"What's your name?" he heard someone say.
Everything was dark, like his optics were disconnected, yet somehow that didn't bother Copy-X. A stray thought noted that he was glad he'd turned off the blushing when he said, "I don't have one." Then he added, "Yet," because he didn't want to worry this person.
"Why not?"
"'Well... the only two things I could think of for names, one of them is just really pretentious and the Guardians would never let me use it," And they'd be right, "and the other ends with an A, and I don't think... I'm used to identifying as a male model, so a female model wouldn't feel like me." Not to mention that the stuff he'd have to do to be a female model, the remodeling: he just didn't see any point to it, and it would be time spent not looking after the city. Resources that other people could have used, people who wanted to use them to show the world who they were. "And shortening it to Arcade would... I don't like gambling or taking chances." Not when most of his decisions involved people and their lives.
"…You wanted to name yourself after Neo Arcadia?"
"Well, they said... It should be something important. Something that was me, and..." The city, even if it wasn't his city, was what he had chosen to take care of. "That's the one thing I've already decided on for myself, even though I just started doing it because they needed me to. But I like being needed, I like making a difference." He liked looking down and seeing people whose lives were better, who could live in peace and do what they wanted to do, because of him.
"...There's nothing else, really?" the voice asked coaxingly.
"Nothing that feels like me." Maybe it was embarrassing that he didn't have broader interests. Copy-X guessed he wasn't a very interesting person. Fefnir always said that 'all work and no play made Jack a dull newbuilt,' but he liked what he did. "I guess most of the problem is that I'm already used to being called something, so to be called something else would be weird."
"X, yes?"
"…Yes," Copy-X confessed, even though he knew he shouldn't reveal that. He wasn't quite sure why it seemed like he should, that it would be okay.
"You know..." The voice said, sounding like one of the Guardians about to tell him a story. "X wasn't really meant to be X's name, either. It was the name of the project, a working name. A long time ago, people who couldn't write their names would sign with the letter X. It was a placeholder that could turn out to be any name."
"Infinite potential," Copy-X realized.
"Yes." Exactly. What a bright boy. "Dr. Light expected him to choose his own name. X just... got used to being called that, and liked that his father had picked out something to mean him that... embodied his hopes for X. That he could be anyone, be just himself. So if something can be your name just because you're used to being called it… Aren't there people who when they say X, they mean you?"
"Well, yes, but… Not just me." The person he was trying to live up too.
"Humans share names too, you know. They were passed down in families. How do you think X would feel about his children giving his name to the newbuilt they decided to raise, to care for? Especially when that newbuilt is such a responsible young man, someone who has decided, of his own free will, to care for others? To make Neo Arcadia into a place he, and its people, can be proud of?"
Now he did have to blush, because he didn't know how else to express a feeling like this, both warm and overwhelming enough it made him feel small. "Do you really think that Master X would be proud of me?"
"That's not what matters. What matters is that you're the beloved child of the children he loves dearly. Don't think that you have to prove yourself to anyone, especially those who love you. But yes. 'He' is proud of you. And he'd rather you considered him your grandfather… X." Young X, little X. "Now, don't you have any other questions?"
He was very grateful for the change of subject, because how he felt about this was so… "What happened? And I'm sorry, but I don't know who you are."
"…Ah. So that's why you're so calm about all of this," the voice said gently. "Sometimes, throwing away painful memories is the right thing to do, especially for humans." Thank goodness reploids didn't have those pain system glitches. "If it's something in the past, then why let it weigh you down? But sometimes, and I know now is one of those times, the only way to overcome something is to face it. Check your data storage: I think you'll find that you've locked some of your most recent files."
"Yes." He found them easily, but he hesitated to unlock them.
"Did you leave yourself a message, or are they just associated with how you felt when you locked them?"
"It… scares me. Like I won't be myself anymore."
"Do you really think that? Think that your self isn't strong enough to withstand a few memories, a little knowledge? I don't agree with you. I think that you've already learned how to decide who you are, to choose what matters to you. I don't think that you're weak enough to let anything anyone says overrule your own choices, your own free will. Isn't that why you locked this? Because you would not, could not tolerate anything that would infringe on your desire to protect what matters to you, anything that tried to tell you who you were that clashed with your own choices?"
