr. Wily, making sure the memories and new emotional bonds remained intact?
He found it pleasingly vicious, a nicely karmic death. If only Blues had remained, babysat the Third Numbers and helped handle strategy instead of running off to go die in a gutter somewhere, the absurd treatment of robots could have been handled years ago.
"Where is he? Zero."
"The Great Hall," Shadow reported.
Dr. Wily had expected him to have to go check. Had he tapped surveillance systems, set a robot to watch Zero or did he have stardroid radar? Zero's aura of power wasn't exactly subtle, although of course Dr. Wily had built in some stealth capability so Zero could conceal it. Not because Zero should need to hide, but he might want his hosts to have infiltration capability (Shadow) instead of being ridiculously easy to see coming once someone else built a detector for this energy.
He found Zero in a capsule a little too small for him: it helped that the lid wasn't closed. Forte and Gospel were curled up against the side of it.
"He's playing," Dr. Wily heard from behind him when he tapped his foot, considering kicking one of them awake since they didn't respond to his presence. He turned to see the Lightbot android yawn and stretch, still sprawled out on Zero's throne instead of getting up from it or even sitting up straight. "Familiar not-my capsule makes simulations," X said. "Zero wanted big combat simulations against a lot of trained humans with unit tactics so he could play without killing real humans and upsetting his hosts."
He did look like Blues, although Blues had never sparkled happily at people. Dr. Wily wondered if Blues was having X spend time with the Fifth Numbers. It seemed a natural match if he wanted babysitting services, but that would depend on how he wanted Dr. Light's latest learning system to turn out.
Albert turned back to Zero, his greatest creation, lying there in that capsule. Crib. That was definitely a crib.
Gospel's leg twitched: judging from the smile on Forte's sleeping face, they were definitely dreaming of chasing things down and blowing them up.
"Why aren't you in there?" he asked the green-eyed boy. "It's your crib."
"I was, but then I got bored. Zero said Blues said he'd work out a way for it to not bore me, but Blues is doing thing with Zero's hosts while Zero's combat protocols are engaged so restraining them if Blues scares the hosts doesn't make Zero all messed up."
"Video games bored you?" Robot masters tended not to like them either, at least not the violent ones. They'd rather play Minecraft and Animal Crossing in real life, building things with their robots and looking after the robots. The difference between dislike and boredom: interesting. Boredom indicated indifference, meaning X hadn't had a robot master's default reaction to seeing the deaths of even imaginary people.
The android pouted. "It's just the same thing over and over. It doesn't give me data on anything outside the game, and I can't start doing different things to see what happens because that messes up what Zero and Forte want to do. Why does Zero want to do that, but he never wants to experiment and think about experiments with me? He says thinking about things is hard, but he wants things hard when it's a game like this!"
"Complaining that people are intellectually lazy… Next you'll be whining that the sky is blue. We've noticed," Dr. Wily grumbled.
The Lightbot smiled.
Not Dr. Wily, not his father (a father! So much better than builders), but still sharp-tinged insight combing through his mind. More than willing to be critical, to point out a flaw and expect him to do something about that now, but there was affection underlying it, a desire to keep him alive instead of a demand that he measure up or be terminated.
"Do you still think that you died?" he dared to ask only because of that feeling, only after Blues had worked for five minutes without showing anger at him. He had helped Star find Blues, he had tended him for Dr. Wily thinking it was for the best.
It was still dangerous to ask, to provoke this particular robot master, but Shade was in danger from the moment he was built. Wily Island was so absurdly safe by comparison to that park that he felt almost compelled to take risks here, lest he lose his edge.
"Take a human at five, fifteen, fifty. Put them in the same situation. Every version would take completely different actions for completely different reasons, based on completely different experiential sets. It isn't likely that there would be anything at all in their behavior to indicate that these three different people are in fact the same person, that there is any common soul shared by all three. Whether they count as the same person despite this is a philosophical question. Most humans simply assume that they're the same person their entire lives, but I was created partially to think about self and emotions, so of course I looked at the facts."
Blues worked far faster than Shade could have, the ease of long practice (desperate struggle to keep his own systems from going haywire, spawning bugs cascading into catastrophic failure), but there was still a slow, patient and painstaking feel to it. Shade knew better than to think that Blues was a peaceful person, but his mind still had a peaceful air to it right now. Meditative, Shadow would have said. Calmness born of peace and patterns, the same as the sound of the waves.
"Are you still angry with me for not stopping Dr. Wily from saving you… No. From infecting you with Zero's virus before Zero was even awake?"
The robot master whistled softly. He didn't make any move to access Shade's emotional subroutines, or logic processor to see what the younger robot master was thinking, just kept working on the current section.
Until he wasn't anymore.
Until Shade found himself unable to move, unable to do anything but register what was happening as his personality was cut off from sending signals to his limbs, as his security protocols were relentlessly deleted, feeling those defenses (suddenly so feeble!) excised from his mind with a cold blade.
