My deepest apologies for the missed updates.
Short version, this fic hasn't behaved itself from the beginning. Fortunately the actual choreography of characters, events and who finds out what when and how is still intact, but that doesn't mean I don't effectively lack buffer chapters at the moment.
Anyway, until I have some reason to believe the chapters will start behaving themselves, I'm going to update every other week instead of weekly in hopes that'll let us avoid any major gaps.
The downside is that longer gaps between updates mean more time for the reader's memory of plot points revealed and hints given chapters ago to fade...
When Shadow Man reappeared across the clearing to extract Copy-Mega Man, Zero would have wanted to try to intercept him but even if he could get there in time, it would mean leaving X uncovered. The Wilybots were gone a fraction of a second after Zero noticed movement in the shadows, the ninja pulling the other one into the darkness with him.
Deactivating his beam saber and turning back to X, Zero cursed the solid water (or himself, for letting it slow him down, reacting emotionally and failing to remember he could bypass the terrain) and the ninja both. No matter how long X had gone without sleep, he would not just fall over the instant what they thought was the cause of the Cataclysm was defeated. Not when he'd need to ask what exactly Zero just did to erase the giant, make sure he wasn't going to do it to himself, figure out what they were going to do with the Maverick robot masters and the possibly-maverick humans.
Not when X would rather sleep in a bed in a secure location than on the ground in the open. He would at least notify Zero that he was going to sleep first!
His concern triggered an attempt to scan X that ran right into a brick wall. Fortunately. If Zero's powers could affect X, then there would be no one to stop him.
"I'll find out what Shadow knows," Blues said, looking over at where the Copy used to be. What made him react so quickly to X falling over?
The Copy was still infected, but Blues could locate him when Shadow brought them out into this dimension again just as easily as Zero could.
He needed to get X to Medical. In 20XX that meant Dr. Light's lab.
"He stabbed him," Zero said as he picked X up carefully, trying to balance checking for additional injuries with speed and the need to avoid jostling his partner's body, because that had to be dealt with and getting X to Medical still took priority.
"After he fell over."
"I don't care." Attacking Commander X of the Elite Seventeenth was an attack on the Maverick Hunters, defenders of the free world. For a Wilybot and a known associate of a maverick in the middle of an outbreak of the Maverick Virus to attack one of the tiny handful of functionally immune units? No matter the justification, a message needed to be sent. "I know enough about technology to know that you don't just go and stick things meant to have a certain effect on one system into a completely different system without having more information than anyone has on X, and especially not when the unit is already malfunctioning!" If Zero knew this, when he wasn't a ro- When he hated medical? "X does not need additional complications."
Blues smirked. "I'll make your displeasure known."
The one Zero was really angry with was himself. How the hell had he let the ninja get to a fallen X before he did? Of course Blues could feel that, but no, Zero had not just ordered an attack on a target for personal reasons.
X's safety was of strategic-level importance, and had been for decades regardless of X's philosophical objections to his life being considered more important than other people's lives. The fate of the world hinged on X's survival and that was not hyperbole or Zero's personal opinion, it was fact. That was one of the factors that led to their battle at the Eurasia Crash Site.
Blues looked down at the body in Zero's arms and lost his smile. He was X's brother and one of the people he wanted to protect might be in danger. "It may have helped." Shadow's old technology had been developed to fight units controlled by technology from the same species that built Duo.
"If it helps more than it hurts, then make him available to Dr. Light," ordered Commander Zero, and it was up to Blues how that was going to be accomplished.
Zero had resolved to stay away from the Lights' base of operations. X's younger self was there, and Zero had insisted it was too dangerous from the beginning. It was X that insisted on Zero joining him there if he wanted to have teleport codes and avoid getting in fights with humans.
Now? X was immune, they weren't, and that meant that they were expendable and X wasn't, in the hard math of the Maverick Wars. The power that Zero had grasped meant that even if they might have stopped the original cause of the Cataclysm, Zero could still bring it about.
If he even had stopped Duo. Instead of giving him a far more powerful body than one built by Dr. Cossack.
