Honesty Hour

by Patchwork Poltergeist

The Irken Empire has tried reasoning with Zim. They've tried banishment. They've tried imprisonment. They've tried re-encoding and they've tried deletion. Nothing has worked and patience has run out. Now, the Irken Empire tries the worst they can throw at him: the truth.

7. The Weight of What We Owe

SESSION LOG V.

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Irken Food Drone Zim curled against the back of the Vortian armchair, letting his sore limbs and joints sink into the plush fabric. It was that familiar soreness of ground-based missions, running laps, or staying awake a decade longer than recommended. No deep-rooted ache of bones knitting and resetting, no sharp twinge of healing muscles. The pangs in his skewered hand had lingered hours after he'd healed, and Zim still felt a twinge if he twisted his wrist wrong.

Only in that hand, though. No pain from the teeth he'd broken or the toes he'd snapped off or the chunks of flesh he'd ripped from himself.

He didn't understand. Either years had passed during his time in the quiet chamber, or he really had imagined the whole thing. Could Irken brains, even those as clever as Zim's, craft scenarios that elaborate? That real? It had felt nothing like reruns, either. Reruns fuzzed and faded at the edges, and this had been broadcast in high resolution, complete with scents, tastes, and textures. It just didn't make sense. Something that both Zim and Extractor Foma could agree on.

"Well?" Zim cracked his stiff shoulders and sat up. His chair sat beside Foma's with a front-row view of the monitor's patchwork of maps, charts, and security cameras. "Did you find anything yet?"

The Extractor leaned in her hoverchair and squinted over steepled fingers while the computer finished the third security check. "Zim, you've been here since the first scan. You know I haven't."

As promised, the base had received a deep-clean sweep, complete with six x-ray thermal scans on five different levels, including subterranean. The scan stretched beyond the base's perimeter to probe every house, shed, shrub, tree, vehicle, and suspiciously fluffy cloud in a ten-mile radius. The cameras, thermals, and microphones hadn't found anything in the rooms, the walls, Foma's personal ship, Zim's base, the roof, or the vents. Both Irkens agreed that Dib couldn't fit inside Foma's vents in the first place unless humans could collapse their skeletal structures (Zim was 87% sure they couldn't), but it never hurt to check. Besides, any Invader, Extractor, or Infiltrator worth their title knew that security breaches weren't limited to break-ins. The Dib had been known to utilize spy bugs before; who knew what other loathsome tricks he had up his sleeve?

Yet the sweep discovered no spy bugs, no teleporter homing points, no sign of entry, no missing screws or discolored patches in the facades, and no unusual electronic signals besides Foma's and a stray radio signal from a trucker being eaten alive by wolves on a Connecticut turnpike.

No trace of Dib in the soundproof room either. They'd flipped through the footage together: a full-color hour of Zim pacing along foam walls, mumbling and shouting and hissing to himself. And doing so completely alone. No Dib. No GIR. No visits from Foma until the last five minutes or so. According to the timestamps, his quiet time lasted exactly one hour, five minutes, and 45 seconds.

"But as I said," Foma pointed out, "the PAK's memory footage will likely appear different." She cupped her chin in her hand and sighed at the little dent in Zim's PAK hatch. "Pity your processors still need time to cool before we try another memory transfer."

Zim leaned over the arm of his chair, searching the cameras for a flapping coat or cloaking glitch the scanners might have missed. He pointed at the Past Zim hissing obscenities at empty space. "Why would the PAK have a different recall? This is the real one, isn't it?"

"The details are a little complicated, but yes."

"Complicated how?" Complexity had never stopped her when she explained how SAD Boxes or mood dampeners worked. "If you think nobody broke in, why are you so worried about security?"

"I'm always concerned about security. I would have run scans before we left anyway. Stowaways pop up when you least expect it, and who knows what parasites this planet's harboring? Besides, there's more to this footage than security…" She scrolled through lines of notes in the sidebar, frowning at the timestamps. "It felt like you were in there months, you said?"

Months or years squashed into a week stretched into a decade crammed into a day, but close enough. "Sometimes, yeah. I don't know for sure. My clock won't work."

Foma chuckled under her breath. "I noticed. Some time discrepancy is normal for this sort of thing but months… that sounds much too long. Days, even weeks, yes. And you're certain it felt that long?" Before Zim could answer, she shook her head and returned to her notes. "No, of course you're sure. When I checked on you, you acted like it'd been years. Hm. I've never tried this process with a defective PAK before; it may just be a log error or a stress response. It's certainly a puzzle, but you've always been full of puzzles, haven't you?"

Zim huffed and twitched his good antenna. She spoke of Zim's PAK as if it were a Reubeeks Cube—some frivolity for the minds to toy with as it idled the hours away.

The antenna twitched again as one of the vending machines refreshed its ingredient cycle. The hour of quiet time in a scentless room had heightened his senses, and he'd found himself noticing new little details all over the room. At a swivel, Zim traced the base's power core rumbling along to the background music, and smelled faint traces of gumballs and lollipops in the desk drawers and the wash of metallic office scent underscoring all of it. Yet in that collage of scents, Zim couldn't help but notice Foma's. From the time they'd reentered the break room, her pheromone signal stayed calm the entire time. It flickered and changed with interest or mild concern, but no alarm. No real worry.

"You don't really believe Dib was ever here, do you?"

Foma waited a moment to gather her answer. "Well, when we consider the security footage—"

"Footage means nothing when dealing with the likes of that conniving dirtweasel pig. The Dib-human could have employed any number of trickeries to slip past security, like teleportation—"

"We didn't find any evidence of teleportation, Zim. It's the first thing we looked for, remember?"

"Then he used a shrinky ray to squeeze through a crack in the wall or projected himself into the room using some… some sort of sciencey secret human thing, I don't know!" Zim turned away from the Extractor's concerned frown. She looked at him like a crazy defective talking madness. Dealing with mad primitive creatures from a wild planet crawling with bone-scalding rains, everything sounded crazy to an outsider. It didn't matter how long she'd observed the place; Zim lived here and Zim knew better. He took a breath to steady himself. "I know that human, Extractor. And I know what I'm talking about."

"I don't doubt that one bit, Zim," Foma said. "You know him better than I, or most of his own kind, know him at this point. If anyone could sense Dib, it's you."

"Then why do you refuse to believe me? You—you're only humoring me with all these security checks and reassurances. You never even believed Dib was here at all!"

"I believe that you believe he's been here."

"Meaning that you think I made it all up."

She frowned. "That's not what I said."

"You didn't need to."

Foma turned the hoverchair toward Zim, adjusting her gloves as she thought. Slowly, she clarified, "It's not that I think you're making it up. For one thing, that would imply you're doing it on purpose—and you aren't—and for another, that implies that it's not real or that it doesn't matter. That isn't the case, either. It matters to you a great deal."

This smelled like another calmdown talk. "And the part about being real?"

She shrugged. "Well, 'real' can be subjective sometimes. For example, when we've tested Elites under duress in training sims—"

"You're changing the subject. Do you think Dib was here or don't you?"

"It's not that I doubt you, but without any real evidence, I find it difficult to believe your The Dib physically entered this space." Flicking out her stylus, Foma wrote some notes and opened a new file. "And unless he's mastered metaphysical travel or mind projection, I doubt he managed it incorporeally either. But stranger things have happened."

With a gesture and a flash of Foma's neural nodes, a new window opened in the corner of the monitor. In the confines of the memory file, a small army of Halloweenies scattered and bounced off Zim's windshield. What had once been a militia of nightmares became a mash of casualties in the quest to wrench Dib from their clutches. A speedbump on Zim's warpath to the only way out of the nightmare-world of Dib's head. What a hideous experience. Hideous and rude. Just because Dib harbored a carnival of madness and horrors in that massive skull of his, that'd been no reason to literally drag Zim into it.

At the time, Zim's attention focused on escape and nothing else. He'd cared nothing for the whys and hows of the place. Rewatching it now, he had to wonder if Dib's head functioned only as a portal, or if the dimension just happened to localize in Dib's head, specifically, or if that just happened to be what Dib's brain-thoughts actually looked like. If there was even a difference. Still rude to drag Zim into it, in any case.

Extractor Foma tilted her hoverchair forward as she observed Past Zim hoisting Past Dib into the nightmare vehicle and storming out of the building. No commentary or opinion of the events, though her eyes sparked with interest. When Past Zim plopped out of the portal and onto the sidewalk, she paused the feed. Little lines of static fuzzed across Past Dib's legs wiggling out of Past Dib's head.

