POST-SESSION ADDENDUM.
The facade didn't last, of course. It couldn't possibly.
Months of observation told Zim that humans generally didn't have that sort of stamina. Personal experience told him that Dib Membrane, specifically, did not and could not maintain the patience or fortitude to keep up the act for long. If for no other reason than his pride wouldn't allow anything less than a complete win.
Oh, Dib had certainly tried to maintain the illusion in the beginning. In that first new stretch of skooldays, he'd attempted a prodding question here: "Hey, have you updated your base security? She could still come back, you know." A probe wrapped in false concern there: "Hey, are you doing okay?"
Occasionally, he baited him as if Zim were nothing more than a whimpering Earth creature huddled beneath a mailbox on a rainy day. "If you don't feel safe at your base, my dad says you could… I dunno. Maybe try my place?" Those had been the worst of all—if not for Dib's pathetic attempt at acting, then for the sheer audacity to assume Zim would fall for it. Besides, if he wanted to enter the human's nest he could do so whenever he liked, invitation or not.
It went on that way for about a month or two. Zim supposed he could credit Dib for his persistence. On his weaker days, he even found himself appreciating Dib's dedication to the act. But the curtain had to close on it sometime.
"Fine, you know what? Whatever. Do what you want, Zim."
When the local city Fun Center went up in a brilliant flare of smoke and ashes and chicken heads teleported onto dog-clown hybrid bodies, Dib regretted that request.
The first spy probe arrived in Zim's base not long after. They traded blows and threats a skoolday after that.
Took him long enough. The fool.
Overconfidence had blinded the human—made him sloppy. In the entire time that Dib begged and cajoled and tempted him to join forces, it had never crossed his mind that Zim didn't need a place to hide because he had nothing to hide from.
Despite what Dib chose to believe, Zim had never defected from the Irken Empire. In fact, he sent them progress reports every other weekend. Punctuality had to be top priority when one worked with Information Extraction. Worked for it? Something like that. He'd never asked for specifics. (Mostly because that meant longer calls with Sub-Extractor Smarsh and his hour-long rants about people stealing parking spots.)
The job had none of Invasion's luster or bragging rights, and "Infiltrator Trainee Candidate Zim" didn't have as nice a ring to it but hey. It beat food drone duty.
Plus, it seemed to please The Tallest.
"Huh. Not a bad job, Zim." Tallest Purple skimmed the report with one hand while plowing through a fresh donut in the other. "Keep it up. Give us a follow-up next week."
"Absolutely, sirs." Zim clacked his heels together and saluted his sign-off. In the background, GIR flashed his own little metal salute.
A Good Job Not Ruining Everything For Once celebratory gift basket of hot nachos, brand new camera probes, and a smiley-face glitter sticker arrived the day after his first report. That proved it. They'd been pleased.
If The Almighty Tallest were happy, Zim supposed he ought to be happy as well. Which he was, of course. Happy to serve his Empire, grateful for the opportunity to redeem himself and his reputation, and satisfied with the knowledge he kept Irk's enemies safely tethered to their own stinkball planets. He was. Truly. Or at least, he was learning to be. It was good to try and good to learn. Zim was good, and being good felt good. Therefore, Zim was happy.
Even so…
Sometimes—not all the time—but… sometimes when the day's work ended and his base eased into the placid lull of background noise, Zim felt his spooch clench, unsettled. Not unhappy. Not unsatisfied. Unsettled. As if he'd left his Voot code key in the washroom or forgotten to turn off a stove.
And it grew.
Out of sight, the feeling warped and slithered and prodded under his skin. Something that he should know. Or something he already knew.
He almost tried calling The Tallest about it once—
"We just did this fifteen minutes ago!"
"I'm getting pretty sick of this conversation; it was fun telling him the truth the first time, but sheesh."
—but Zim decided against testing their patience. For all he knew, he'd already asked them about it. Without a High Extractor monitoring his memory errors with playback at the push of a button, he couldn't know. He could always demand the PAK's own recall, but he didn't trust that defective thing as far as he could throw it.
Could he be relapsing? It wouldn't surprise him because lately, a lot of things about his extraction session still didn't fit right.
Early in the maintenance sessions, The Tallest had scolded Zim for calling them back fifteen minutes after the last attempt. Foma had cautioned they wouldn't like being called again so soon after last time. But Zim hadn't remembered a 'last time' in the break room and he couldn't recall a 'last time' now. He'd spent the minutes and hours before that moment eating Foodcourtia fries and meeting the "skool psychologist", hadn't he?
The call history lasting longer than the time Zim had entered the break room told him otherwise. But unless they'd somehow called the Tallest four different times during the Zim's blackouts, he didn't see how that could be possible. Especially when The Tallest wouldn't be inclined to lie, and Extractor Foma couldn't lie at all. Zim couldn't understand it. Not that any of this mattered after the fact, anyway. It really wasn't worth worrying about.
Zim didn't overthink it when he retired for the workday.
He tried not to overthink it on the walk to skool.