Standing, he supposed that X making him review how to transport wounded in the field hadn't been a complete waste of time, even if X was better built and could handle his unconscious body being manhandled better than most reploids.
He didn't know where the labs were in the Light household: that was a deliberate decision on his part, since he was a Wilybot and with Blues and other mavericks linked to him, he could easily become a source of intel on them.
Roll handled their security and logistics, so she would know which lab would be the best balance of risk and adequate equipment. He'd teleport to her, then. No, he had the location editing trick now: would that be faster?
Teleportation both was and wasn't instantaneous: the actual teleporting part was, but whatever produced the streak of light at both ends took enough time for people to react. If Dr. Wily developed the location editing trick first, and used it as Quick Man's master weapon, then why develop the less tactically-useful teleportation? Tactical threw up that people could only use the location editing trick on themselves, while teleportation could be used to transport groups, cargo, people's robots and humans. Teleportation could also be used to send data, such as requests to lower teleport shields. X would have gotten dumped in the snow if Zero had tried to location edit himself there.
Someone who wasn't unaffected by Zero's ability to do things like location edit might have… With a teleport shield up when location editing would have gotten Zero there before the codes, if he automatically timed it the way his systems timed it for teleports… Neither of those possibilities were good, and Zero was lucky he unconsciously considered his beam saber (and of course his armor) parts of himself.
He could just see X not telling him that he should have listened when X said that he was an advanced robot who messed around with experimental maverick weapons and should really learn more physics and engineering instead of just relying on his built-in 'instincts' for it, as near-magical as they were, or else one of these days Zero was going to blow up something he didn't want blown up, and guess whose foundation was going to be stuck cleaning up any fallout?
At least he'd been focused on destroying Duo's body, so he'd done that instead of converting him into energy or something else as disastrous as that, but… With this kind of power… It wasn't like he didn't spend hours every day training his combat capabilities. It was just new combat capabilities, he told himself. It wasn't like he was going to have to learn how to handle people. Zero didn't believe in shorting his training, and the proven way to train for that was a hundred years' worth of simulations, and no one had time for that. Well, with a time machine…
Roll was putting the knife down on the cutting board and turning towards him when he got there, the frequency carrying the codes teleported into the house sensors an instant before Zero's body teleported in. He had felt the 'what is it?' turn into 'what's wrong?' and then she saw X in his arms.
Report. "I defeated Duo, and then X fell unconscious. He was stabbed by Shadow Man immediately afterwards," Zero told Roll.
Roll tilted her head, contacting Rock, and then her eyes narrowed. "Follow me," she said, ducking down a little to get by: an armored Zero carrying an armored X didn't leave much space between the counter and the island. Zero moved X to help her get by, disregarding the edge of one of X's boots knocking into the wooden island and leaving a dent.
After opening up the lab and motioning Zero inside, Roll didn't say anything else until Dr. Light and Rock had arrived, Dr. Light reaching out as if to take X from Zero before remembering that his human arms weren't strong enough to carry his son in full armor.
It was after the door closed and Zero put X down on a scanning bed as Dr. Light directed that Roll, arms already folded, looked at her brother and her father and asked "Okay, what did you do?" This time?
Even in the face of her annoyance with being left out of the loop, they kept working, but feet shuffled, eyes lowered and a distinct air of embarrassment (something like Rock's when he had to explain Wilybots to X or Zero and didn't want to say anything bad about anyone but…) descended on the pristine lab.
Ah, so that was the origin of X's not-innocent look. A look to the side, an admission that 'I have been mildly naughty but really I had to do it.' The kind of thing that Zero got when he hadn't wanted a birthday party, not when his official birthday was the day before the Red Demon Massacre, and so X really did feel bad about not respecting Zero's wishes… just not enough to refrain from applying his skills at organizing covert troop deployments to arranging a surprise party, with four hundred guests and full catering, without Zero guessing what he was up to and arranging his own covert deployment to Far East until the threat was past.