"Now, the part of this that I can't understand is why this human would bother breaking in to contact you in the first place. I understand he has a history of spying but this session wasn't exactly a secret." Foma glanced at the ceiling as if she, too, suspected a big-headed shadow might lurk in the corners. "He already knew where you'd be and what we were doing. We had an agreement."

Zim growled low in the back of his throat. "That was your first mistake. Agreements and truces mean nothing to the likes of him. Whatever deal you made is more worthless than Cyberflox coupons. Doubtless, the knowledge of two Irkens on his planet aroused Dib's suspicions and he couldn't resist." He glared at the frozen feed of Past Zim pacing alone in the quiet room. "When he discovered the true nature of these maintenance sessions, he intervened."

"Why would he do that?"

"Isn't it obvious?" Zim's claws sank into the chair cushion. Fabric tore under his touch, springy and delicate as human flesh. "Sabotage." Or to make him look crazy and as if no progress had been made at all. It'd be just like Dib to trap Zim in an endless session cycle, popping up when the finish line lay inches away.

"He came to stop you from recovering." Foma drummed her fingers on the desk in thought. "Strange, he didn't object to it at the time." The hoverchair shifted closer. "Why do you think he'd change his mind?"

"Who knows why any of them do what they do? He claimed he…" Zim wrinkled his lip in a snarl of disgust. "… felt bad."

"I see." Foma added several new lines of notes.

Zim rubbed the chair's backboard in the spot where his PAK leg had torn a hole not long ago. No sign of a hole now. It'd been stitched, perhaps, though he couldn't find any stitching or new seams. Maybe the hole had been smaller than Zim assumed. "Don't get too excited. That's what he claimed, but that doesn't mean he told the truth. If you ask me, that pity act served as an excuse. An excuse or a littler truth to throw me off the scent of another reason—the real reason."

"Which is?"

"There is no trophy without Zim. The humans love their trophies too, you know." He'd seen the Skool trophy display in the hallways: a collection of garish metal cups and obelisks behind glass. No doubt Dib salivated at the thought of Zim floating defeated behind such a display glass as well. "Or it might have been simpler than that. He might have seen my progress and feared I'd return as an even greater Invader."

"But," the Extractor gently said, "you aren't an Invader. Are you?"

Zim's claws withdrew from the cushion and folded in his lap. "No. But Dib didn't know that." He did now. Assuming he'd been there at all. Perhaps that was why he'd left. He'd realized that Zim posed no real threat. "Even without the encoding, I still invaded his planet."

An invader, not an Invader.

Foma nodded. "From what I observed, Dib believed you were an invader more than anyone else did. Perhaps even more than you." Her eyes followed Zim as he tried to lean away. "That must have meant a lot."

"Don't insult me," Zim snapped. "That stink-meat means nothing to me."

Foma raised an eyebrow. "Nothing at all?"

"Nothing. At. All."

The hoverchair floated close enough to rub against the armchair upholstery. Foma leaned across her armrest, folding her arms inches away from Zim's gloves. "Your The Dib acted as your personal nemesis for nearly two Earth years. That's a significant amount of time to have an adversary. I find it difficult to believe it means 'nothing at all'. Especially when it ended so abruptly." She shrugged to herself. "I know I didn't enjoy it when it happened to me."

"Speak for yourself, then." Zim scooted against the opposite armrest. "Not all of us overflow with squishy useless feelings to pick at and dissect. Any meaning about my 'nemesis' begins and ends with his interference with my plans."

He gave a humorless chuckle. As if some stick-armed naked mammal could even dream to become an Irken nemesis. A hindrance, yes. Opponent, perhaps. But nemesis? Absurd. The very concept bordered on treason. Foma's nemesis was not Zim's nemesis and to compare the two would be absurd. "Yours was Irken, correct?"

Foma glanced up as she pulled a candy dish from the desk drawer. "He was."

Thought so. Rival tallers fought and battled for positions all the time anyway, natural as bloodstream nanites. Sheer numbers said that at least one of those rivals had to morph into a nemesis eventually—be it for a week or a lifetime. "Then it's not the same thing at all."

"Of course it isn't. All relationships are different, even the bad ones. Just like how every experience is a little bit different, and because of that, they all affect us in different ways—some small, some not so small. It happens with all sorts of species, not just other Irkens. Whether we like it or not." Reaching into the drawer again, Foma pulled out an elegant little scalpel. In the right setting, the shiny antique could pull double-duty as a dagger. The engraved handle and little swirls in the blue metal served no purpose besides arrogance and flamboyance. Not Irken design at all. "The only difference between a rival, a nemesis, and an opponent is perspective and circumstance."

Looking back, The Extractor had mentioned this theory of hers before. Static fuzzed the finer details, but Zim recalled a similar attitude towards Dib shortly after they'd officially begun their sessions together."It's hard to lose a nemesis." She'd been gentler than usual with him then, too.

"What happened to yours?"

Foma blinked in surprise. One hand clutched the edge of the candy dish while the other squeezed a fresh lemon gummy roll. "Mine?"

"Yeah, did you win or what?" He made a face and shook his head at her silent offer to share.

"Suit yourself." Her fingers flexed along the edge of the scalpel, rubbing the little indents in the blade as she sliced into the roll. Sheets of sparkly sour candy fell into her hand one at a time. The lemony scent almost masked the fresh wave of stress pheromones. "I won by default. At the time, our team's assignment was infiltration fieldwork deep in Fweezian territory. Minutes before our ride arrived, he leaked my location to the enemy and left me to rot. I guess he figured that he'd have lots of time to grab the Sub-Extractor title while I had my hands full with being carved out in the meat markets."

Foma snapped up a gummy sheet with a clenched smile. "Don't get me wrong. It was a valuable learning experience. Between the interrogations and carvings and such, I had lots of free time to quietly harvest extra information, get inspiration for my extraction simulator, and plot a little revenge." Rubbing the gummy roll between her fingers, she sliced a new sheet. The Extractor sighed, flicked the sheet aside, and ate the rest of the roll in one gulp. After a moment, she ate the sheet too. "Such a nice revenge, too… airtight and clever in all the right places. Painful in all the right places, too, of course."

None of that really answered Zim's question. He supposed he shouldn't have been surprised; Foma rarely liked direct answers. "So, the revenge failed." There'd be no reason to mourn it, otherwise. "Someone else got to him first, right?"

A reedy creek hissed between Foma's teeth. "Worse. He starved to death from the snack blockades."

The venomous glint in her eye blinked away, there and gone so fast Zim almost thought he'd imagined it. She cleared her throat and sat back up, all calm smiles and understanding again.

"It all felt so strange at the time. I lived and he hadn't. I became High Extractor and he became jet fuel. Even better, by the end of the Snack Wars, I'd streamlined the information extraction process and gained the respect of Tallest Miyuki. I won in every single way that mattered, and yet it still didn't feel that way." Foma rubbed a smudge off the scalpel's handle and tossed it back in the drawer. "Do you know why?"

Zim flicked an antenna. Real victory had to be earned, not given. Surviving could be its own win, but hardly the same thing. "It's like a tie, but worse."

"When a game's canceled, it isn't the same as winning or losing. The game just stops." Foma gave him a meaningful glance. "In a way, it's worse than losing, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't know," said Zim. "I don't lose."

She grinned at that. "You can't lose if the game never ends, either. You do have a lot of drive, Zim. I'll give you that much, and it's really—"

ATTENTION. FOREIGN ORGANIC MATERIAL DETECTED. Exclamation points and radiation symbols sprouted across the monitor. A bright blue dot flashed in the middle of Foma's base map in the southwest sector, on the move and fast. REPEAT: FOREIGN ORGANIC MATERIAL DETECTED.

"There!" Zim pivoted to slam both hands on the desk. Finally, proof! Now she would see. He leaned into the monitor, grinning with the sweet promise of vindication as Camera 34, SW Sec. 6 switched to reveal…

A lizard. Its sticky feet skittered across the wall and over the camera lens. It licked its eye once and vanished.

The blue dot and all the alert signals faded. Zim stared at the empty spot where the lizard had been. The Extractor's reflection hovered above it, watching him watch wet lizard footprints dry on the wall.

"When my rivalry ended," said Foma's reflection, "I didn't believe it for a long time."

Zim glanced over his shoulder. "Just one false positive doesn't mean anything."

"Worthy opponents are rare, and it never feels right to leave them undefeated. It's awful to lose a rival or a nemesis that way, but I'm afraid it happens sometimes." One by one, the alert windows and the camera feeds and the security scans closed. "This is one of those times, Zim. I don't think you're ready to accept that yet. That's normal. But the sooner you can, the sooner you can move on."