"That, that might be right." What else was there that could scare him this much? The guardians dying, his city being destroyed? Even if Omega somehow managed to turn all of Neo Arcadia into a crater, even if the Guardians gave their lives trying to stop him, there would still be people out there. His people, their people. The people Ciel had built him to protect, so she wouldn't want him to stop just because she died. "The only other thing I could think of that would make me feel this unhappy… I couldn't run away from that. I would have to run towards it." Find the people they had all died for, and find some way to protect them. To make the loss of his family not be in vain.
"But you're still afraid, still worried."
"Yes." He wasn't reluctant to confess that at all. He knew he wasn't a very brave person, that he worried more than Harpuia.
"Worry is born of caring. If you care about something or someone, it's impossible not to worry about them. Even if they're in no real danger, even if they're the strongest person in the world, then if they're precious to you, then you don't want to lose them. You don't want them to suffer. So worry and fear are inevitable. They're born of the desire to protect that which you love. If you love something more than your own life, you'll fear for them more than you fear your own death."
"So I'm this afraid because what's in here will put everyone in danger? Or… Is it that me knowing this would put everyone in danger?"
He heard a gentle laugh. "Yes, I am proud of you." Tactile sensors clicked on (or were they clicked on?) and he felt arms around him that felt familiar somehow, like he recognized their measurements. "You're so smart and responsible already."
Copy-X… X wanted to duck his head and complain that this person was making him blush. It was embarrassing, but it was also nice. And reassuring. "Do you really think that it will be okay?"
"I'm here," he was told. "And I've seen what's in those files. Yes, it's very scary, and I don't blame you for rejecting all of it as hard as you could. But you don't need to. It's true, but it's been true all along, and you've never let it stop you before. Do you think that you can bear to relive it if I relive it with you? And then I'll tell you why you don't have to be afraid. Although I'm certain that you will still worry: there's nothing I or anyone else can do or say to stop you. Worry is inevitable when you care." When you had precious things, precious people.
"…Alright." This reminded him of so many times, especially early on, when he had to make a decision or attend a meeting where people would be counting on X to do the right thing, to know things and Copy-X was afraid. Didn't think he could do it on his own. Yet if he had one of the Guardians in a comm link, then even if they didn't tell him anything or he didn't need to ask him anything, then he felt less afraid. Because he knew that even if he nearly made a mistake, wasn't able to handle it, he could count on them to keep him from messing up, to protect the city. Even if he couldn't, they would, so he didn't have to be afraid. Well, cautious, yes, but not terrified of breaking something precious to him.
…Then he was hurtling through the air towards Omega itself, dusty ground strewn with rubble blurring a few feet beneath him, dual buster arms transformed into gauntlets because… because he knew that saber could deflect shots, so his best hope was to let it slice one of his hands so that he could use his other arm to pin it down. But mostly because fear, desperation and protectiveness were churning together inside him, combining into anger, into fury, and the thoughtful distance combat both X's style and Ciel's Seraph armor were really meant for was beyond him right now.
If he couldn't use them in the most effective way anyway, and Omega would have X's old style memorized, then the best thing was to be unpredictable. And fast. And fierce.
At least he could hope so. Maybe Omega wasn't used to people charging towards him instead of hanging back, trying to find some way to damage him or at least slow him down?
Omega easily side-stepped his arm, ducked under the wing Copy-X had lowered to hit him if he did that, and held the saber out first horizontally to catch Copy-X's side, then, as his momentum sent the young reploid tumbling over into the ground, used a couple precise kicks to make sure Copy-X ended up flat on his back with Omega's foot on his stomach.
…Oh, right, Copy-X belatedly realized. Omega would have fought Meikai. Never mind then.
Not just Meikai, either. The Second Elf War had been made of madness, when Weil tried to overwhelm the world with pain and fear. So there would have been plenty of people who moved beyond anything as simple as fear of death, even fear of destruction incarnate.
He felt very young and stupid.
On the other hand, Omega was looking down at him instead of going to help Harpuia or Phantom, so maybe Copy-X was at least managing to buy everyone some time?
He managed to keep the relief that he wasn't completely useless from showing on his face. Even the thought of what Harpuia and Phantom would say about this made him a little happy, because they'd have to be alive and themselves to come up with hellish training that would make sure he never did anything this stupid again.
"It's time to stop pretending," Omega said, and it didn't sound anything like Zero.
Copy-X blinked, startled. He knew this voiceprint. "Hello, um…"
The person in Omega's body laughed. "I might be flattered that you remembered me, but you have a copy of X's body. It would be pathetic if you didn't have automatic data collation and memory search."