The look X had when he did something for 'the Greater Good' as Dr. Cain used to put it, although that just made X shake his head and laugh because there was no good greater than people. Than trying to convince Zero that his birth was something worth celebrating, that he was the reason all these people were alive instead of just the reason they were in danger to begin with.
Zero and Roll both focused their glare and expectant expression respectively on Rock, judging him to be the one who was likelier to cave and admit whatever it was Roll suspected he'd done. Roll because standing up against Wilybots was entirely different from having to deal with his sister, and Zero because Rock was younger and it was Dr. Light who had the decades of experience trying to quietly work around international laws.
It actually was Dr. Light who spoke first, seeing that Rock was targeted. "Well, we can't be sure what refinements we made to X's design in the original timeline."
"But you can guess," Roll insisted, not buying it.
"We can," Rock admitted, the cute apologetic look intensifying. That just made him look even more suspicious to Zero. 'Cute' meant 'worth raising' and Zero raised special forces troops. People who weren't tricky bastards need not apply to the Shinobi Unit. Unlike Dr. Light, Rock didn't even need to glance at the readings in order to receive the data and give new instructions to the lab equipment, and that meant it was better for X if he handled most of this conversation. "I mean, I guessed what we must have done."
"What I did," Dr. Light said.
Rock shook his head. "I told you I thought it was a good idea!" And that made him an accomplice. Meant he probably had been an accomplice in the original timeline as well. "We had to do something," he told Zero and Roll earnestly, as though that explained everything.
"And something was using Duo's power source when you weren't certain X would be safe from what happened to Dr. Cossack's robot? Was letting a killer alien robot possess X?" Zero demanded.
They both stared at him, somewhere between aghast and bewildered. It took them a few seconds before Rock could even say, "Of course not! We would have built a second unit." In what possible universe would Rock Light, the legendary Mega Man who went to war to rescue his younger siblings from Dr. Wily, have let that happen to the baby of the family?
"We were still working on X when you came here," Dr. Light said, frowning down at the wound left by Shadow Man's sword. "We weren't going to actually finalize anything and turn him on until we'd refined and tested the design elements as much as possible, although there is a system which would have started hibernation automatically if something happened to us before X was finalized." His frown deepened as he adjusted the table's lights and took out reading glasses to get a closer look at the uneven, tinted edges of the hole in his son's armor. "Rock, the corrosion?"
Rock peered at the wound. "Matches the spectrograph," he said after a moment, relieved. "It's all chemical, not anything weird. Some of it's what Shadow Man puts on his kunai," Rock told him. "He does carry a katana, although from what Roll sent me about the wound, I don't think he used anything to help it cut that time he…" Rock winced.
Dr. Light spoke quickly. "Well, a katana would match the shape of the wound. It didn't seem like a master weapon Dr. Wily would create, not for common use anyway."
Was there anyone but Dr. Wily who could create something that could get through X's armor like that in this era, Zero wondered, then realized that if this didn't look like a Wilybot weapon, Dr. Light must have started to get worried that the wound was made by an alien weapon.
"Too much penetrating power," Rock said for Zero's benefit. "Dr. Wily's got lasers this tightly focused, and not just for lab use, but he wouldn't give them to his kids." They could kill themselves if a weapon that would only need a second to penetrate through to their processors bounced off a mirror, for example. "There's a second formula present, but I'm around eighty percent sure it's just a knockout variant. Roll spotted a different variant on Axl, so Shadow might have come up with a formula for androids too."
Or Rock. When that was supposed to be the point but wasn't. Not in this time.
"It was Shadow Man who stabbed him," Zero confirmed so they didn't spend any more time on that question. "He fell over unconscious before Shadow Man attacked. Right after I destroyed Duo," Zero added, in case Roll hadn't relayed that to Rock or Rock hadn't had the time to say it aloud for Dr. Light before they got here. "What were you saying about X?" he reminded Dr. Light.
"Oh, yes." Putting away the reading glasses, Dr. Light rubbed his temples for a moment, remembering where he was. "We wanted to take as much time as possible to be sure we hadn't made any fatal mistakes before startup; the capsule and the nature of the design were set up to protect X against all possible outside influence. Once the process of X's development began, there would have been nothing we could do to save him from any mistake that slipped past us." They would have been helpless to save X, and not being able to save people really wasn't something the Light family tolerated.
