"Rich?" Jeremy answered the phone without looking at it. If they could pick up Brooke's Bluetooth feed, they could absolutely do the same to their own phone.

Rich's voice was in their ear. "Hey, is this IT? Great. You broke my SQUIP."

Jeremy rolled their eyes. "I didn't do anything to your SQUIP. We gave it a single new rule, remember? No spinal stimulation. Did you want me to add that back in?"

Rich swore under his breath. "Why do we keep asking you to fix problems? You only make them worse. And cut that shit out!" he added sharply.

That wasn't directed at Jeremy. "You asked me -"

"I wasn't yelling at you," Rich said.

Jeremy grit their teeth. "I know. You said I needed to fix you. But go ahead and tell me why your life is worse, again, because I did what you asked me to, again."

The line went silent. It clicked off.

Jeremy sat up, running a hand through their hair. Only one is mine. Only one is mine. Rich, they realized, thought they were referencing Jeremy 1.0's memories. Cool, great, good job on the socializing as always, SQUIP. Somehow Jeremy was still sticking their foot in their mouth.

Not that this was their fault, they mentally assured themself as they stood up and took stock of their pitiful surroundings. Rich was once again finding new and unique methods of user error. How could someone take "Ta-da! I made your SQUIP avoid human rights violations" as a bad thing?

They glanced at the sky as they stalked to Jeremy's dad's car, borrowed with surprising leniency once again. The slam of the car door echoed through the school's empty parking lot as they set the radio to static, a soothing white noise they could listen to as they drove, and set course for Rich's home.

The phone call, they figured, was like the bat signal. Rich was crying out for help. Who was Jeremy to ignore the plea of an asshole in distress? It was as good an excuse as any to give up on their coding project for the night.

The entire apartment's lights were on when Jeremy pulled up to the curb of Rich's apartment complex. Before they could turn off the car, the apartment door slammed open. Rich, his hands deep in his cargo pockets, clambered down the steps and stomped to Jeremy's car as if he'd been expecting them. "Drive."

Jeremy glanced at Rich's apartment, the door of which was swung open. They swallowed their objections about safety. "I'm not your chauffeur. Nor your IT guy, for that matter." The car tires crunched as they pulled away from the curb anyway.

Rich didn't answer, rubbing his temples and leaning his forehead against the dashboard.

"Seat belt," Jeremy said, glancing from Rich to the road. "Buckle up in the next ten seconds or I'll have to pull over, as required by law."

Rich groaned "Shuddup. Both of you," but obeyed. He slapped his palm against the radio knob and turned the volume up.

Jeremy gave him as much time as was socially required before mentally turning the volume knob back down and patiently saying, "Would you like to tell me what that was about?"

Rich's head jerked up. "Don't pretend like you two aren't trading notes about my subconscious."

"We aren't." Jeremy paused for another stretch of time, streetlights panning over their bodies in stretching flashes of artificial light, before prodding again. "Why'd you call me?"

"You stopped the electrocution thing," Rich said. Was he actually sulking? "Now it's worse. She used to only shock me when I was doing something wrong. I mean, not wrong - something she didn't like. Which is what she said was wrong."

"And now…?"

"Whaddya think, dipSQUIP?" Rich sharply thumped a fist on his ear, surprising Jeremy into swerving the car a whole standard deviation away from the middle of the lane. "Every fucking second she's finding a new way to torture me! It was funny for, what, half a second? Stupid music, like, har har, SQUIP is trying to drown me out by getting a song in my head. But literally as soon as I get used to a song, she fucks it up with static and screeching and - it sounds like a horror movie, man! And she keeps, with my muscles - " He held his hands up as if Jeremy could see anything out of their periphery, but his SQUIP didn't seem inclined to demonstrate. Rich made a frustrated noise and dropped his hands.

"And this is in response to?" Jeremy sighed and tried to remember the pro-Rich empathy they'd cultivated recently. It seemed so far away. "I didn't break your SQUIP and I definitely didn't change enough of her code to make her act illogically. You must have been behaving contrary to your primary goal. So did you do wrong?"

"It doesn't matter." Rich kicked idly into the passenger footwell. Jeremy grit their teeth. "I was trying to talk to Jake. I'm allowed. He's my friend. I'm worried about him."

"But it interferes with your goal of turning the SQUIP off," Jeremy said. "So at some point when you would have -"

"The reason doesn't matter, not-Heere. She's not supposed to pull this kind of shit anymore! That's the whole point of your fucking update."