Easy to say when the opponent had actually died. Dib remained very much alive and wiggling. Even if the second player quit in the middle of the game, nothing stopped them from coming back. Nobody had declared winners, losers, or ties. Nothing had been canceled. Not yet. No, this was a lull. A hiatus.

It couldn't have all ended in a Skool hallway with a handshake and coordinate exchange. Dib could never let it go that easily. He wouldn't. And why would Zim bother imagining that whole business in the quiet room on his own? Maybe he didn't have an answer yet, but neither did she.

"It would be just like him to trick us into a false sense of security," Zim told the blank monitor. "Leave us unprepared for when he finally makes his move."

"I don't really see that as a likely possibility."

"But still possible."

"Yes," Foma said, "it is still possible."

A holographic star map unraveled above their heads, covering the domed ceiling from end to end. A model of Zim's Voot traced a dotted path from Conventia to Earth in straight lines, sharp corners, great loop-de-loops, and wiggly serpentines. It had no timestamps, but Zim remembered them well enough. Zim's meandering route had taken six months.

A frown crossed Zim's face. He recalled his capture and re-imprisonment under Frylord Sizz-lor. The straight shot from Foodcourtia and back had taken about three weeks, not counting the time spent escaping the planet itself. Foodcourtia's star system sat even farther away from Earth than Conventia's.

"That shouldn't have been six months." Zim said it under his breath, barely even a whisper.

Even if The Tallest dared not speak Earth's name, they still would have known where it was. But if they'd known, they also would have sent its route and coordinates to the Voot Runner. The path should have been a straight shot. Straight shots had planned routes. Planned routes needed a destination in mind.

"Foma? How long did it take you to get here?"

She tilted her chair back to see the star map for herself. "Two months, one week, eight days, fifteen hours, two minutes, and forty-eight seconds. Why?"

Zim shrugged. He supposed it didn't matter much now.

Foma highlighted Zim's route and zoomed in close enough to see all the labels and coordinates for the stars and dead planets, complete with little red stamps for all territories claimed by the Irken Empire. The Earth still hung blank and unmarked among the stars. "Even with a NYOOM drive, it's still a long way to go, isn't it? It's so quiet out here. Schmillions of lightyears of dead space without even a habitable asteroid. All but one little speck." She indicated the green dot pulsating at the end of the dotted path. A little signal fire in the black. "Somehow, against all odds, you found this perfect storm of livable chemical compounds and sentient lifeforms. Why, you'd almost think the whole thing had been built just for you. I don't think anyone expected you to find anything at all out here. And yet…"

"You won't get away with this, Zim!"

Behind them, the monitor booted up Zim's memory files. Past Dib chased Past Zim through the narrow concrete arteries of the city, over fences, under bridges, across cesspools, and through the backyard of that one human with the evil pink birds guarding the lawn. The one once known as Invader Zim widened the distance and lost his pursuer fast because of course he did. Invader Zim was a marvel who outwitted and outran his rivals, master and commander and conqueror of all who dared test his might. Invader Zim won. Always. It might take him a couple of tries, his plans might need a recalibration or five, but in the end, Irken Invader Zim always won because he was a winner. Irken Food Drone Zim missed him already.

"You even found a nemesis to think about you day and night and all the times in between. You've been very lucky, I think." She looked between Zim, her notes, and Past Dib careening over a garbage can to manage a three-point landing. "It's almost too perfect. I wonder how long it could have stayed that way if…" She rubbed the back of her neck and sighed. "I don't know, if you'd managed to just be still for a little while."

Zim blinked. "Perfect?"

One could call this planet of boiling rains, braindead droolers, pizza-pushing mutant ghost-zombies, and mile-high DVD late fees many things. On an optimal day, Zim might even call it tolerable. But even at its best, Earth stood as an amalgamation of miseries wadded together into a tangled wretched stinking mess. He couldn't remember the last time he breathed outdoors without throwing up in his mouth a little bit.

"Perfect?!" If Zim's taxed voice didn't creak so much, he might have screeched. "This?" Both hands gestured at the messy collage of memories and research footage full of filthy streets and putrid little puddles. He could practically smell it from here. "THIS?"

"Yes, this." She smiled, and Zim couldn't help the feeling that Foma extracted some sort of amusement from all this. Not mockery—for the Extractor didn't seem to have a normal sense of humor—but the genial amusement of watching a smeet chew its own foot. She'd expected this reaction from him.

How else could he react? The state of the planet spoke for itself. She'd stayed here. She'd seen it. Nobody with two wires to spark together knew no one would stay here willingly.

Zim unclenched his fist, took a breath, and spoke slowly. "The only good thing that ever came from this fetid place was the thought of its husk burning behind me."

The star map collapsed into itself as it zoomed in, planets folding over galaxies and trade routes until it all rolled into a compact little green Earth sphere. It dropped into Foma's hand like an overripe fruit.

Her claws closed over the landmass locally known as an Australia as a tiny holographic moon orbited her wrist. "At the start of our sessions, you seemed awfully determined to return to it. You barely talked about anything else." The hologram vanished with a snap of her fingers. "When your Frylord returned you to your duty, you caused over fifteen ship collisions and bottlenecked the lunch lines in your rush to come back to this 'fetid husk' of yours."

Zim plunged his hand into the candy bowl and grabbed a Brand Name Chew™ hiding deep at the bottom. The stupid thing's wrapper slid off in one solid piece the second he touched it. Wouldn't even give him the satisfaction of a real rip. He settled for sinking his teeth into its crispy coating instead.

"You're mistaking dedication to the mission for dedication to the planet. Of course I came back." Little purple flecks sprinkled across his shirt as he spoke. "I had a job to do."

"A job you could have completed in a few months but dragged out for two years."

Zim bit a chunk out of his Chew and glared at her dumb fancy cloth draped over the desk. He could still see scorch marks under the lace. Again, she'd completely failed to account for outside forces constantly interfering with Zim's plans and resetting his timelines. A part of him wanted to point that out, but he knew where talk of his mission inevitably led to.

Foma's antenna twitched as Zim gnawed his way through the snack. She clawed through the bowl and picked out one of the lollipops. One of the swirly kinds with the marshmallow center. "You're right, though. Your attachment was to the assignment, not the planet itself. I should have been more precise with my phrasing."

"Are you going somewhere with all of this?"

"I think you should know this is a natural part of the re-encoding process." Foma scrolled down to Dib's profile picture and jotted a series of notes in bold underlines. "You may need some post-session time to fully come to terms with certain parts, but that's normal, too."

Zim frowned at his dented PAK, its fans still warming the backboard as it hissing hot jets of air behind him. They hadn't stopped since the last time he saw "Dib". He hardly noticed the sound anymore. "But I haven't been re-encoded yet. I thought all of that stuff came from my PAK being…" Two out of three PAKlights flickered and the fans hissed louder. "…less than optimal."

The lollipop rolled in Foma's mouth. She sat up, folded her hands into her lap, and stared at him. Waiting.

Zim lowered his antennae. "Defective."

Satisfied, she nodded and went on. "That's the thing: this should have been part of the re-encoding process years ago, but it never got to finish. I actually debated this with PAKnician Wekkz while we were still in the theory stage of your debugging." Her stylus pointed at Zim's PAK. "He theorized hardware issues." The stylus trailed up past the neck and shoulders to Zim's brainmeats. "I claimed you had a software issue."

He leaned away from the stylus hovering centimeters from his eye. "Who was right?"

"We both were!" Foma beamed and waggled her shoulders. "But mostly me. See, what you had was a firewall issue. You built these massive mental walls, and whatever tried to break them got set on fire. Things like fully accepting your re-encoding. Now that you have, the rest of the process can finally fall into place."

"The debugging process or the re-encoding process?"

"To be specific, the mourning period of the re-encoding process." PAK schematics and brain diagrams popped up on the monitor, along with profiles of several Irkens and the Judgementia brains. "Most re-encodings are promotion upgrades in the same field, maybe a slight rearrangement here and there. A hard switch to a brand new encoding and title is much rarer. We're not really meant for it, and even brand new processors and drives struggle with the adjustment. It's not an enjoyable feeling."

To put it lightly. Thoughts of returning to fry oil and dripping toilets and the screaming hordes of offworld feeders and wearing that stupid, stupid, STUPID hat set Zim's teeth on edge.

His shaky hands folded the candy wrapper in his lap. He glanced down at it: a smooth crease cutting straight across the paper. He made another fold, then another. Zim admired the clean geometric lines and creases in the wax paper while the words found their way out of him. "And then after readjusting, it stops and they get used to the new encoding."

Zim folded a top corner: a solid break between the black and yellow letters. It looked good.

He glanced up at Foma. She hadn't answered him yet. "That feeling does stop, right?"