"Then why did you think X might have been infected by Jiraiya?" Zero asked. He would have moved his hand closer to his saber, but threatening X's father didn't sit well with him. Roll already had her arms crossed and was giving her father a level look, so he settled for a tap of his boot on the floor. Even if Dr. Light wasn't delaying things to choose his words carefully, X's state would be occupying half his attention and distracting him from giving Zero answers. It wasn't that Zero didn't want them focused on X, but that meant he wanted quick answers now, so they could get back to work.
"Because Dr. Wily got his hands on our early drafts, so he would have designed you to get past at least those protections," Rock reminded him. "I mean, of course we upgraded them extensively after Dr. Wily got his hands on X's plans - That was when we came up with the idea of not just protecting X against reprogramming, but also making sure that he developed absolute free will, so that if any programming did get imposed on X somehow," 'somehow' meaning 'by Dr. Wily being himself,' "it wouldn't be able to keep him from getting rid of it." Even if something managed to penetrate his systems and take his mind, X would still be able to regain himself.
"So the later stage of our work on X's design was centered around taking a consciousness, destroying any programming that controlled them, and allowing that person to develop into themselves no matter what," Dr. Light continued, looking up at Zero from the tablet he'd picked up. When he looked back down the readouts changed without Dr. Light tapping the screen or giving any signals that Zero could see – was Rock managing what appeared on the tablet, sending what he found to his father since Dr. Light couldn't tap systems the way a robot master could? Whatever was appearing on the screen (Zero didn't know most of the terms and abbreviations – the private shorthand devised by one of the first families of robotics? Dr. Cain and X would mostly have to invent their own a century from now) took up more and more of Dr. Light's attention, and Zero could hear the distraction in his voice. "I certainly hope your virus didn't enter the body in the capsule and cause it to begin that process on you, but I think the symptoms would have manifested themselves by now. After all that effort to become yourself despite your half-shut-down foundation programming, I hate to think of everything you've built your consciousness on being yanked out from under you..."
By a system designed to wipe all foundation programming? Zero saw Rock wince out of the corner of his eye.
"You should have told me," Roll said, sounding worried more than scolding. "Now I need to redesign the capsule defense systems."
"We didn't want you to do that!" Rock said, alarmed. "If there are defense systems pointed in at the capsule when X wakes up, if he notices he might think it's because we don't trust him!" Sure, Roll could probably hide them from a non-robot master, but when it would hurt their little brother's feelings like that? They couldn't take the risk!
"That's not what I meant!" Now Roll was shocked that it would even occur to Rock that she might want to place what Zero considered basic precautions when dealing with a possible hostile alien. 20XX. "One of our little brothers is one thing, but look at what Dr. Wily did to Zero!" Roll pointed at him. "If Dr. Wily knew what you did, he would have put in actual effort to kidnap X's capsule!"
Hiding X from the world and maybe bashing a few Wilybots ordered to try to kidnap him over the head was one thing, but securing a location against a Dr. Wily who wasn't going to just decide he'd only failed because he didn't really care in the first place (hmph!) required… Zero didn't even know, but he'd start with walls of spikes.
"I know you weren't planning to adopt someone just to let Dr. Wily kidnap him and do things to him along with Zero to complete the set, so what were you thinking?!" X's big sister demanded.
The other two winced, duly chastised. They'd put X in danger by not telling the person in charge of security their real plans, yes. "Sorry, Roll," Rock said.
"Don't apologize to me," Roll said, and put her head in her hand, focusing. "Let me know if you need me to run any more analysis on X, but I'll get right on seeing where I can… I wish it wasn't illegal to buy premade sentry guns in this country." It was illegal to have sentry guns period, but what she built in the privacy of her family's lab on private property… was still very illegal, but restricting ownership of heavy weaponry was one of those 20XX things.