When class started, he reminded himself that technically, it didn't count as overthinking when one just had many thoughts to think. Not overthinking. The correct amount of thinking.
One little inconsistency could never be enough to rattle Irk's finest. Errors happened all the time, even with fully functional PAKs. It was just one little inconsistency or two. Or five. Or twelve. But Zim only noticed when he thought about them, so Zim didn't think about them.
Or at least he tried.
"Do you remember me, Zim?"
It had been such a strange thing to ask. Yes, he'd remembered Extractor Foma when he'd thought back to Elite training later on in the sessions. She couldn't have expected instant recall on the spot, right? Until that day, they'd only known each other across a cramped sweaty lecture hall of Elites in a presentation Zim barely paid attention to. They'd never so much as engaged in a post-lecture Q&A session. Yet she behaved as if they'd personally met before.
Maybe they had met officially but he'd been too absorbed with his own important affairs to offer his full attention. It wouldn't be the first time.
Questions boiled in his spooch and wriggled up his spine, and the less he thought about them, the more they multiplied. Coincidences piled and beached themselves on his incredible brain, steaming and rotting the second they were exposed to the air.
"Nooooo!"
In the northern corner of the classroom, Dib cried out in anguish. Not from any efforts of Zim's, though that didn't make it any less pleasing. "Aw come on, again?! I just got a new chisel this morning!" Dib groaned over the broken stone tablet cracked in three places on his desk.
"What's the matter, Dib? I would have thought a primitive species would be used to such basic human primitive tools for primitives." He patted his wig. "Which I… also am. One of." Zim glanced at the stone slab on his own desk. Which had not been broken, thank you. Zim didn't go around breaking everything in sight, unlike some.
Dib raised his hand and shot back a bitter look that promised swift retaliation the moment time allowed it. "Ms. Bitters? If we can't have digital tablets, can't we just switch back to pencils and paper?"
"Feh." This was what the one known as Ms. Bitters considered a laugh. "You think there's room in the budget for pencils? I had a pencil once…"
Another budgetary concern. Zim stretched his neck toward the door window. If he squinted, he could see the reflection of one of the brand new Poop machines in the hallway. Those machines wouldn't break down in the middle of the day and need spare parts that didn't exist anymore.
Why did Foma have a working model of an old vending machine? If she'd wanted to keep the aesthetics, she could've pasted an old shell onto a new model. But no, the break room—a perfect replica from the floor plan to the food stains—had stocked legitimate and functional antiques. Without funding, how did Information Extraction's strained budget support it? Building such a perfectly detailed replica would have had to take tens of thousands of monies, hundreds of hours, and loads of research. The cost far outweighed the reward.
"I do software, not hardware."
Unless she didn't need to commission a build in the first—
Zim shook his head. He'd let himself get distracted again. He couldn't afford any mistakes. Dib needed Irken eyes on him every second.
Foolish. Foolish indolence and baseless conspiracy. These were nothing but baseless worries of an Irken looking for something to worry about. Worries of an Irken with little to do and little trust in his own Empire. Zim was not that Irken. Those days were over.
Zim trusted the Empire and the Empire trusted him. More than that, The Irken Empire had offered Zim another chance he likely didn't deserve. They trusted him with delicate information, and in doing so, trusted Zim to guard Irk's forces and territories against those who'd tear her down and rip her asunder.
No. Zim would not allow it. He would not entertain another millisecond of these stupid distractions. No more mistakes. No more friendly fires. No more disappointment. No more embarrassment. No more.
Dib's gaze lingered on him, smoldering on Zim's skin like rainwater. They locked eyes like swords across the room: a silent promise the fight wasn't over yet. It never would be, not until the day Zim stood victorious over that gargantuan head. Until that day, Dib Membrane required Irken supervision every second of every hour of every day until the day he stopped existing.
The camera monitors, hidden microphones, and heat sensors had been an acceptable start, but not enough. After all, spy bugs could be tracked, cameras smashed, and mics muted. He had to step up his game.
Zim's eye slid down to the chisel gripped tight in Dib's sweaty little hand. A primitive tool for a primitive species. They'd barely managed to break the atmosphere, much less master space travel. But even primitive creatures evolved, eventually, and their tools upgraded with them. Dib's damage capacity towered above that of his peers already. Only a matter of time before that damage grew. He would need something more than mere supervision. He needed containment.
Yes. Confinement and control. Zim needed a way to monitor this Empire threat safely, securely, and in a way so that he could still harvest the proper information reliably. Something as simple as a prison cell would never work. It'd only aggravate him, and in such dull surroundings, a creature as dangerously creative as Dib wouldn't remain in a cell for long. Two, three weeks at the absolute most.
Naturally, Irken ingenuity and the Extraction department had fixed this sort of issue cycles ago. The Information Extraction Simulacrum V-2 ™, conceptualized by Extractor Foma herself, fit the occasion perfectly. Though useful in training Irkens' endurance for capture/torture scenarios, the Simulacrum truly shined in its original purpose: enemy interrogation. With no physical harm to the body and infinite resets, one could extract all the information they needed. No risk of the subject accidentally expiring and a near-zero chance of escape. Even better, a total reset erased all memory of previous session runs. Even on the off-chance Dib figured it all out, he wouldn't remember a thing. Zim could knock the whole thing out in a day or five, easy. Up to six months inside the Simulacrum leveled out to roughly an hour or two on the outside. Why, he could torment Dib for a virtual eternity!