The lollipop rolled in Foma's mouth, clacking against her teeth. "Well…" She took a long suck of candy juice. "It gets better."

"That sounds like a no," said Zim.

"It's not a yes, either," said Foma. "It won't bother you so much, and you'll get used to it, but—"

Zim sliced another fold. "There's always a 'but'."

"But re-encoding isn't a code replacement." Her hands folded together and came apart, mimicking an invisible mushroom cloud. "More like a code expansion. Unless the PAK's completely wiped, original encodings can't be completely overwritten—the code is still there. In a way, I'm still a smeetery supervisor." Foma chuckled. "Just look, I'm analyzing PAK defections like the last two hundred and fifty years never happened."

Zim's thumb ran over a new fold. He angled the paper inward to let the little paper triangle stand up in the air.

His antennae perked as it sank in. "Wait, so that means…" The candy wrapper crinkled in his hands. "That means that in—in a way I'm still—"

The Extractor held up a finger. "In a way," she slowly said, "because the old code is still there from when, for a time, you were an Invader." Her finger tapped the desk hard. " Were. "

Zim returned to his paper folding and said nothing. If he waited a little while, he'd go back to feeling nothing, too. Or maybe longer than a little while. But whatever he kept to himself, Zim's face or scent or busy hands must have said instead, because when he looked up, Foma had softened again.

"You were an Invader, Zim." She said it with devastating kindness. "And maybe if you'd managed a bit more patience or obedience, you could have grown into a good one. The potential was enormous."

A panel of balloon lettering folded under Zim's thumb. He flattened it down hard. "Are you referencing my file or coddling my feelings?"

Foma raised an eye ridge and frowned at the mention of coddling. "I'm stating a fact," she told him. "You're the only Irken in your height/weight class to reach the Invader rank. Not the only one in your generation or your Era—you're the shortest one in the rank's existence. Even if it didn't last, getting that far at all was a huge accomplishment."

Except it wasn't. An accomplishment only counted if you could keep it. Being an official Invader for less than two years without even a decent deactivation didn't make the score charts. Not the good ones, anyway. The Irken officially known as Invader Zim had existed for a year and a half; slightly longer than the betting pools had predicted. Most bets also predicted he'd get eaten, dissected, exploded, or all three in that time. Any of those three would have been better than Foodcourtia.

"For what it's worth, it truly is a shame it didn't work out differently." Alright, now she was absolutely coddling.

Zim glared at the candy wrapper in his lap. "So you think I had the 'potential' to do something more than standing in a circle?" It came out bitterer than he meant it to.

"Maybe." Foma's tongue swiped over the tiny candy bits still clinging to the bare lollipop stick. "And we might have found out if you hadn't stepped out of that circle, commandeered a mech, and demolished your own—"

"It was a waste of Zim!" He propped himself high, leaning over the arm of his own chair and into the borders of Foma's. The upholstery split and burst under his claws.

The Extractor's antennae pricked and twitched.

"If you truly believe I had potential, then you must also believe that I could have done more than stand around like a… a Plim in a petri dish. I-I could— I CAN do so much more!" Words came too fast and all at once, congealed and too thick to come out. "The devastation I could have unleashed! The worlds I could have decimated…"

"What I 'must believe'… Hm." Extractor Foma drummed her claws on the lace cloth and rose from her chair. "To be honest, I think that if The Almighty Tallest let you lead the first wave of Operation Impending Doom 1, it wouldn't have been enough. The same way that becoming an Elite or an Invader or getting your own private planet wasn't enough." The light of the monitor winked across her pink eyes as she angled her head down at him. "I believe you want something else. Something more."

Zim's right antenna swiveled to follow the Extractor's bootsteps clicking behind his chair. Defective or not, he still knew better than to insult his tallers to their face. There had to be a politer way of telling someone they'd backslid into obsolete backwards nonsense.

Good thing he technically couldn't see her face right now. "What sort of backsliding obsolete nonsense is THAT supposed to be?! Of course it wouldn't be enough—we're Irkens! We're supposed to want more, that's what 'more' MEANS! That's the whole point of conquering. An empire doesn't exist without more."

In the corner of Zim's eye, a shadow fell over the desk top. Foma's glove gently lifted the lace cloth and rubbed the edge of the scorch mark. "There's nothing wrong with ambition if that's what you mean. If all of Irk's military had your drive, we'd own the universe already." The edge of her finger traced the black tendrils in the wood. "There's a difference between ambition and greed, however. You want more than any other Irken asks for; something more than Irk can even give."

Extractor Foma folded the lace over the scorch mark and smoothed out the wrinkles until it lay flat. "I think you want," she said, "to be loved."

Zim recoiled. "I—how could…? Why would—what kind of language is that for a taller?"

He might have expected this sort of vulgarity from average table drones or cannon-fodder foot soldiers, perhaps from a smeet still using the basic vocabulary base or an Invader who'd spent too much time with the locals. Never from someone of this height, of this rank. The word was as pointless as it was inaccurate—so slippery and imprecise that Zim had no clue which definition Foma meant, if Foma herself even knew. How could he argue the point when he couldn't even know what the point was?

Maybe he could work backward from the context. She couldn't have meant "squintz" or "florb" or she'd have said so. They didn't seem applicable to the situation, either. Had casting such a wide inaccurate net have been the point? Or did none of the specific Irken classifications for feelings apply to this specific thing?

To his best guess, Foma had actually meant that Zim wanted to be appreciated. To be valued. To be thought of in a favorable light, or to do his work and have that work seen for its worth.

"There's nothing wrong with wanting to please my Tallest," he finally said. He only wanted what every Irken wanted from them. A smile. A glance. A nod. "Good job, soldier, you serve us well." "Appreciation and love aren't the same things, Extractor. You know that."

Foma leaned over the side of the desk, arms crossed where the lace met the scorch marks. "Yes, I do. That's how I know what you want is more than appreciation. You want to be loved." She didn't say it like an accusation. Not a joke. Not a diagnosis. Not a theory. It was not a question and there would be no debate. This was an observation no different than "the sky is pink" or "snarl beasts have five jaws".

Zim didn't quite know what to do with that.

Her hands moved from the lace to the banners hanging off the side of the desk. Wrinkles smoothed and settled with a brush of her glove. "You're right; there's nothing wrong with wanting to please our Tallest. There's nothing wrong with wanting Irk's attention, appreciation, or even Irk's affection. But it's difficult for us to appreciate your accomplishments when those accomplishments hurt us."

"But—"

"This isn't a reprimand," she added. "However, you need to understand that you've hurt Irk, Zim. You've hurt us consistently and very badly, with little apology or sign of stopping. And I think you don't—or can't—stop because you want something we can't give."

"You just admitted there's nothing wrong with ambition," Zim snapped back. "And there's nothing greedy about wanting my just reward for doing my duty, either. If I have potential, then it is my DUTY to use that potential. It is Zim's duty to try!" Zim's fist struck the desk. Shockwaves rumbled through the banners and tablecloths. The candy dish shuddered and wobbled to the side.

Foma dove to catch the candy dish before it toppled over the edge. One of the pizza gumdrops bounced over the edge and rolled across the floor. She observed its journey with a slight frown, clicked her tongue, and glanced back at Zim.

Zim coughed into his fist and opted to admire the monitor's screensaver.

"Trying isn't the problem. I'm concerned about your motivations." Foma slid the candy dish to a safer spot and pointedly ignored Zim's disapproval of her word choice. "You want love, but you want it for you— just you, and no one else. Does that sound fair to you?"

Zim took a moment to consider. "It's fair if you deserve it."

"What have you done to deserve it?"

He blinked and stared at her. Was it not obvious? "I am Zim."

That in itself ought to be enough. The deserving came inherent. He could not be Zim and also not deserve all the worlds with all their treasures and accolades. And maybe everyone else could get a little something too, he supposed. A pat on the head or something. Admittedly, Zim had never really considered the everyone else part until now.

One could hardly call it a foreign concept, either. "Other stink-creatures are rewarded far more without doing anything besides exist. Smackey obtained no less than four different sports training spheres just for living to his twelfth Earth year. I've seen Vortians get gift baskets for failing! One of them explodes or coughs up a little blood, and suddenly there's grass baskets and meat samples for weeks."

"Yes. Certain species have certain customs to keep them healthy inside." She climbed into her hoverchair and turned it towards the vending machines behind them. The perfect line of colorful rectangles hummed together, bright in the dimmed lighting and brimming with snacks for the feeding. All except for the machine in the center, all rusted and broken on the inside with burnt sugar and melted cream in the gears. Irreparable without a new motherboard.