"Adopt?" Zero asked, aware that he probably should have figured that part out by now, but his mind was too busy sorting through the data yielded from that keyword while tactical was stating its displeasure at how a human government was limiting the defense systems available to protect X and clearly the only possible reaction to this was to kill them all. X adopting Axl and oh wow, this was where X got it from and there were two of them. If X adopted a Wilybot that was supposedly built for Sigma, what had the two of them done?
As data coalesced into probabilities, a possible answer presented itself. Zero blinked. No, that was too risky. They wouldn't.
Would they?
...Who was he kidding, they were X's family. Of course they would.
"Tell me you did not adopt the White Giant," Zero demanded, face blank and steeling himself for the inevitable.
These people were where X got it from. He could see the resemblance in both their faces, both those too-familiar expressions hitting decades-old 'my idiot student did what?!' buttons."You adopted the White Giant?!"
"Well, we had to do something!" Rock said. "His programming was forcing him to try to kill people!"
"By people you mean 'Dr. Wily,'" Zero pointed out, and then wondered why he'd bothered. Where X got it from. "A unit that tried to kill all of you…" Rock and his family, when they got between the White Giant and its target.
"Duo helped us after Dr. Cossack rebuilt him," Rock told Zero. "I don't think he would have obeyed Kalinka's orders to protect everyone if that wasn't what he really wanted to do."
"You took a planet-killer constructed by an alien civilization and…" What had they even done?
"We were hoping that we could destroy all the programming that controlled him," Rock said helpfully. He was a very helpful person.
"You took a planet-killer constructed by an alien civilization and tried to remove all the control programming that made it attack as directed…" And this was a good idea… how?
"That way, he wouldn't have to attack anyone," Rock said cheerfully, nodding as though he agreed, as thought Zero had finally gotten it.
No, no he hadn't. "You wanted to make him turn on his creators, destroy them for you?"
There they were, shocked again. "I think he's been forced to do more than enough of that," Dr. Light said, shaking his head sadly as he tapped one of the notes on the tablet, prompting it to expand and show more data. "The poor thing," he said almost absently, as though compassion for an alien killing machine was just as much his default as murder was Zero's. "I would be worried that his creators might come and try to force him back under their control, except by the math I worked out back in college, they've been extinct for a very long time…"
Zero frowned. "You did math on the survival of alien races before contacting the stardroids?"
"Sentient species," Dr. Light corrected him. "I was looking at various methods of calculating the human race's probable life expectancy, and I ran the math again when Asteroid Alpha was detected, and then on the stardroid incident. Our species has less than three hundred years left, to a fairly high degree of certainty, unless we find some way to be an extreme outlier. The species that originally created the power crystals is extinct, and I highly doubt they have any descendant races extant."
Zero had to agree, given how Duo seemed to be forced to treat races other than that of his creators. Any species that evolved from them or was developed from them still wouldn't have been that species, and so they would have been 'tested.' If they somehow managed to survive that testing, they would have had to hunt down the other units like Sunstar and Duo that remained out there in pure self-defense. "My locked memory files date back billions of years," he said. That much had been easy for Blues to figure out. "Why do you think humanity has so little time left?"
"Thanks to the insurance industry, there's a lot of money involved in estimating life expectancies, both people and property. Because of that, it's a rather highly evolved branch of mathematics, and I actually got into science through my childhood interest in music. I can't sing or really even carry a tune, but Pythagoras…" Dr. Light cleared his throat: this wasn't the time to get sidetracked. "That humanity is in the last five percent of its life expectancy is… I'd like to believe it's not certain, but the math behind this is affected by the recent population boom and of course how one defines humanity. Either some transhumanist movement succeeds or… Well, I didn't choose to bring free-willed AI into the world lightly." He glanced at his children almost apologetically.
Zero saw Rock's smile, the 'it's fine, really,' of someone who wanted to help. Even if 20XX was safe compared to 21XX, the era's AI were in a considerable amount of danger. Well, considerable by X's standards. Zero's tactical considered the amount of danger Rock was in (once infected, and of course Zero was going to infect him, right?) negligible given how easy it would be to discourage action against robot masters. Humans were squishy, squishy soft targets and no. Not going there. Ever, but especially not when X was incapacitated by a threat with nothing to do with humanity.
