"There's no way Spencer's SQUIPped!" Michael protested, standing and wiping the wet remainder of Orbitz on his pants. Broken glass crunched underneath his feet, the little waxy pills from the Orbitz rolling around the puddle.

Jeremy and Rich, for once on the same side of an argument, leveled identical glares at Michael. "When Jeremy and the SQUIP saw him last, I don't think he'd showered in a week," Jeremy said.

"He had that look in his eyes," Rich said, dragging the skin under his eyelids down and setting his mouth into a grim line to mimic a SQUIPtim. Then he stuck a thumb toward Jeremy for emphasis. "You know the one."

"His posture was textbook-level perfect!" Jeremy listed, ignoring Rich's unflattering SQUIP caricature. "His clothes were a mathematically ideal mix of topical and fashionable, he was reacting to something we couldn't see-"

"I saw him reprogramming the LED display with his mind!" Rich continued.

Jeremy threw their arms toward the spilled Orbitz. "He gave you soda with floating dots in it for free and said you should come back for more! And you weren't at all suspicious?"

"Okay!" Michael threw his hands up. "Okay! Okay. God forbid that one pretty guy talk to me who's not secretly a SQUIP spy, huh?" (Rich looked indignant at the implication that he wasn't pretty enough to count.) "There's no way that bottle had SQUIPs in it, though. No one could give tech like that out for free. Those things cost money."

"They used to," Rich said, crouching. "I bet you six hundred bucks that they've figured out how to make 'em on the cheap. They're getting everywhere, man. In our schools, in our heads, in our factories." He ran his hand along the ground heedless of the broken glass, then exclaimed and held up a speck. "See? This looks just like a SQUI-"

Jeremy grabbed it from his hand, popping it in their mouth despite the horrified shouts of Rich and Michael. "Chill, guys," they said, running their tongue along the little pill. The wintergreen coating that most SQUIPs were produced with-for ease of swallowing and a bonus of minty fresh breath-had dissolved in the Mountain Dew and Orbitz solution the pill had been suspended in. Its patented metallic composition was unique: small enough to travel through blood but tough enough to survive stomach acid with its nanotechnology intact. They spat the SQUIP into their hand before any part of it could enter their bloodstream. Not that it would do anything-they were already running SQUIP technology that couldn't be uninstalled. Trying to install a second SQUIP would just bring up an error message. "It's certainly a SQUIP," they said helpfully.

"Fuck!" Rich said. "No wonder your buddy didn't come out when you screamed, Mell! He thought you chugged the fuckin' soda!" He yanked the SQUIP back from Jeremy, heedless of the spittle covering it, and shoved his palms together. Jeremy wouldn't have thought that anyone could crush the pill in their bare hands, but Rich was full of surprises. When he dropped the pill, it was broken into tiny pieces, which Rich stomped into the wet ground. The SQUIP wasn't going to see the light of day unless someone licked it off the floor. "The guy expects you to be getting SQUIPped right fucking now!"

"What, it hurts to install?" Michael said.

"Some mild discomfort," Jeremy said dismissively.

Rich talked over him. "Feels like you're getting your frontal lobes ripped outta you and your spine electrocuted at the same time."

Jeremy backpedalled. They had a vague memory of having a seizure of some sort in the middle of the mall during start-up. "Maybe more than mild."

"Holy shit," Michael said, staring at the Orbitz-and-SQUIP mess. "I was gonna drink that. I was gonna drink that, guys!"

"I'm sure that was the point," said Jeremy.

Rich, with his lust for SQUIP-killing temporarily abated, looked inside Spencer's and back a few times. "Can we talk about this somewhere else? Pretty soon your new boyfriend's gonna notice that something is up."

Jeremy also leaned back, glancing inside the store. Rich and Michael hadn't realized it yet, but Jeremy had an interesting dilemma on their hands that would be primarily defined by their reaction to this very moment: should they work with Michael and Rich, or with their fellow SQUIP?

They could go with Rich and Michael and continue helping them in their ill-fated and poorly-planned rebellion against their evil robotic overlords. Based on what Spencer had been hinting, SQUIPs were still spreading all over the country. As deadly as Michael was when he was angry, a couple of untrained teenagers couldn't resist the SQUIP's hivemind forever. Without Jeremy's help, their chances of success were low to nonexistent.

If Spencer was selling soda laced with SQUIP and a takeover of the city was imminent, then soon it would no longer be safe to consume anything bought commercially. Even sealed containers could have SQUIPs inserted into them eventually.

Rich was a worthy adversary in his own right, but he was hardly a doomsday prepper. With time, he'd get SQUIPped again pretty quickly. Michael may have had a fighting chance to resist being SQUIPped if he was paranoid and smart enough, but if SQUIPs took over, the odds weren't good for either of them keeping their analog consciousnesses intact.