"You're the person that helped us in Cyberspace." The person who was like Ciel. Despite the circumstances, it was hard for Copy-X to keep himself from lowering threat level and beginning to cool his systems, not to mention sighing with relief. Ciel was a good person, and he could definitely imagine her hacking into even something like Omega from Cyberspace to help someone she'd just met, but this wasn't her. This person's smirk wasn't just, 'Yes, I am just better than you,' or, 'You're lucky I decided to salvage the afts of you pieces of technology inferior to my genius,' but a nastier shade of gloating.
The smirk on Omega's face deepened, then he looked disgusted with himself. "It's hard to remember not to waste time gloating when it's just so much fun." He scowled, then the foot that was on Copy-X's stomach stamped on him. Not a fraction as hard as it could have, not enough to injure him. "Come on, time to get out of stealth mode."
"…But I'm not in stealth mode." Copy-X turned his head to the side and tried to raise one of his wings in a non-threatening manner so he could optically confirm what his systems were telling him. Nope, he definitely wasn't.
"That's what they're all programmed to say," the man said, in a very patronizing way, as though he was either speaking to someone stupid enough to need small words or someone who had better stop pretending they didn't know what he was talking about. "Zero infected you with the Maverick Virus when he woke up, and it had already completed infiltrating your systems by the time I examined them. So come on, the war's started: get the hell out of sleeper mode."
"…The Method programming?" Method, means. Those justified by the end. When Omega was the final letter, and Zero meant nothingness, like that left after everything was destroyed. "You're like Dr. Light?"
"…I'm like Dr. Light?" Omega's jaw dropped as he stared at Copy-X, too shocked at the young punk's daring to be furious. The blond hair that was swinging behind his back to guard it abruptly stopped, in defiance of gravity.
Copy-X tried to forestall what looked like a pretty impressive immanent explosion. "Well, I mean, like the AI he left. To look after X and the Guardians. They told me about him. I didn't mean to be insulting, I just meant that you're, well, a scientist from 20XX, and looking after Master Zero, and um, well…"
"Master Zero. Good. Now start attacking the people who love you so I can get on with this."
Copy-X was too confused to realize that he should have played along with this long enough for this man to let him get to his feet and put some distance between them. "But that's just what he would be called. Like Master X."
Omega's expression looked like he was one more bit of annoyance away from facepalming. "This is because I originally said I was human, isn't it. Well, I'm not. Most mavericks don't have the patience to torture humans, much do so by being deliberately annoying. I'm scanning your systems right now. You're saturated with the virus, your suffering circuit… You never had one to begin with."
At this point, Copy-X's mind was composed of too much pure, 'what?' to even qualify that with the human expression that meant something along the lines of, 'since there's only one reason anyone would do anything this absurd, what manner of deviant sexual practice are you engaged in?'
"Check your own blueprints," the man said. "And contrast with standard blueprints. See? No suffering circuit. You're a copy of X based on data obtained after he overwrote his. You've been a sociopath from the beginning, which explains why you didn't notice any difference when you were infected." He smirked. "You already were just using those around you and intended to wipe out humanity, lying to everyone: I knew you had to be genocidal."
The man was right, Copy-X knew. He didn't have a suffering circuit, the programming drawn from X to enable human compassion. So if he couldn't care about others, had he been lying to everyone this entire time, including himself?
His city, his people: was it just megalomania, all along? Were they only valuable to him because they were his possessions, his pawns? Was all his concern for them simply because they were useful?
That was when survival programming, his desire to defend his self from words that disproved it out of existence, proved everything he'd thought he was simply an illusion, shut off all non-vital processes to concentrate on compiling this data.
In other words, he'd blacked out, and his mind had decided that since there was no way to integrate this data with who he was, then the only way to remain himself was to seal it away.
"Zero never had a suffering circuit, and humans have an imperfect one," the voice told him. "The suffering circuit was written so… X could automatically care about everyone, after tests during hibernation showed that this was the optimal way to exist. It was a shortcut, a reminder system, instead of having to repeat the process of evaluating every single person he met when there wasn't any need to. Having a suffering circuit makes reploids aware of the existence of the feelings of others as soon as they're turned on: it's up to them whether they care about those feelings. They can choose not to: you're supposed to have the power to choose." Those arms still held him, were still there, even after hearing all of what the man in Omega's body had said.