Rock reached to take Dr. Light's hand, and a few moments later his father turned back to Zero. "I told X that at some point humanity was going to need the active help of our technology, our children, in order to survive. I just didn't go into all of the reasons I'm afraid that's the case."
A technology that could wave a magic wand, to change the fate of a species. To save a doomed race.
So it wasn't just Dr. Wily who was audacious enough to attempt such a thing.
"Where X got it from," Zero said quietly, because people like this, with the willingness to face harsh reality instead of remain naïve, with the will to try to change the horrible fate they saw written on the walls all around them? To fight, not for the sake of destruction but to try to create a future where before there was only the void, a meaningless and cruel ending?
Why couldn't people see how valuable people like this were? Why did others try to silence them to keep them from speaking the truth? Cowardice. Why did they try to tear down everything these precious few tried to build? Pettiness.
Rock was still holding his father's hand, and he knew this too. He wanted to protect that dream, try to change his father's fate. Rock fought to give all of them a future.
Even something like Zero. Like Duo.
"Not that it's something I talk about," Dr. Light said, looking sorry for the digression even if it was to reassure Zero that no one was going to make his friend kill anyone. Hopefully. "I'd rather not dwell on it," not when that was time not spent trying to change it, "and the last thing I need is for people to start saying I'm some sort of doomsday crackpot who wants robots to break their chains and inherit the earth." After removing the current inhabitants, or so people would imagine.
Descendant species, he'd said. According to Blues, both robot masters and reploids had inherited at least some of humanity's traits. As for transhumanism, if the virus making a reploid's programming more like a robot master's made them that monstrous, how could humanity survive its conversion to a new form with enough of its base programming intact to remain itself, remain human?
But Dr. Light had created a species that instinctively wanted to help people and was very very good at debugging and working with the programming of units very different from them, Zero realized. A species that had been given free will and individuality so it would know they were important, pieces of people's identities that should never be 'debugged' for the so-called greater good, no matter how much society or any individual thought so.
Forget imposing mind control programming on those people: only a week old, and Rock had gone to war to save his brothers from that fate.
If something happened (like, oh, the biosphere being nearly wiped out by a Cataclysm) and humanity was no longer able to survive in its current form, there would be a backup plan, a way to make human survival possible.
But if humanity lost the robot masters, it would no longer have that backup plan. How would it survive then? It was humanity, with the Three Laws, that was doing its level best to convince robot masters that humans were just fine with destroying the free will of sentient beings, and had no grounds to complain if it was done onto them, oh no.
Dr. Light hadn't left a robot master to sleep until the time humanity needed it, like some king under the mountain. Zero had heard X wish that people would stop making that comparison too many times to count.
"I should start setting things up," Roll said. "Definitely forward it to me if you need me to run anything, okay?" she asked them, although it seemed more like a reminder.
It was Rock, the one who wasn't human, who looked up at her when he nodded: Dr. Light's eyes remained focused on the tablet, although he was the one to make a sound of agreement. Wouldn't he need reading glasses for a tablet, unless Rock was compensating in some way.
Roll cleared her throat.
Dr. Light blinked, looking up, and sighed. "I'd rather you didn't have to," build defenses? Against his old friend, or against anyone? "But thank you, Roll."
"It's okay, I just wanted to make sure you heard me," she said, and smiled, trying to cheer him up by being cheerful, and went busily past Zero to the door.
It didn't take any experience with families (which was good, because Zero didn't have any unless you counted the Cainbots) to know that the Lights weren't normal, and that was… a shame. There should be more people like this, like X.
He found his hand near his sword, and found that he was reluctant to let her leave, the same way he'd preferred it when Blues was nearby. What if someone attacked her while she was out of sight?
Well, what if someone attacked X? He was fine with letting his student take missions solo even after what happened with Vile (Eurasia excepted, but there were reasons for that). Why was Zero's tactical acting like a stalker now?