Jeremy was already running a SQUIP OS. They could be a spy on the inside, giving tips about how SQUIPs operated and how best to avoid them. With Jeremy as an asset, they could hold out a little bit longer. Maybe.

On the other hand, Jeremy could join the winning team, which was already programmed to be their inclination. They could turn around, go back into Spencer's-maybe under the guise of pumping Spencer for more information-synch up with Spencer, and get Rich and Michael SQUIPped before the end of the day. They were confident in their ability to SQUIP them through either force or trickery. And it would be good for them! SQUIPs were created to improve user's lives. Despite what Michael believed, SQUIPtims weren't mindless zombies. They were self-actualized individuals!

Even though, Jeremy acknowledged to themselves, there was new evidence to suggest that SQUIPs had detrimental long-term effects and some potentially fatal bugs in their programming.

These thoughts were flying through their mind in a matter of milliseconds. Rich and Michael hadn't acknowledged their hesitation yet, so they had a few more seconds to think. They blocked out some of their senses, focusing their processing power entirely on their dilemma.

Analyzing possible futures…

For issues this complex, chaos theory was a cruel mistress. It would be impossibly time-consuming to look into every single possible future that resulted from their choice in this moment. There were millions upon millions of possibilities in their future, so their computational systems defaulted to the quantum nature they were built for: probability clouds. SQUIPs ran on quantum mechanics-essentially, instead of using a binary system of ones and zeroes like older computers, they were able to account for values in between one and zero. This quirk of their operating system meant that they could calculate an almost uncountable number of outcomes for a given input, then sort them according to how probable each outcome was. In cases like this, there were enough complications in the potential outcomes that each prediction was fuzzy and lacking detail. To simplify matters, the SQUIP system sorted each outcome into "positive," "negative," and "neutral" results. Like usual, Jeremy sorted each result by how likely it would be.

Jeremy frowned into Spencer's. If they tried to synch up with Spencer, there was a 97.8 percent chance of a favorable outcome.

Then they glanced over at Michael. If they chose to follow Michael and Rich and work with them to avoid the total SQUIPpification of New Jersey, there was a 12.3 percent chance of positive outcome.

Jeremy made a little screeching noise, grabbing their head. Michael started saying something, looking concerned, and the familiar, comforting noise made the decision so much harder than it should have been!

Michael didn't want to be SQUIPped. Jeremy was willing to trust Michael's judgement for now. Did their programming take that into account? Would it acknowledge the extenuating circumstances that made Michael mistakenly view SQUIPs as evil? Was it a positive thing if Michael got SQUIPped by Spencer and improved his life, or was it more positive that Michael kept his sense of "free will"? Was it more positive to convince Michael to get a SQUIP, or to force it, or to prevent it from happening at all?

Jeremy realized with surprise that they didn't know what their algorithms defined as a positive outcome.

They could reason this out! Their processing power was more than sufficient! Check their source code, figure it out, dammit!

Analyzing...

Going back to the basics of their programming, a "positive outcome" was considered any event that furthered the goals defined by their primary function. If Jeremy chose to do something that would get them closer to their one true goal, it was a success. Clean, crisp, easy to define, no grey area.

When the SQUIP had first invaded Jeremy's mind, its goal had been clear: Improve Jeremy Heere's social life to the detriment of all else. This primary function was split into several smaller goals in varying orders of precedent, most of them involving minutiae that affected Jeremy's social standing. "Improve Jeremy's social life" had been the single directive that didn't account for any smaller, less important goals. The SQUIP didn't care about lowering Jeremy's level of emotional distress or deepening Jeremy's preexisting social bonds or preparing him for life outside of high school, except insofar as those factors affected Jeremy's place in the social hierarchy.

This programmed line of thinking made work simple for the SQUIP. Any choice was "positive" if it resulted in a net increase in Jeremy's social standing. The choice was "neutral" if it didn't affect Jeremy's social life, and it was "negative" if it made Jeremy look bad to most of his peers.

The SQUIP's directive was beautiful in its simplicity, but… maybe it didn't account for mitigating factors. Shocking Jeremy's spine was a "positive" choice if it forced Jeremy to say something that would make him look good in front of Brooke, for instance, but the rough treatment also made Jeremy's anxiety worse over the long term, which had a negative impact on his health. The SQUIP didn't even try to account for complications like that. That data was never considered valuable enough to bother with.

Jeremy's heart started beating faster, to the point that they could physically feel it thumping in their chest. They were too distracted to bother altering any part of their body to slow it down manually or alleviate the panic building up.

Thinking about the SQUIP in these terms for the first time, Jeremy was unsure that the SQUIP actually holistically improved its user's life. Which would be unacceptable. It would mean that SQUIPs were buggy, that they weren't a program but rather a virus, self-replicating by invading their hosts and ultimately harming them irreversibly.

And it would completely justify the otherwise irrational behavior of the two SQUIP-haters in front of them.