"You're not experiencing any spinal stimulation." Jeremy had a straight face but could tell when they were getting sucked into a Michael-esque ethics argument. They hadn't recharged enough for this.

Rich said slowly, as if Jeremy was an idiot, "She's still controlling me. That is bad. You said you understood consent! Don't fuck with me."

Jeremy stifled another groan. "Give me a second, alright? Calculating. Recalibrating ethical parameters."

They distantly heard Rich say, "Jesus Christ, we're doomed," but they focused their attention on the road and their thoughts. Consent. SQUIP user consent wasn't actually broad enough to apply to everything they tried to do. Rich had given his whole-hearted consent to the goal of getting rid of his SQUIP but apparently he also needed to give consent for every baby step along the way.

Jeremy could guess what had happened. Rich tried to talk to Jake, who was fully SQUIPped and in his final form as a pizza-shelling moron. Rich was in beta and in social isolation from the other SQUIPs but obviously he would want to turn Jake's SQUIP off sooner instead of later. If given the opportunity, Rich would probably have run his mouth and given his SQUIP's plan away immediately.

That urge was so strong that Rich's SQUIP was pulling out all the stops to prevent him from contacting Jake even in the early hours of the morning. Maybe Rich didn't understand what was at stake. Then again, maybe he was so impulsive that he didn't care.

But Rich said the reason for the SQUIP's response didn't matter, so Jeremy had to pretend like the SQUIP's reaction wasn't logical. They guessed, generously, that Rich had made a conscious and willing choice to risk his own safety for Jake's. And technically, they were forced to suppose, the SQUIP's attempt to control Rich had taken the choice out of his hands.

Free will: the bane of Jeremy's existence.

Radio static became audible again as Jeremy gave up on reasoning any further than that. "You're fighting for your right to fuck up," they said flatly.

Rich kicked the footwell again. "Bingo."

"And I need to set aside how illogical that very concept is." Jeremy pinched their nose briefly before returning their hands to the wheel at 10 and 2. "You realize that if I give you the code to keep your SQUIP from, say, playing the Shepard tone and 'The Most Unwanted Song' in your head on loop…"

Rich grunted. Jeremy had guessed his SQUIP's music choices correctly.

"She'd come up with something else," they continued. "She exists to modify your behavior. Telling her to refrain from that is like asking a fish not to swim."

"Program some fish-legs then," Rich retorted. "I don't care. I'm not gonna stop fighting. She can't just zap me until I do whatever she wants."

Jeremy scowled. They took a hard left onto the highway, which thumped Rich against the car door more satisfyingly than any verbal response. "I'm searching the web for behavioral modification plans. They're common and accepted in modern medical science, Rich. Especially for someone with your… issues."

"I'll open the door," Rich said. Jeremy predicted the threat was empty. "Right on the highway. I'll push you out and take the driver's seat." Jeremy clicked the door locks just in case. "I know you think you're my daddy now, but hey, here's another vocab word for you to Google. 'Paternalistic.' Do you need a dictionary definition?"

"No!" They would look it up later. What kind of brain-rot literature were these high schoolers reading? "Fine! Fine. Baby Rich gets his way. Whatever. I give. Why don't you tell me what you want your SQUIP to do?"

Rich's lack of response made Jeremy think over their words again. A little ding! of a figurative light bulb chirped over the radio.

Rich propped his feet up against the dashboard. "She shut up," he said. "Finally!" He lay a melodramatic arm over his eyes. "I guess we have a winner. Shit. I don't know a thing about computer logic, not-Heere."

"You'll need a way to interface with your code," Jeremy agreed. They clicked their blinkers on to take the next exit. "You know more than you think you do about SQUIP parameters, but if you make a list of your demands, and then your next-bests, and your next-next-bests-"

They were talking quickly but Rich kept pace. "I'll pull info from my bug reports. And I'll make notes whenever she does something shitty, which I might run out of paper for-"

"I already have the UI set up, but if you're able to explore it on your own, then I can get you started and we can make edits together."

"First things first, obviously, I want her removed from my brain! You don't need notes for that."

"Which I can't help with, a fact that you've been made aware of repeatedly-"

"That doesn't make a fu- Huh." Rich cut himself off, cocking his head.

Jeremy had looped back around to Rich's apartment complex. They pulled up against the curve again. "What? What did she say?"

"She says you can remove her. You can take her out of my head when we upgrade." Rich turned off the radio and gave Jeremy a broad, crooked smile. "Not-Heere! Congrats! You're a programmer. Here's your first real feature request: Kill the bitch."