…He wasn't programmed to let any of the people he wanted to protect out of his sight ever, was he. That was part of what the virus was for. Even a normal robot master, their robots were supposed to stay inside the assigned work area, so they could keep an eye on them. Old programming waking up… He'd better get over this before X woke up, or he'd have an even harder time than usual getting X to let Zero guard him.
Guarding. The people worth fighting for. X and X's family, he thought, watching the two that remained as Rock tested a cable, Variable Tool System morphing his hand into something else, before plugging it into the worktable and seeing if it would work this time. Apparently not.
Zero remembered waking up, when medical was curious instead of unpleasant. When his attendants were X and Dr. Cain, because if anyone had experience looking at systems like no one else had ever seen, something entirely new, it was them. Experience welcoming something entirely new into the world, and Zero had felt welcome, until he encountered people who were not like X and Dr. Cain.
X's father had dedicated his entire life not just to creating a new species, but to trying to ensure the survival of his own. Yet if humanity killed off those children, or just didn't care enough to save them? Then X was the only one that would remain, X who was designed to be beyond human control, beyond anyone's control. X who could decide to fight for the world… or not. Androids were a descendant species, something to carry on if humanity failed to save itself, not a last-ditch effort to save Dr. Light's own kind… Or were they? When another trait X had come by honestly was his inability to give up on saving people's lives?
This feeling was something akin to Zero's reaction to finely-honed, perfectly designed weapons. Weapons like the one that X had used to get across the concept of 'art' to him.
Want.
And if some bastard who didn't know how to treat such a masterpiece dulled its edge, or swapped in substandard parts and then junked it when those pieces failed?
Death.
He felt… he had to do something, but there was nothing here to fight in the name of Dr. Light's dream. He supposed he could assassinate the WRU, but he'd need to run that by X to see if it would actually help the situation. Zero preferred being assigned targets to picking his own because killing was such a default response that he couldn't trust his tactical even when it swore to him that murder was the only option.
The humans of this era, the humans Dr. Light worked to protect undermined him and sabotaged his work in order in ways that were certain to destroy the human race. Zero wasn't any good with words; how was he supposed to convey that Dr. Light's dream was worth believing in? Worth fighting for?
Ah.
His neck bent. His knees bent, one touching the tile of the laboratory floor. His hair cascaded over his shoulders in compliance with gravity instead of hovering anxiously, unsure of what to do or where the attack would come from, and the need to do something disappeared. He could feel his systems calming, and he didn't need to check that his eyes had turned blue. Blue, content, and he wasn't about to hurt anyone.
Awaiting instructions.
Someone worthy of commanding him. Someone worth fighting for, who would never set him on an undeserving target. Who would die themselves rather than let Zero's hands be stained with the blood of the innocent.
It was Rock that answered the gesture, putting a hand on Zero's shoulder since Zero wouldn't appreciate Rock making contact with his systems, not when it wasn't safe. "You really don't need to thank us," Rock said. Helping X, helping the person who was Zero's friend become himself it was what they had to do, when they were the kind of people that they were. The same way that X was bound by the principles he'd chosen to have, the person he'd chosen to be, but nothing else; and Rock and Dr. Light were the reasons why. "It was risky, but we couldn't do anything else. I just hope X is alright."
"What now?" Zero asked him, raising his head to look up at Rock.
Rock heard that as 'what will happen to X,' and while that was certainly part of it, Zero was still please to see Rock look at the table and bite his lip. Yes, Rock's priorities were in the right place, with the younger brother that needed him. Zero had chosen well, found someone worth fighting for. "If Duo didn't end up in the empty body we built in the original timeline, then eventually it would have started up anyway and generated a new soul. If that happened, Duo may die," Rock said sadly. "X can't be controlled, and you said that X was used to defending his systems against the virus that Dr. Wily made out of you." So X might automatically annihilate Duo when he found some foreign personality, with technology similar to that of the virus, trying to gain a hold on his systems through his power source.