Zim followed the Extractor's gaze, frowned, and took up his candy wrapper again. One of the edges had gotten smushed when he'd dropped it before. Smoothing it out, he bent and angled another corner. He licked the tip of his claw and pinched the bottom between his fingers, stretching it to a tapered point. He did the same for a parallel corner. Not a perfect match, but close enough.

"Do—" Foma paused and frowned at Zim's folded candy wrapper. "Do you remember the story I told you before about Smeet 646-8b?"

"…No?"

The serial number sounded vaguely familiar, but after so many of her anecdotes, who could keep track? If the smeet didn't have a name, it hadn't survived long enough to surface. A failed smeet too broken and pointless to function held no significance for the Empire, and none for Zim. It shouldn't have had significance for Foma either. Everyone had their weird fixations, Zim supposed.

"He was a smeet who thought he couldn't breathe—as if he'd been made with gills and then dropped in a desert. It caused him a lot of pain." The hoverchair settled beside Zim again. "He breathed fine, but he didn't know it. Now, of course he didn't have gills because he wasn't an Amphibbinaut. The same way that you and I and The Tallest aren't Amphibbinauts or humans or Vortians or Truffloids."

"I know that! Why do you insist on drawing these pointless parallels to Zim? I've never held any illusions for what I am. We are no mewling heap of snivelies begging for hugs and love. We're Irkens. We don't need it." He grit his teeth and swung his head toward her. " I don't need it."

She only laughed at that. "You can't need what you already have. Irkens do love, Zim, don't doubt that for a moment. We conquer and build and kill and serve for the love of our Empire and our Tallest. Empires need more than one individual to function. A pilot doesn't love their right ignition wire, they love their ship. In the same way, a Tallest loves their Empire, not just one Invader… or Food Drone. Ships still need all their parts to fly, though. The trouble is, you can't seem to cooperate with our mechanics and so the system crashes." Tilting her head, Foma shifted closer to examine the strange geometric design Zim had made from the candy wrappers. "Excuse me. What's that you're doing?"

"Eh? This?" Zim held it higher. All the blues and purples shimmered along the sides as he tilted it. "Replication of some sort of Earth beast. A…" He stuck his tongue out in thought. "They call it, um, a crane."

Foma wrinkled her brow and poked one of the delicate wings. When it didn't explode, her finger traveled the length of the wing from where NUT— began to the base of the head where —RITION ended. "A crane? Like… like for construction?" She squinted with a little frown. "Oh! It's got wings and you said it's a beast? So it's one of those… they're called borbs?"

"Birds." Granted, Zim had never seen a real crane or referenced his collected data for more information, so he couldn't attest to the accuracy. He suspected the real things weren't so pointy. "The stinkchildren were tasked to design them in what they call a 'craft time'. That part's a wing, and that part up there is the head." He tilted it upside down to show her the little legs and feet. "The real ones have skin and feathers, probably."

"I suppose the real thing flies, too. Sort of like a model, but it's not accurate like a model. Are you going to add feathers later?"

Zim shook his head. "It's supposed to look like this."

Foma squinted. She hovered over the paper crane from the right angle, then the left angle. Squinted some more.

"The humans call it an 'abstraction'. It's an idea of a thing, but not the real thing." Zim grinned at Foma's perplexed expression. "It's fine if you don't get it. Art is subjective."

She smiled at the precise creases and edges where the eye was supposed to be. "I don't really understand the point of it, but the intricate design is so interesting. You've got a talent for this."

It had only been a replication of the class demonstration and an excuse to do something with his hands. Still, a deserved compliment was a deserved compliment. "Do you see? One as versatile as Zim isn't limited to destruction. I can build, too."

She nodded. "You have a history of innovation and problem-solving."

Potential, in other words. Potential that she saw in him, and always did. The same way the Empire did, otherwise they'd have never allowed her to come in the first place.

"Extractor?"

"Yes?"

"Do you really think you can fix me?" He set the paper crane on the edge of the candy dish. The local art slave had mentioned something about getting a prize if one manufactured thousands of cranes, but Zim had been bamboozled by promises of secret prizes before.

"You did most of the work here, Zim. I only got you to a place where repairs could happen at all." Extractor Foma looked Zim over with a smile. "I did have doubts at the start, but with these breakthroughs, the odds are very good. This set of sessions have been promising."

"And afterward, I can go home."

"If I have anything to say about it, you absolutely will."

Zim smiled back. "And The Tallest must know I still have potential if they risked sending their best out here all alone."

"Oh, I didn't come here alone," said Foma.

The smile faded. Zim looked around the (supposedly) empty room. "I thought you said—"

"I never said that; you did. Computer? Track mode, please."

The monitor split-screened to an Earth map. Four little lights pulsed in the grid, each labeled with a PAK number and identification link.

Foma zoomed in to point at the yellow dot blinking on an island above the South America continent. "That's Sub-Extractor Smarsh—still searching for your Information Retrieval Unit, I assume. I think I may need to talk with him about efficiency later." Her finger shifted to the northeast part of the North America marked with red and pink dots. "That's me and you, of course." The finger kept moving up. Up past the continent, up over the polar cap, up through the atmosphere, and into space. A white dot blinked somewhere between the moon and the Earth. "And that's Mertz!"

The monitor fuzzed and cut to a cozy living quarters. Earth's moon cast long strips of light through the open blinds, wriggling over a modest mini-fridge and a host of tangled wires.

An Irken drone with pale eyes slumped on a squish-sack playing video games. He looked up and gave the camera a limp salute. "Oh, hey. Do you need me yet?"

Foma shook her head. "Remain in standby, Mertz."

The one called Mertz yawned, gave another salute, and went back to his racing game.

Though Zim couldn't quite tell in the dim light, the shade of his uniform seemed much darker than the standard, and this drone couldn't be here for janitorial duties if he stationed so far away. Indeed, most drone duties couldn't be performed long distance. Whatever he did, he'd need to be on call for, not present for. Judging by that lazy posture and his 45th lap on Splatterhaus Station, he didn't expect to be called anytime soon.

On a shelf just behind the drone, something gleamed in the shadows. Though half-covered by its carrying case, he could still make out the almond shape of the silver shell. It was just the right size for an average PAK. "That's a mortuary drone."

"Yes, Mertz has been my first choice for mortuary service for a few decades, now. He's very thorough." Foma turned back to Zim, frowning at his expression. "...What?"

"Did you bring him for me?"

She laughed. "Oh my, no! I brought Mertz for me. Well, me or Smarsh. You have a 70/30 mortality risk with a 90/10 disfigurement rate. If the worst happened, I'd need someone to collect the PAKs." Foma pointed to the line of PAK Pods on a father shelf. "I still brought an extra for you, though. Just in case."

That made sense. Extractors spent their careers lurking in shadows, perched behind desks, or spiking drinks. It didn't take much to overpower Irkens who strapped all their enemies to chairs or tossed them in sim pods. As a former Elite and Invader, Zim's threat level dwarfed that of two Extractors, high ranking or not. Still, something about the sight of those PAK Pods squished Zim's spooch a bit.

Beside him, Foma applied a fresh nub to her stylus and wrote a fresh batch of notes. Something to do with finishing touches for a #IRK_SIM:SCEN_RUN -SESS 9 -POST -RUN 5 -SCENARIO 12:D-M. The censor filter hadn't been applied to these. Green checkmarks decorated the paragraphs and smiley faces grinned in the margins. One little dancing gold star with sunglasses kept looping a thumbs-up. Zim had never seen a write-up about himself with smiley faces and stars before.

"When we left, I said that everyone involved would return home. You included. I try to keep my promises when I can." Foma took one last look at the PAK pods and waved at Mertz before closing communications.

"Home," she'd said. Come to think of it, that had been the term she'd used from the beginning. Not "Irk". Not "the Empire". Not Foodcourtia or Judgementia or any other planet. Every time—every single time—"home".

As in the permanent home. The final cloud storage of all PAK consciousness, memory, and personality after expiration of a body host.

Zim sank deep into his chair. Ribbons of cloth and fuzz spilled from the upholstery as his claws dragged across the armrest. "You mean home to The Collective."

"Naturally. What else… did…" Foma's eyes rose over the top of her datapad. The tips of her antennae drooped as the lines of her smile fell away. "Oh. You didn't… oh, Zim. I'm sorry, I thought you understood."

Of course. It had all been too easy. He should have seen it ages ago. Zim flinched away from the Extractor's reach. "Even after all of that, I'm still getting deactivated?!" His voice peaked and trembled, and the sound of it sickened him to the pit of his spooch. How dare this sound be the voice of Zim. How dare this be the fate of Zim?

The question hung in the air, lonely in the company of cheerful background music and humming vending machines.

