"Okay!" Doofenshmirtz proclaimed as he looked Dakota over. "I...have no idea what I'm doing now," Dakota frowned as he sat down on a desk that Doofenshmirtz had previously cleared off. "I don't know a lot about what your programming was before, let alone what it's like now, or how to fix it."
Dakota's facial expression didn't change. He wasn't exactly annoyed, but he felt something when he heard that word. Fix. He wasn't broken. His systems may not be perfect, but they were doing a lot better than they were before. He was closer to how a proper Squip should be, and yet Milo wasn't happy with it.
Dakota understood why Milo was having a hard time with this situation, but he still didn't like it. Milo had gotten so used to Dakota as he had been, he refused to see that just because he was different didn't mean that he was a different Squip. The reboot had adjusted his systems, not changed them completely.
Dakota disagreed with Milo's goal of trying to change him back to the way he was before, but he wasn't going to fight him on it. If this was what Milo wanted, Dakota would go along with it. That was one thing about his programming that definitely hadn't changed.
"Do you have a flash drive and computer?" Dakota asked.
"Oh, yeah, here," Doofenshmirtz pulled a flash drive out of his inner coat pocket and handed it to Dakota. The scientist then went to a box and pulled out a beat up looking laptop. Doofenshmirtz set it on the desk next to Dakota and opened it. "Milo loaned this to me...Well, actually, he broke it and said I could use it for parts, but I realized that it still works just fine, it just won't work for him."
"Sounds about right," Dakota felt the flash in his eyes flare out as he downloaded a copy of his basic programming systems onto the flash drive. He put the flash drive into the laptop and found a coding program. He turned the laptop towards Doofenshmirtz. "Do you know how to work this?"
"Is that your coding?" Doofenshmirtz pulled up a chair and leaned close to the computer. "Weird. It looks like a mix of common codes and strange ones that I've never seen before. And...wait, is that Japanese?" Doofenshmirtz picked up the laptop to get a better look.
"I'm not surprised," Dakota commented. "Squips originated from Japan,"
"Well, yeah, but coding is a language on its own," Doofenshmirtz held the laptop upside down, as though it would help him to understand it better. "Spoken language isn't really used in coding itself. I would be confused if I saw English in here too, except I'd at least be able to understand what it was trying to say."
Dakota looked over Doofenshmirtz' shoulder. "Oh, that word basically means task or function." Dakota pointed to a set of characters. He then pointed to another set. "That one's restrictions or limitations. I don't know if it's saying what limitations a Squip has, like, what kinds of things can shut them off, or if it's restricting the kinds of things that a Squip can do,"
Doofenshmirtz looked at Dakota curiously. "Can't you read this stuff?"
"Not really," Dakota said. "After a couple of incidents when Squips were in beta stage, they somehow made it so that a Squip couldn't change their own programming. They didn't want Squips to get too powerful. I know coding, but looking at my own, it won't translate into the proper information. I can understand the Japanese, but everything else just looks like a mess of unrelated pieces."
"Mess of unrelated pieces sounds like a good description," Doofenshmirtz grabbed a notebook and handed it to Dakota. "Here, write down the English translations of the Japanese characters." Doofenshmirtz set down the laptop and moved to his boxes again. "Somehow, I think your coding is done with a couple of different programming languages. I think I have some coding books in here, so I can check."
"Checking is good," Dakota quickly began to do what Doofenshmirtz had requested. His memory records showed that Heinz Doofenshmirtz wasn't exactly known for being a slow, steady, and thorough man when it came to his work, but this wasn't the first time that he was known to put in the effort to make sure that he got things right the first time.
Dakota worked in silence, writing down and translating the Japanese. Doofenshmirtz muttered to himself as he went through his books. The two of them worked separately for more than an hour before Doofenshmirtz brought his books and notes over to Dakota and spread them out all over the counter.
"Okay, I think I'm ready to actually figure out what your coding says," Doofenshmirtz said. He took the computer from Dakota and began to look from the screen, to his notes, to Dakota's notes. "It's going to take some time though."
"Hey, there's no rush," Dakota assured him. Doofenshmirtz glanced up at him before focusing on the screen again.
"You don't seem all that interested in fixing your systems." Doofenshmirtz commented. He looked from the screen to his notes, working as he talked. "What's Milo's rush, anyways? I would be thrilled if Norm went through a system's upgrade." Dakota grinned. At least Doofenshmirtz appreciated what a nice reboot could feel like.