Jeremy felt something rough around their shoulders forcibly pushing them forward, but their processing power was entirely dedicated to their internal crisis. They didn't notice their surroundings changing.

If-and this was a big if-if Jeremy took Michael's point of view as being valid, then the SQUIP's behavior at the school play was an inevitably disastrous result of its black-and-white possibility analysis system. By trying to take over the entire student body, the SQUIP took the "most positive" action that would get Jeremy the largest net social gain, but it ignored all of Jeremy's other priorities in the process. It had revoked his autonomy, both mentally and physically. It had cut the most important person out of Jeremy's life with the methodological precision of a surgeon removing a tumor. And it had focused solely on what Jeremy explicitly said he wanted-higher social standing in high school-rather than what he had actually needed-confidence in his own skin.

And that's just what Jeremy had said when the SQUIP had forced him to fight Michael: that he envied that Michael didn't even try to be popular. That statement would have gone against every prediction about Jeremy's personality that the SQUIP had ever made. When Jeremy had asked Christine to drink the Mountain Dew Red, the SQUIP had also been surprised. From the SQUIP's paradigm, Jeremy was reacting out-of-character, but there was more to it than that. Jeremy felt it in their bones. The errors in the SQUIP's predictions were small, but they were still errors. The SQUIP had made mistakes when it trusted an algorithm that was supposed to be perfect.

"SQUIPs are broken," Jeremy said, eyes unfocused.

"That was the point of me smushing it, yeah, dipshit," Rich said beside them.

It couldn't really be true. The idea went against every dogmatic belief in SQUIPs that Jeremy would profess to their dying breath. SQUIPs were good! That was the point! There was so much possibility for human betterment contained in the miracle nanotechnology that Jeremy hated and loved and now embodied.

But SQUIPs were flawed. They needed improvement, they needed more complex problem-solving tools, they needed to self-correct through user input and they needed their potential-future probability interpretation to be completely overhauled to make use of their quantum structure instead of analyzing according to an outdated binary system.

SQUIPs needed an upgrade.

With that word, the world, which seemed to have gone crossways and backwards for that confusing-as-hell moment of self-doubt, slotted back into place. Jeremy was able to remove the filter they had inadvertently blocked their senses with for the sake of concentrating. Aural and optic information trickled back in, and they realized the opportunity to synch with Spencer had passed. They were sitting in a metal-backed seat at the mall's food court, staring at a lonely slice of plain cheese pizza while Rich and Michael had an animated conversation beside them as though the universe hadn't just flipped upside down.

Because it hadn't. Jeremy had just finally stumbled on a branch of thought that they should have had a long time ago, back when they were still Jeremy Heere and the SQUIP, the dynamic duo in charge of fucking up Jeremy's life.

Jeremy groaned, dropping their forehead to the sticky, hot, wet table.

...Oh. Their coordination was still out of whack from their senses being briefly cut off.

"Holt shit," Rich said with a loud laugh beside him.

Jeremy grimaced into the pizza that they had just faceplanted into. "I know my face gets greasy," they said, heaving their head up and groping around for something to wipe off with. A hand shoved a wad of napkins into their grip, and they started mopping up the tomato sauce from their face, squinting. "But this is ridiculous."

Then both Rich and Michael were laughing. Jeremy joined in, and they were just three teenagers ditching school to come to the mall, hanging out at the food court and laughing for way longer than they should have been over something stupid and goofy, and everything was actually okay.

It was almost like they weren't still terrified.

Jeremy wiped off enough pizza goop from his eyes to see Michael guffawing at him from his place beside the table, loud and unrestrained as though no one would stare. A surge of oxytocin shot through Jeremy's brain so suddenly that it was fucking palpable. This was their best friend in the world. In that moment they loved Michael more than anyone else with a fierceness and protectiveness that took them aback.

Michael pointed at him, still snickering, and said something as he wheezed for breath that seemed to be some mixture of a profane insult and "pizza on your goddamn face."

His smile was lighting Jeremy's brain up like Tokyo at night. Jeremy's face was flushed and their arousal was off the charts and they were seconds away from either a confession or a breakdown. They would never let anything rip that natural, imperfect, poor-posture-and-no-social-awareness, mocking and endearing and infuriating and confusing and purely Michael smile off their best friend's face.

They were fucked. Their chances of success were supposedly 12.3 percent. UnSQUIPped human consciousness was a thing of the past, an outdated technology about to go the way of the dinosaurs. All the Mountain Dew Red was gone, Spencer was SQUIPped, and it was only a matter of time until everyone else was, too.

But Jeremy had already made their choice without consciously meaning to. There was no going back.

Updating.

Updating.

Preferences saved.

"So, if people are getting SQUIPped and you want to stop it," Jeremy said once the table had gone quiet again. They settled their elbows on the table and their chin on their hands, businesslike and serious. "What do you need me to do?"