Extractor Foma laced her fingers together and took a deep breath. A moment to filter and fine-tooth her next move. Whatever calming phrase, whatever smooth rewording she searched for, she didn't find it.

Instead, she blinked slowly and said, "I don't know. It is a possibility, and with your record, it's not an unlikely possibility. Nobody has decided anything yet. But if—" Foma leaned across Zim's chair, so low her chin brushed the Vortian upholstery. "But if—if—that happens, you'll be relieved of duty. It won't be deletion, and it won't be existence erasure. You will still exist, and you will still be you. Whether you deactivate seven weeks or seven hundred years from now."

This had to be a joke. Another one of her misdirections or some way to soften the blow. "You're telling me you did all this and didn't even know how it's supposed to end?"

"Ideally, it was supposed to end with you accepting that you're no longer an Invader. Whatever happens after that is out of my hands. Nobody discussed sentencing with me. You could be deactivated, or sent to finish your sentence on Foodcourtia, or paroled or…" She shrugged with a half-hearted chuckle. "This is such a unique situation, anything might happen. However it turns out, I'll keep helping you the best way that I can for as long as I can. Okay?"

"Okay." It wasn't okay at all, but Zim didn't have a better answer.

Coming this far only to arrive at an I-Don't-Know felt hollow, and it felt untrue. He didn't think the Extractor tried to deceive him, but there had to be something else. Even if she didn't have an S-class guarantee, Foma still had to have a hypothetical theory or four. A guess would be better than nothing.

"What do you think should happen?"

"Me?" Foma pointed at herself as if there might be some other Foma in the room. "Don't be silly; I'm just an Extractor, not a Judgement Brain. We both know I'm not qualified for a decision like that. All I can give is an opinion."

The background music rolled into a soothing tonal mix of chimes and synth. Something between elevator jingles and the we-close-in-fifteen-minutes music they played in the mall galaxies before sending out the taser mines.

Zim blinked. "And… that opinion is…?"

Foma tilted her head.

If he didn't know better, Zim would think this was another test of his patience. "What do you think should happen?"

The Extractor's processors clicked and whirred. Her brows drew together as if untangling a calculation or programming an exceptionally obtuse VCR. It kind of reminded Zim of Tallest Purple ordering dessert. "I'm not qualified either way. Why would what I think matter?"

Zim's hands dragged slowly down his face. "Because I ASKED!"

The wires finally sparked. "Ohhh, it's for personal reasons! Why didn't you say so?" She took the candy wrapper crane into her hands, playing with its little blue wingtips. "In that case, I see two real options. The first would be a comfortable exile assignment; something engaging that kept us a safe distance from your damage radius. The Tallest already tried that, and you've proven your damage radius is much wider than we'd assumed. The Massive takeover proved that." Foma stretched a finger to balance the crane on her knuckle. It wobbled there for a moment before falling back into her hand. "After your sessions with me and accepting your new encodings, I think the idea could still work. Without the denial firewall, though, I don't think you'd get much out of it. This is the sort of thing that only works once. I think the healthier option would be to return you to your encoding."

"Food service." He suspected as much.

She placed the crane back on the desk. "No. Your original encoding."

With a flash of neural nodes, a timeline of Zim's career filed out across the monitor. The smeethood, Invader, and Food Service Drone years cut and deleted themselves as the computer shifted center and zoomed in.

Zim gazed up at a tapestry of Past Zims elbow deep in wires, goggled behind monitors, handling biological samples, coding, smoldering, dissecting, and being on fire a little bit. "You want me back in science?"

"Bioengineering, specifically. Maybe mechanics, or even design if you developed the patience for it." Foma skimmed the timeline, taking note of the explosions and splatters of biological residue. "Under parole supervision, of course. Without the corruptive Vortian influence this time, it could work. If nowhere else, Information Extraction could always use more hands in physical research. You can handle constant screaming; that's a fifth of the job done already."

The monitor switched back to the desktop. Sterile columns of icons and shortcuts flanked a departmental seal that dominated the desktop. "That said, bias could have influenced my judgment by this point. What I'd like to see for you may not be what's necessarily best for you."

"What's best for me, or what's best for the Empire?"

"You say that as if they're different things. Zim, I can't understand why you think you're the only one out here." Smiling, she patted the rim of his PAK. "You have your Tallest, and me, and dozens of Brains, and shmillions of fellow Irkens with you. I wish that for once you could trust us to know what we're doing."

"I do!" At least, he thought he did. Probably.

Zim glanced at the hand on his PAK. Apparently, it'd cooled enough to touch, and the lingering scent of burnt wiring and stale metal had dissipated. The dent in the hatch still remained, but he didn't see it unless he searched for it. His PAK legs hadn't attacked him since three sessions ago and the heatsink didn't cause blackouts. From the time he'd left the quiet room, Zim's PAK sat between his shoulders quietly running his life support in the background without a fuss. Working with him, not against him, the way a PAK ought to.

This, more than anything else, had to be the keystone of his progress. Solid proof the work had paid off and he got better.

"Why doesn't it feel better yet?"

"Sometimes when good things happen to us, they don't seem good at the moment," Foma said. "Even if we know it's good, we still feel frightened or sad. Endings are always a little sad, I think. Beginnings, too. This is a little of both, and it's still a process." She unrolled the blanket from a hidden pouch in Zim's chair and ran her fingers through all the soft folds and speckles in the Fweezian fur. "If you can, try to remember the benefit of all this. The Irken Empire will thrive. The Almighty Tallest will be pleased, and Irk herself will grow stronger for generations. So much good can come from this if you'll let yourself see it."

An Empire could only be as strong as its Irkens. Illness meant weakness. Weakness meant death. Whatever kept the Irken Empire from death had to be good. But when he gazed up at the domed ceiling, Zim remembered the flare of Spittle Runners, Doom Mechs, and Schroovers lifting into the stratosphere without him. He remembered his little circle on the asphalt and all the tall shadows passing over his face. Because Zim had to stay in the circle. Zim had to wait his turn. If his turn ever even happened.

"And what about Zim?" asked Zim. "What do I get?"

Foma considered it. "I should hope," she said, "that it's what you deserve."

"That still sounds like a nicer way of saying I'm going to be deactivated."

"That can't be helped. Everyone deactivates eventually, even The Tallest. Even you. It's our last, and perhaps, our highest duty." She spread the fur blanket over Zim's armrest, within reach but not crossing the boundary into his lap. Comfort if he wanted it. "Let me tell you something my superiors told me a long time ago: it's only meat and code. At the end of the day, that's all it is. Deactivation just separates the code from the meat and moves it somewhere new. You've done awful things, Zim, but you still deserve to go home to the Collective."

In other words, Zim deserved the same thing everyone else deserved. The standard-issue fate that awaited common service drones, Elites, accident-prone smeets, Warlords, Frylords, Announcers, Wardens, and F-tier Invaders nobody cared about. A voice in a chorus. A drop of blood in a body.

"I'm not amazing," he quietly said. It hurt more than when he'd admitted he wasn't an Invader anymore. At least that had happened by accident. "I'm not great."

"No, I'm afraid not." Even Extractor Foma couldn't pin a bright side to it. And yet, something in her eye sparkled like a coin between the couch cushions. "But…" A smile grew in the corner of her mouth. "…maybe you still could be."

All these truths dropper-fed to him with sugars and nectars had grown too sweet for Zim's palate a long time ago. "I tire of your coddling, Extractor. You no longer supervise Smeetery and I am no longer a smeet. If this is some attempt to dress up frywork and drudgery as some noble purpose, then…." Zim's tongue fumbled for a suitable threat. "Then… don't!" Eh, good enough.

Foma raised her eyebrows. "Hm. Defunct encodings have had a habit of resurfacing lately, but that's hardly an excuse. I apologize, Zim. That was unprofessional of me."

So was apologizing to a food drone almost half her height. Zim couldn't tell if it had been a slip or if she thought so little of him she didn't care about bearing weakness, but it embarrassed them both either way. "Miyuki was right. Smeet supervision made you oversensitive."

"I prefer to think of it as personal investment." Foma smoothed the wrinkles in her gloves, rubbing the points of her knuckles as she went along. "If an Irken still has a chance to support their Empire, I'm obliged to help them do it. Even if it takes multiple session sets to get there."

Zim narrowed his eyes. "And you believe I can?"

"Oh yes, in a great way. If the final stage with PAKnician Wekkz is successful—and I have every confidence it will be—that doesn't just mean you can be fixed, Zim. It means everyone can be." Her grin had the ambitious zeal of smeets breaking the surface for the first time. "Think of it: no more smeetery deletions. No existence erasures for anyone ever again. No more lost potential, and all because of you!"