Five desks away, Dib lifted a stick-figure drawing of Zim with all of Stick-Zim's organs outside of his body and one eye floating in a jar. Dib pointed at Stick-Zim and grinned. Did he really think this groundless intimidation would rattle him? Ha. Zim had seen worse in training.
The idea of tossing Dib into fifty-eight consecutive vivisection sims enticed him, but Zim stayed on this miserable dirt rock for business, not pleasure. Besides, something so blatantly painful would only encourage escape. He needed Dib to stay put. Maybe instead, Zim could program something he wouldn't want to escape from. No need to escape prison when you couldn't see the bars.
Zim smiled to himself. Yes. Yes, a Best-Case-Scenario could work for this. An idealized recreation of Dib's current native environment and fellow wretched humans, crafted from the ground up in clean malleable code. Zim himself would barely need to lift a finger—the Simulacrum naturally plucked data and memories from the prisoner's brainmeats to write and re-write the program on the spot.
Best of all, a Simulacrum already waited in the base, ready to go whenever he needed it. His personal model was an older V-1, scaled 40X40 and subject to some minor system errors, but for a small-scale job, it'd do the trick. It had worked before when Zim extracted the information of who'd thrown the muffin at his head. No reason it shouldn't work now. Dib would be so busy slavering over the spoils of his victory he'd never even notice. Pathetic. If the very thought of Dib's existence didn't sicken him to the core, Zim could almost foster some meager scrap of pity for him. Almost.
Indeed, the human ought to feel honored. Few individuals could claim to be a real threat to the Irken Empire. Information Extraction reserved Simulacrums for only the most dangerous enemies.
"Don't you usually interrogate enemies of the Irken Empire? You don't think I'm …"
"Please don't misunderstand. This is not an interrogation."
Zim's right antenna itched and fidgeted under his wig, searching for scents that didn't exist. His spooch clenched and gurgled in an unsettled churn. Unsettled? No, no—excited! Excited at the victory sure to come from the interrogat… Wait. Would it even count as interrogation?
After all, when one already knew the answer, that wasn't called an interrogation.
"We both know that's not true."
They called that a confession.
Well. Pedantics and labels could be sorted out later.
The real trick in all of this would be keeping Dib from realizing he'd been trapped. Though highly advanced in duplication and replication, Simulacrum scenarios weren't flawless. Little signals and tells crept in through the cracks, no matter what. The time crunch between the outside world and the sims had been a problem since launch. Programming couldn't conflate the sheer number of prisoners from countless different worlds with different suns, moons, time zones, and bank holidays. (And all that before allocating for memory gaps from hard resets.) As a result, passages of time never quite behaved themselves. The sim compensated by eliminating all the usual time markers: no windows to betray a glitched rotation cycle, no watches or clocks to track. Zim doubted Dib's feeble brain would notice such a tiny detail, but he could never be too careful.
The churn in Zim's spooch tossed hard, though he couldn't say why. Perhaps some small part of him feared failure. Which was absurd. Impossible. Zim was Zim, trusted and beloved of the Empire, and receiver of gift baskets. Zim feared nothing.
The bell rang.
The stampede of muddy sneakers thundered in a mad rush to break from Skool first. Hordes of filthy children surged around the desks, screaming and tripping over themselves as they poured from doors and windows and air vents like blood from a broken orifice.
All but Zim.
Zim stared at the clock above the chalkboard. It read 9:36. The Skool budget couldn't be bothered with new clocks or new batteries for old clocks. Now that Zim thought about it, he couldn't recall any clocks in the hall either. Or the cafeteria. Did he have a chronometer in his base? If he had, it'd been installed for show and likely didn't work either. The base had needed several reboots to get going again, and he'd never bothered manually resetting the time.
Dib's hand slammed on Zim's desk. "Well?!" He adjusted his glasses so they did that thing where the light gleaned them all spooky-like. "What is it this time, Zim? What are you up to? Another wormhole? A rip in the space/time continuum? Admit it!" His coat flared behind him with the dramatic flourish of his finger. "You're after our clock technology, aren't you?"
Zim leaned away from the finger, grimacing. "You—"
"Ha! Well, don't count on it, spaceboy. Good luck getting anywhere without these !" Dib opened his jacket to reveal a pair of AA batteries tucked away with his grappling hook and ghost salt. "You might as well just give up now."
Outside, dirt and plastic bags tossed across the blacktop in a humid storm wind. It had been raining, foggy, or cloudy nearly every day since Zim had resumed his duties. When had he last seen the sun?
Zim's gaze trailed from the batteries in Dib's coat to the frozen clock on the wall. He frowned. "What time is it?"
Dib blinked back at him. "Does it matter?"