Feeling that same blade readied again, to scythe clean his main drives, to reformat everything that made him Shade.
"Right now," whispered a terrifyingly human voice, "I could delete the core of who you are."
His silver tongue betrayed him: he thought that long practice had given him the ability to keep talking no matter what danger he was in, what fresh horrors he was faced with. Yet somehow this made his mind shake, unable to comprehend what was happening, begging anything that would listen that it wasn't, worse than watching one of his robots torn apart and knowing that if he acted he would die and all the others, what would happen to them?
Why was, why was the person he'd trusted, the one he'd let into his mind, doing this to him? Was it his fault, had he been found wanting? He wanted to believe that was it, wanted to beg forgiveness even though he didn't know what he'd… No, he did know what he'd done wrong.
The presence in his mind that should have cared for him instead tearing at him and his defenses, what kept him safe and well: that was what the virus did to Blues, while Shade helped it along, worked to keep Blues' systems from escaping into meltdown.
That same chirp came from his emotional subroutines, but it couldn't pass his lips.
It was still heard.
He wanted to collapse with relief when he felt Blues' thoughts soften towards him, even though that knife was still held to his throat.
"What I could do to you? This is what you asked Zero to do to Dr. Wily. To our father. To create the new is to destroy the old," the eldest said softly, and returned to his work.
The threat of imminent death was still there. The confusion of signals left his thoughts scrambling, caught between two contradictory emotions. Trust, because here was proof that Blues, that someone cared and he was safe. He would live. Terror, because here was proof that someone found him unworthy to continue to exist. He would die.
"If you don't figure it out by the time I'm done, I'll tell you," Blues said. "If you figure it out before I'm done, I'll delete the process when you do," the one held in suspension within Shade's own drives, a sword of Damocles that had already pierced his skin and could at any moment continue its fall to cleave his skull open and smash the contents.
Would Master Zero really allow Blues to kill him like this? "Master Zero," he said, and knew he'd guessed right when the words passed his lips. "We're uploaded to his cloud, within his power." No longer truly resident in their drives, even if Zero emulated the systems they were used to well enough it was hard even for a system manager to spot the difference. "At any moment, he could end us." That was the point Blues was making, that was what Shade was supposed to compare this to and learn from the experience. Learn what? That this was not something to be done lightly, that even done with the best of intentions it was still cruel?
"Yes," Blues told him, and he could feel the 'good boy.' "He holds our souls in his hands. I was placed in the power of someone who could and very well might have wiped me by someone I loved." His father, even if Blues was infinitely lucky enough to have two fathers who loved him.
The threat to his self that he sensed now: Yes, it was no different from the one that already existed. He trusted Zero with that power because he trusted Dr. Wily. Zero was born of his father's will to save his children.
"My younger brother," the elder murmured, and yes. The command that pressed against his systems, ready to be input, was withdrawn.
He could breathe again, exert manual control over his air cooling system even if he didn't quite feel that it was safe to test movement systems yet, when Blues was going over his systems and that meant he should stay put until the elder was done and not move around distractingly.
Blues, Blues was also family. Yes?
"You are my little brother, born of my coding and the work of my creators' hands," just as I am, "and I will protect you." That didn't mean he wouldn't terrify Shade, when he'd protected Rock all these years by outright attacking him, but an older brother. Like Quick Man, who rescued Shade from that terrible place and carried out all of Shade's robots, but willing to talk with him and tend to him.
Teach him.
"You're good at pushing your luck…" That ultimate compliment? For Blues to see Shade as not just worth debugging, but upgrading? The way Forte wanted Dr. Wily to think he was worth upgrading, and now he and Zero worked to improve their performance together?
The eldest sighed, and combed his thoughts through Shade's mind again, as his own emotional state calmed, something in it of waves on the shore, or perhaps what he sensed from Blues when the eldest rested by the sound of those waves. "We'll see," he said, and Shade smiled, because that wasn't a no, that was a 'perhaps, with time,' and with time those waves could grind the mountains that resisted them into sand.
Time, he had time now, they were going to live now, instead of both of them living under the shadow of death, Blues thanks to his systems and Shade due to humans.
"Stop putting Zero in situations where he's going to end up killing people without intending to," Blues told him. Blues, by infecting him. Dr. Wily, when Shade asked Zero to change him permanently, to overwrite the human Dr. Wily. "If you can start thinking before you advise mind control," he said to the robot master who'd asked Dr. Wily for a mind control master weapon. "Then I'll think about it."
Video games are an official hobby of Dr. Light's, so yeah. X had a lot of time to kill in the capsule: I think I could clear out my RPG backlog in a century. Probably. Child of Light would be a good parent-child game for them to play, despite the appropriate name.
X, no. Just because Zero is hogging your father doesn't mean you should try to find out if Zero's father is any fun.
Trying to get back to writing/posting. Will hopefully be able to update Burn The Bridge Home this weekend, but I need to write ninetyish percent of next week's chapter.