Rubbing his shoulders, Zim slid out of his chair. His muscles felt stiff and weakened from sitting so long. The ground needed to move under his feet. "How is it because of me?" Zim's boots tapped counterpoint to the peaceful background synth as he paced along the vending machines. He squinted in the light of illuminated logos and buttons. "I'm not the one doing any debugging. That's all you or the PAK tech or…" Or The Tallest. If the process happened under their orders, that made it their achievement. "Not mine."

Foma cracked her back and rose to follow him. "Hm. In that case, I have a question. Can you name the first solo cruiser capable of multiple lightyear jumps carrying the weapon capacity of an Armada vessel?"

"A Voot Runner. Obviously."

Lights brightened along the arch of the ceiling as the monitor went back to sleep. Foma's neural nodes pulsed in quick sequence, the base of her antennae twitching in time. "Can you tell me who designed it? Or who coded the prototype?"

Referencing his PAK database brought Zim the schematics, models, prototypes, exploding test runs, and un-exploding maiden voyages, but no names. "No."

"Exactly. Nobody worries about the builders—"

"They want results," Zim finished. "And that's me.

"This is a feat for the Collective Memory. We'll remember this for as long as smeets are still implanted with knowledge." Foma leaned against the broken vending machine, running her fingers along the darkened buttons. Her neural nodes reflected bright against the glass, and so warm against the collar of her uniform Zim smelled it from here. "Your name will be among the first ones Irkens ever learn. They will know Irk lives and thrives, and they'll know it's thanks, in part, to you. What you've done can't be revised, and I can't say for sure if it can be redeemed." She wiped a streak of burned sugar off the machine dispenser. "But it can still be salvaged."

Salvaged. The word dropped hard into Zim's stomach. His knees wavered under him.

"There's still stuff that can be fixed. Right?" The vending machine's plastic buttons cracked under the grip of his claw. Low waves of panic churned under the quick throb of his spooch. "Zim's not—I'm not ruined."

She held up a clarifying finger. "What you've done, not you yourself. What's done can't be undone, but when it comes to the one who—"

A shadow flexed across the curved arc of the ceiling. Lights pulsed and flickered in time with the bright staccato pace of the neural nodes. Music warped and slowed and bent as if the sound itself melted in a furnace.

Foma's antennae flattened, still twitching at the base. "We must be getting some interference. I think our session may be reaching its time limit…" She shook her head and turned back to Zim. "Sorry, where was I?"

"Uh." Zim followed the line of dead light panels to the monitor wall. Even the screensaver had vanished. It had gone to full hibernation mode, if not shut down entirely. "Something about not undoing stuff?" His own antenna twitched at a weird scratching sound.

"Right, of course. Repairing something can only bring it back to its original state. When something is salvaged, it's remade into something brand new—something even better."

"A new and improved Zim." He liked the sound of that.

The scratching noise came again. They both heard it that time, and now a low hum accompanied it. It sounded as if someone vacuumed the inside the walls.

Foma stepped back from the vending machines, squinting from the walls to the dead light panels to Zim. Metal squeaked and groaned behind her. She looked up just in time to see the shadow of the broken vending machine over her feet. "Oh, that's a bit—-"

WHAM!

Tile cracked and rattled beneath Zim's feet as he jumped back from the impact, PAK legs sprung and on guard. Clouds of sugar dust and debris churned through the air in great billows of white and grey. Shrapnel of glass and metal and half-melted snacks tumbled from the belly of the fallen vending machine in waves. In the corner of his eye, Extractor Foma's fingers twitched weakly from under the machine.

Even in the rising maelstrom of scents, Zim smelled him before he saw him. The stink of it tore through the clean office like cannons. The silhouette of the hair fin arched through the settling dust clouds as the flaps of animal hide waved at his sides.

Dib walked across the back of the vending machine, coughing up little dust flecks. "Hey so, second opinion? Your therapist stinks."

Zim circled the machine on his three good PAK legs, shadowing the human's every movement with his own. Dib shifted right, Zim shifted right. Zim blinked when Dib blinked, inhaled when he inhaled. The Dib had managed a stealth assault, but Zim would allow him no more than that. "As if that blunt knob on your fleshy face could smell anything over the malodorous funk of your own smelliness."

In the fragile newness of recovery mode, Zim had focused inward for so long that he'd forgotten the threats outward. Foolish. Distractions made him vulnerable—he and the base and the Irkens around him. Yes, he'd warned of the Dib threat, but he should have done it from the beginning. She might have taken him more seriously, then.

The Extractor groaned and lifted her head. Pinned from the shoulders down, she dragged her free arm out of a pile of broken glass and brushed debris from the base of her antennae. Neurotransmitters sparked and spat, and the music speakers overhead squealed with crackling feedback when she turned her head. She coughed and squinted up at the Dib creature. "...What's a therapist?"

To her credit, Foma retained her composure well for someone who'd been proven totally completely entirely and one-trillion-percent wrong in under three seconds.

Dib had come, and little wonder. Zim was no longer an Invader, but that didn't matter. Rank and classification meant nothing to his sort. Alien threats were alien threats. Dib would never let go of that. He could never let go of that.

"I told you, Extractor." Eyes locked upon his prime enemy, Zim's face cracked sideways in a grimacing smile. Something great swelled within him—something rawer than joy, taller than rage, grander than gladness, and it vibrated from the tip of his toe claw to the threads of his antennae. Vindication. What a glorious emotion. "Yes… YES! I told you, didn't I? DIDN'T I? You doubted the word of Zim, and now see what's become of your base: infiltrated and defiled! Maybe you're an expert in brain-pokings, but I am an expert in Dib. I told you!"

Foma cupped her chin with her free hand. "Well. Can't be right all the time, I suppose." She glanced up at the human above her head. "Hello again, young man."

Dib stared back with a small frown. His hand shifted toward his pocket. "You—"

Zim's rotary drill sprung from his PAK before that hand moved any further. He glared.

Dib glared back. His hand withdrew.

That's what I thought. "You see? Nobody knows the filth of this planet the way I…" Zim glanced at Foma again.

For someone suffering the shame of a containment breach while crushed beneath eight hundred pounds of snack infrastructure, she'd been taking all this surprisingly well. He couldn't see the state of her PAK under the machine, and though built for durability, the PAK had never been meant to take such an impact. Inappropriate emotional response could be an early warning sign of system failure. Also, swallowing glass probably wasn't great for one's insides.

"Uh. Are you okay?" It felt strange being on the opposite side of that question for once.

"Oh, I'm just bleeding internally a little bit. I've had worse, but thank you for asking!" She coughed up a wet pink glob on the tile. "You're showing concern for Irkens besides yourself; that shows a lot of growth."

"Yes," said Zim. "Yes, it does. I hope you've learned a little something about the dangers of coming to hostile planets unguarded. You never know what these stink-meats have hidden up their arms."

"Sleeves." Dib raised an eyebrow. "Pretty sure you mean sleeves."

"Silence! You dare contradict me?!"

And as a matter of fact, how dare he look down upon Zim from up there? As if he had any right to high ground? In one quick push, Zim launched atop the vending machine to loom over Dib. Shoulder to shoulder, the curve of his brow sat two inches above his. Indeed, Zim had grown after all of this. "What are you still doing here? I thought I told you to get out!"

Dib took a small step back from the rotary drill still jabbing at his face. "You don't tell me what to do, you're not my dad."

Foma's voice drifted up from under their feet. "How are those father issues working out, by the way?"

"Hey, that's none of your business, lady!"

"I'm just making conversation." Foma huffed under her breath. "There's no need to be rude."

Dib flapped the dust and debris out of his coat and ignored her. "Okay. I'm gonna ask you one more time, Zim: let's just leave."

"That wasn't a question," said Zim.

"You know what I mean! C'mon, let's…" Dib gestured over his shoulder at a glowing ring on the wall that Zim didn't recall being there a moment before. "…let's just get outta here."

The ring's insides pulsed and warped in a soup of morphing colors. Sort of like the soup from the Skool cafeteria except it glowed slightly less and didn't have that moldy smell. Zim tossed an expired yogurt cup through the ring. It flew straight through. The innards of the ring wriggled and someone on the other side shrieked, "AUGHGH MY EYE! MY DAIRY ALLERGY MAKES THIS INCONVENIENT!"

Typical human frailty.

Zim crossed his arms. "What's that supposed to be? Some sort of a… transdimensional portal thing?"