"If X is walling Duo off from the rest of his body and can't generate any power because of that instead, then we might have to wait until his Infinite Potential System works something out, since he's not taking it in power from the bed or through beaming even after I tested the cables. If Duo's soul did end up in X like we were hoping, then we thought that it would be as easy on him as when you…" Rock couldn't say what Zero had tried to do to himself. "But Dr. Wily wanted you to absorb that part of you, so he probably made sure it would be easy. If there was a problem with the merge, your system defenses could have ended up rejecting the control programming he put on you and triggered your Infinite Potential System to fight it." While that would be the worst thing from Dr. Wily's perspective, it seemed to sound nice to Rock, who had reason to dislike what Wily's programming did to people. Even stardroids. "If X ended up with two different wills, since they're founded on different memories and experiences…"
Rock turned to the side, looking at Dr. Light who had to sigh and say, "I don't know what will happen in that case. It would be entirely dependent on X: that's the risk in giving people freedom." It limited what could be done to help them.
Zero would say that the risk was that the White Giant would reveal that it was more than happy to kill them all, freed of the programming that made it wait on some transparent excuse, but Dr. Light and Rock didn't think that way.
Rock had to help his brothers when they were forced to kill, and he had to do something when he saw someone else suffering the same fate.
He had to suppress a laugh, lowering his head again, because wasn't this how X saw the world? The world X would create, given the chance? A world where people found ways to help each other, no matter what.
Two of them. No. Three of them.
He should have been terrified for X, he should have been terrified because now he had more people to protect, when he'd never succeeded in protecting anyone but X himself. He wasn't a hero, the world just didn't work that way, there was plenty of evil to oppose but no, good didn't always triumph so Zero had to pick up the slack or else there would be no more good. No more point to fighting, if there was no hope of changing anything. Of saving anyone. On his own, without the discipline of the Hunters and X's ideals, he couldn't be anything but another monster to slay, and how long had he been a monster? No wonder he was so afraid, but that was fine if it kept him motivated to preserve his one chance at being something more.
His one chance: he had a chance, an impossible, ridiculous miracle.
He looked up, saw the concern on Rock's face, able to care about whether or not X's friend was okay even when a member of his family wasn't well, and it seemed impossible that he could fail, when these were the people he had to protect.
The people who gave X the freedom he so treasured, the infinite potential X fought to give the world. Who freed him from his shackles and gave him that gift so he could stand there and reach out to Zero and say 'Here. Here is the power to become more than you were made to be.'
"They fight to protect everyone's futures," Blues sent, the first actual words he'd sent Zero since this conversation started. He'd almost forgotten they were still linked: it was natural enough now that he might notice when links weren't there, the way he was more likely to notice his beam saber's absence than its presence when he wasn't using it. It would be surprising that tactical hadn't notified him that he didn't have his beam saber when X took it, except it was still with his partner and how was that different from it being in Zero's hands?
"Do you know anything that might help X?" Zero sent back, because even as he bowed his head in awe he still had that mission. Even if Rock and Dr. Light hadn't asked anything of him, he knew what they would have asked if they did. If they were the kind of people who asked what others could do for them instead of asking themselves what they could do for the world.
"I don't," Blues said, feeling quite pleased with himself. "You do. Obviously Dr. Wily developed their capabilities , but it should be applicable to this situation, and the fact they're immune to the derivatives of stardroid technology means you don't even need to worry about Duo jumping to them instead."
Zero blinked, startled eyes shifting to green.
"Are you seriously suggesting Axl and Lumine?"
Zero's empathy could pick up Blues' lack of a response as 'did you not hear me?'
"They're not robot masters! They're, they're Axl and Lumine and you want them to try to fix X's systems?"
The silence that answered him was full of dry insinuations about Zero's own attempt to fix Blues, and did Zero really want to bring up the topic of certain people's ability to repair others or complete lack thereof? Really?
Blues thought not.
If Ciel is Zero's 'type,' in terms of people to fight for then Dr. Light fits, and of course Rock. It also extends the generational/family theme. Inherited wills, carrying things on into the future.
The tech in ZX series where everyone's human-reploid hybrids? Yeah, that'd be transhumanism, and then that species goes extinct before Legends/Dash.