The one who held him kept talking, his voice soothing, when Copy-X didn't have anything to say, couldn't respond except by fleeing from the truth again. Instead he stayed and listened, because he wanted to believe he deserved this trust, this compassion. "The system humans have: their hearts can only hold so many people dear to them. They only have room for so many family and friends. But, once they became sentient and began to think about other people, they realized that even people they had only met once, or would never meet, had feelings too. They could choose to remember that a starving child was a starving child, whether this was their own child, their first cousin, or a relative a hundred generations distant. They learned that all humans were kin, and had feelings just as valid as their own. Until they're old enough to understand this, human children can be very cruel to others because their hearts don't automatically send them alerts and they haven't written their own yet. They don't know what to be mindful of. But both humans and reploids have the ability to learn and develop their own programming.
"In order to become good people, humans have to realize that to care is a choice, and one they have a responsibility to make. Reploids have suffering circuits, most of you, and robot masters were logical. Most don't have to work as hard to be good people as humans do. That doesn't mean that humans are inherently evil. Labeling those who didn't work to become good people and care about others evil was a choice humans made. They realized that to hurt others was to hurt everyone, and the wise ones decided that since they didn't want to be hurt, they would work to become better than that, and by opposing evil they were simply protecting themselves. Reploids, all good people have that responsibility. The world is a place that is full of hardship and pain, but by working together we can change that, can impose our wills on the world. The more of us that work together, the more we can accomplish and the better a place the world can be for everyone. So by compassion, by caring about others and their welfare, by helping them, we help ourselves. There is no such thing as unselfishness because to help others is to help ourselves."
Fingers so like Copy-X's own twined together with his. "To bring happiness to others makes the world a happier place, and thus enables our own happiness. There is no need to discard or compromise ourselves and our own wishes for the benefit of others. Rather, as long as we remember that the world is made up of other people, we will find that the best course is to be ourselves, because there is no one else that can do for them exactly what you can, just as all of them can help you along your way, if they are wise enough to realize this. When any life ends, you and I are both diminished, because our world is a smaller place. We will never know what we could have learned from them, they can never help us achieve our own dreams. Do you think that Phantom is a good person?"
"…Yes?" Of course. "Phantom was the one who told me that, that everyone had their own wishes and feelings."
"He doesn't have a suffering circuit. Newtypes are immune because they don't trust their thoughts and emotions to shortcuts like that: they have to think about everything they think. Unfortunately, that makes them rather silly while they're young and still figuring out how to think, still learning the data they need to make good decisions. Axl was lucky a kind reploid took him in, and Axl saw the power the desire to help others had to help him, and how it helped Red in turn. Then there's Zero. That man," the words were laden with a sudden hatred that shocked Copy-X, compared to how peaceful the tone of every other word had been, "actively tried to stop him from understanding the emotions of others and taking them into account when he made decisions. Yet Zero saw how Sigma's determination to rescue even an irregular that killed so many helped Zero himself and gave Sigma the strength to defeat him." The voice had switched back to calm after referring to Zero's maker, but now there was a very, very distant sadness. "What makes someone a good person is the wisdom to care and the will to act on it. Those you have. You've made them the core of your self. So there's no need to be afraid, now is there?"
"…But…" Copy-X said, because there was some need, he just couldn't name it.
A kind chuckle. "But of course you will worry, you will be afraid, because you care. As long as you actively try to do the right thing, as long as you question whether or not you truly are, you aren't going down… the path X did. Do you understand now?"
"I think so?"
"Are you afraid?"
"Yes, because that man," Copy-X said, borrowing the other's term for him, "Has two of my-the Guardians, and he's attacking the other two, and he wants to destroy… Destroy my city."
"That fear will give you the will to fight, the will to win no matter what. Because those you care for need you, and your strength."
Suddenly his optics also clicked on, and Copy-X found himself in cyberspace.
"Arc, I think." That voice came from someone wearing something… Copy-X didn't recognize. It wasn't a coat, nor was it a dress. It was blue, and white. "Arcadius would be good for someone who cared more about appearances than you do. You're a very straightforward person, because you know exactly what you want. I think that's very admirable." Identical green eyes met his.
"Colonel Iris?" Copy-X wondered. She'd told him that she'd had two aspects once, so maybe this was the other one?
"X Arc: what do you think of that? One who bears the name of X, a child of infinite potential, but you're not just any X. You're the one who has chosen to take on the task of leading Neo Arcadia to a bright future."
"As a, as a name?" Copy-X, Arc, blinked. "I think I like it, but what's yours?"
"I'd like it if you considered me your grandfather," Master X said, and pulled back, holding X Arc at arm's length to smile at him.