Dib rubbed the back of his head. "I didn't really read the instructions first, it's my dad's science… whatever, it's not important." He jabbed his thumb behind him at the dark monitor flanked by the banners of the Irken Empire. "Doing any of this was dumb in the first place but doing all of it just to go back to your evil home planet and die is… well, it's REALLY dumb! Especially when you don't even have to do it!"

An argument so absurd Zim didn't bother to dignify it. He had seen the sketches of Dib's planned autopsies. He knew better, and Dib didn't deserve the privilege of a debate. "I don't know what makes you think you have any say in matters of Empire, but I suggest you put a stop to it. You're embarrassing yourself."

Zim paused to take in Dib's stance—a fighting stance, despite supposedly coming to Zim's "aid". Another angle lurked in all of this, but he couldn't say what. He glanced between Dib, the Extractor, the portal, the Empire banners, and back to Dib again.

This didn't feel right. Yes, Dib was up to something, but it felt nothing like his normal brand of conniving schemery, and so far the human had betrayed nothing of his real plot. Zim needed more information. It'd been years since he'd attempted anything close to extraction, but he remembered the broad strokes. Kind of.

At the very least he remembered how to set bait. "And then what? I suppose you'd have me offer myself to your Earth authorities. Or maybe you relish the chance to do it yourself."

"Maybe!" Dib smacked his head and tossed up his arms in an absurd flail. " How is it this hard to tell some dumb alien he's being dumb? I don't know, okay? I didn't exactly come in with a plan—maybe we'll go back to trying to destroy each other, maybe you'll go to space and bug someone else, maybe you'll join the Skool play or rob a candy store, how am I supposed to know? Whatever you do, it's gotta be better than this."

Not that Dib had any real idea of what "this" was even supposed to be. The human eavesdropped for a couple of hours and suddenly hailed himself a master of Irken society and ethics. It explained why Dib's speeches rang so hollow and lacked the usual passion. The effort of running that science portal… thing likely demanded more of him than he let on. No, this half-glazed trick pulled from Dib's pocket at the last second couldn't fool Zim. However…

Zim frowned at the wormhole pulsing at Dib's back. Wisps of color crawled out of it in vaporous little tendrils, coiling and dissipating at their feet. Wormhole and dimension-hopping demanded levels of technical prowess that should have been well beyond the reach of any mere Earth monkey. Yet here he stood anyway through tenacity or stubbornness or sheer lack of anything better to do.

Whatever the method, whatever the motive, Dib was not going to let this go. Not now, not ever. For the sake of his prize, he'd chase Zim all the way to Foodcourtia, Irk, or wherever Zim ended up and probably drag Irk's enemies along for the ride. Left to his own devices, who knew the levels of damage Dib could do in his obsession with Zim? If not for Dib's interference, The Massive would never have spun out of control, and he'd done that schmillions of lightyears away. On accident. If he actually tried to do anything on purpose… Zim hated to think of it.

Someone had to stop him. To stop him, he had to stay.

"But if I stay…"

Zim glanced at the Extractor flattened under the vending machine. She'd never said it outright, but all her talk of Collective and duty relief implied that this chance may be his last. Even if he didn't get a probation period—and Zim didn't see why he wouldn't—at the very least he'd avoid existence erasure. No matter what, Zim would keep his own little mark in history. Perhaps even create history by eliminating the need for existence erasures entirely (excepting space clowns, who deserved it no matter what).

To return with the Extractor meant returning to mark his name in the logs of Irken progress, to be among the first thousand names smeets learned in the first minutes of life, would be an honor. An honor he'd truly earned. But to return with the Extractor also meant he'd leave Irk and all her Irkens vulnerable to Dib.

Could Dib take down an entire Armada? Of course not. But that didn't mean he still couldn't do damage along the way. That didn't mean he couldn't leak all that he'd learned to Irk's enemies, and the enemies of Irk would absolutely know what to do with it. If Zim stayed, he faced the very real possibility he'd never make it into the Collective. But keeping Dib's grubby monkey hands in his own solar system might be worth it.

Below him, Foma's voice murmured a small sound of surprise.

The background music stuttered and turned in on itself. Synths stretched into staticky wails over the warping strings as the track looped and layered over itself. It sounded like something had jammed in the internals. Foma frowned up at the flickering light panels where rectangles of blue flared through the ceiling. Bits of clouds peaked at the corners. From down here, it appeared as if someone had cut perfect holes in the ceiling to let the sky in. Foma's fingers flexed in the direction of the datapad a few inches away. "Oh, that's sooner than I expected", she whispered to herself. "I'll need to adjust that next time…"

Zim squinted at a chunk of blue sky dangling from the ceiling. It reminded him of the holographic shell Planet Jackers used, and he suddenly wondered if the Extractor had completely layered her base in camouflage panels. "Eh… Is that supposed to hap—"

"What is WITH you, Zim? It's a creepy weird office doing creepy alien stuff. What do you care?" Dib stepped to the side, eyeing the dangling panel warily.

"It's really my problem; don't worry about it, Zim. It's an easy error to fix." Foma's bones clacked and clattered like a bag full of marbles as she shifted. She glanced at the state of herself with a sigh. "After I fix the rest."

An obvious deflection to either save face or Zim's concerns. Likely the former. A quick skim of the state of her office told Zim what had happened: under the stress of being ripped open from the inside, Foma's base had begun to glitch out. Irken defense prepped for outside threats, but if something had attacked it from within, all the armor in the universe couldn't help.

Behind Dib, the portal cracked wider as bits of ceiling and Miyuki-blue paint snowed around them. Zim hissed between his teeth. The human's very presence had literally brought bits of the Empire crashing down around them. No Irken anywhere could be safe so long as he chased Zim.

"Whoa…" Dib backed away, the glow of the portal shiny on his shoulders. He stared at the gigantic speaker hanging from one lonely wire above him. The wire had already begun to fray. "Okay, I'm getting out of here. Are you coming or not?"

"I…" Zim glanced again at the Extractor for a moment.

A moment too long for Dib, it seemed. When Zim looked up again, he was gone. Dib never hesitated to save his own skin, though the mess had all been his doing. The stinkbeast didn't even apologize. He didn't even care.

"I can't let him run free to plot whatever schemes he's scheming within that bulbous meat stick of a head. He'll…" Now that he said it out loud, the whole thing sounded crazy. Like excuses. Zim couldn't help that.

"He knows too much." She didn't sound entirely happy with the idea.

"Precisely. Extractor, you must…" Actually, he could be in a better position to make his case if he moved the machine first.

Eyes still on the wormhole, Zim slid off the vending machine and walked a short lap around the perimeter. The fall had left a small gap between the wall and Foma's foot. He hooked his two good PAK legs in the vending machine facade and lifted it a few inches. Metal squeaked and strained under the effort, but they held. Lights glowed in the dim shade under the machine; the PAK was fine, as suspected. "Extractor, you must understand, We may be free of the Dib human for the moment, but this will not be the end of it. His gnawing obsession for Zim will never recede, and I…" He clenched his hand into a fist. "I'm the only one who fully comprehends what he's capable of. I must—"

"It sounds like you've made your decision." Foma dragged herself out from under the gap and examined the damage. One of her legs had shattered in several places, and Zim didn't think spines were supposed to twist in that direction. The Extractor shrugged with a small chuckle. "Not that I could stop you."

With a snap of her fingers, the hoverchair zipped to her side and dipped down to let Foma pull herself in. She lounged across it looking like a slightly melted version of herself. "I can't say I'm delighted by this result, but for now it may be the best I can do." She took up the datapad—to call her ship for a rescue, most likely—and gave Zim an appraising look. "The hard part's still done, I need to keep that in mind. That probably means the PAK evals need to be pushed to a later date, but I think that'll be doable."

"What do you mean a 'later date'?" Zim glanced over his shoulder. In the short time they'd been speaking, the wormhole had collapsed to half its original size and still shrank by the second. Without Dib here to stabilize it, the core couldn't hold.

"It means exactly what it sounds like. However, I think we can worry about that when we come to it." With one eye on the wormhole, she wrote a quick series of notes. "And it's good," she said, "to enjoy the time you still have. I may be able to spin this as an infiltration mission, but we'll see. For now, this session set's done. Of course, you can always worry about Dib later and come back with me in the meantime if you want."

Zim glanced over his shoulder, already mid-torso into the wormhole. "What? You say something?"

Extractor Foma shook her head with a sigh. "Just try and have a good time for me, okay?" When her head shifted, the air around her eyes shimmered. A translucent band of light encircled her eyes, and it shifted color with the neural nodes.

Zim frowned. That sort of looked like a fancier shinier version of the visors they'd used during underground training in the virtual—

The wormhole snapped shut.

---

END OF SESSION LOG V.

SESSION SET IX, RUN III: COMPLETE.