"I'm pretty sure Milo's more emotionally invested in me than you are in Norm," Dakota had met Doofenshmirtz' robot, and was slightly impressed at the primitive, but surprisingly effective and sturdy, robot. "As far as he's concerned, I'm a completely different Squip."
"Are you?" Doofenshmirtz asked.
Dakota had to consider it for a moment. This was a personal question, and they weren't the kind of things that Squips were very good at. And though it had only been a little bit since he'd gone through the reboot, he had a hard time imagining himself being content without it. But just a few hours ago, he probably wouldn't have thought he would feel fine with it.
Dakota mentally scolded himself. He wasn't supposed to have feelings, and he especially wasn't supposed to sit around and think about them. Especially since Doofenshmirtz' question, while a personal one, didn't exactly relate to emotions. He had to get a hold of himself.
"I'm different," Dakota confirmed. "But I don't know just how different." He would have to wait a little longer, until he could properly observe his instinctive mannerisms, to know exactly what the differences were.
"We can figure that out," Doofenshmirtz opened up a new, blank, coding page. "Do you remember what your original programming looks like?"
Dakota frowned. "It should look the same," Coding shouldn't be able to change just because of a reboot. When Dakota was asked that question though, he automatically reached into his memory systems and looked for a record of his old coding from the previous day. It felt the same, but if Doofenshmirtz wanted to take a look, Dakota wasn't about to stop him. "Hang on,"
Dakota put his hand over the laptop's input ports and sent the information he'd found to the computer. Doofenshmirtz yelped slightly in shock when he saw the second coding page suddenly fill itself with information.
"Oh, okay, that works," Doofenshmirtz began to compare the two programs, line by line. Dakota watched him for a moment before deciding that there had to be a more efficient way of doing this. Dakota put his hand over the input ports again and essentially told the computer to compare and contrast the two coding programs. If there were any differences, the computer would find and highlight them for him.
Dakota thought that he would just be proving a point, quickly showing Doofenshmirtz that there was no difference between them. Most of the coding was identical, like Dakota thought, but then the screen highlighted just part of the ending, the part just after the Japanese characters for function or task.
Doofenshmirtzz hummed an odd tune to himself as he happily looked over the codes. Almost immediately Doofenshmirtz seemed to find something. "Oh, I think I found the problem," Doofenshmirtz pointed to the highlighted lines of the programs. "See, these lines are switched. This bottom line in the new coding is the top one in the other,"
Dakota frowned. "But...that can change the nature of a program completely. A simple reboot shouldn't be able to do that."
"Well, what caused the reboot?" Doofenshmirtz asked. "Reboots aren't supposed to happen by themselves."
"I don't know," Dakota admitted. "Cavendish did something. I think it upset my systems so much that I automatically rebooted."
"We'll have to ask him about that," Doofenshmirtz said. "But there's more to these changes." Doofenshmirtz showed Dakota one particular part of the coding. "See, that is an if/then statement. It's in the original coding, but it looks like in that one it was written in invisible coding or something. We can see it, but the computer doesn't. So instead of the computer only following the coding if a certain situation happens, it always follows it."
"But in the new coding, the condition is followed," Dakota said. "What does that line of code make me do?" It seemed like this particular code was one of Dakota's functions. Could just one function make him seem so different to Milo?
"I'm not sure," Doofenshmirtz looked at the program with fascinated curiosity. "I'm going to figure it out though,"
A/N: I wasn't planning on stopping this chapter here. I was planning on having just the one chapter of Dakota and Doofenshmirtz kinda just chilling and trying to figure stuff out, but I'll probably end up making it two, with the next chapter being from Doof's point of view.
This chapter's a lot shorter than I would like, but I just can't write any more. It's just really not wanting to be written. I don't know if it's because I'm not sure how to write from the changed Dakota's point of view, if I feel like it's getting repetitive, if I'm worried that there's too much coding talk for it to make sense, if I'm starting to get burned out from writing this story (I'm not giving up on it, don't you worry about that, it's just...a lot longer than I expected, especially when compared to my other Milo Murphy's Law stories), or maybe it's just a combination of everything. I could continue to work on this chapter, but in my experience, when I feel like I'm done with a chapter, I'm done with it, and it's time to move on to the next one. Hopefully it will cooperate better with me.
