…I decided to be nice and not end the previous chapter just when things were getting interesting. That made it a boring chapter. Nice author makes for boring stories: readers please take note of this.

Ah, yes: Disclaimer: I don't own anything Capcom does, which includes Rockman and much, much more. Please don't sue me.

"X!" Rho's voice came through the door instead of the intercom: he never used it, a habit X had given up on breaking him out of a long, long time ago.

X, however, still used it, not wanting the entire hall to hear the conversation. "You can come in, but be careful. Zero's still Lion." As Rho entered, X asked, not expecting a yes, "Lion, are you going to hurt Rho?"

Lion very clearly did not give a damn about Rho.

"Hmm, you seem to be safe. Until Zero wakes up, anyway." The fact that X was joking about Rho being hurt, despite the fact he was only doing it because there was no chance he would be, was a sign that Zero was not the one Rho had to worry about. This was a sign that X was, at the first opportunity, going to read Rho the riot act.

The fact that X was making a clear effort to be friendly, non-serious, and assure Rho that he was going to be fine when normally those were things X did automatically was a sign that if he were less of an insanely nice person he wouldn't be trying to make sure Rho knew X still loved him despite how angry he was at him: he'd be yelling at him until Rho had an ego the size of a mouse and was groveling and begging to try to win back X's respect and placate him.

"Okay." Rho's eyes widened, the oh shit reaction restrained for the same reason the desire to find a deep hole to hide in had to be. "I'd better stay here. I need more information from Cuff."

"Cuff? Is that the person Lament sent?"

"Yes." A mostly red reploid-or was he?- with gold trim came in behind Rho. Zero's colors were red and gold. Despite the fact that Dr. Light had lived in Japan, where red was the color of protection, among other things, used in charms against evil, he had been of European descent where red was an inherently dangerous color. On the other hand, Dr. Cossack was Russian, and X couldn't think of what red meant there off the top of his head but given that it was closer to China… Russians used gold leaf for icons and other things… There had been Lightbots besides the twins, but he had to hide a bit of disappointment when he realized the odds this was one of them were probably on the low side. "They included the bit about him," the rep… the robo… Cuff continued, indicating Zero. When the door closed behind him, he added, "Kilroy gave me something to say that will hopefully be Kilroyish enough that he'll know he's woken up. Want it now?"

"How long is it?" X asked, apropos of nothing, mostly just to draw out the conversation, hoping for clues. Although if Kilroy was up and knew what was going on, there might be clues but they wouldn't just be dropped: they wouldn't have sent someone likely to slip up. Not Kilroy and the person who Kilroy regarded as his master when it came to 'snark-fu,' or verbal combat.

"Lament was giving him a look, so only two sentences." Yes, this person knew Kilroy well. His brother? Someone who had known him for a century? Or just an ordinary someone who he knew via Dr. Lament?

"Lament's there and Kilroy's already awake?" Rho seemed astonished. "The last time he called he said that if he got his hands on Kilroy I wouldn't be getting him back for a week with all the accumulated necessary upgrades and repairs, like installing a working logic processor."

"He does need to be upgraded, but we've had a situation." Cuff had turned to Rho, ignoring X for the moment. He felt a bit hurt, but there was something important going on despite X having found something out unexpectedly. "That's why I couldn't tell you anything until I completed system checks and we were someplace I could verify as secure. And why I'm here instead of Spin even though she's the designated sub for this sort of thing. You weren't hacked. The EMS surge protector got its first test run."

No one jumped out of their seat in shocked panic at that news. That was because Rho wasn't in a seat, X was weighted down by Lion, Lion didn't give a damn about much (if he even knew what the EMS was) and Dr. Cain was firmly fastened into his seat. The various wordless exclamations made up for it.

To calm them down before they had a metaphorical heart attack, Cuff held up his hands placatingly. "It was successful."

"I know that by the lack of 'this is not a drill' sirens," Rho said dryly. "What the hell happened?"

"The surge was contained. The power source hasn't returned to a stable state, though, so Dr. Lament, Spin and Kilroy are over there with Couer working on it.

"What's the prognosis?" Dr. Cain was clearly burying his worry behind the need to stay calm. Understanding the problem meant a solution could be found, and one had to be found: they all knew that but Dr. Cain had lived it and was dying of it.

Cuff shook his head, wanting to reassure them or at least give them information but not knowing what to tell them. "Lament did a report, you know how fast he works, but Spin's been too busy to translate it out of Lament-ese. We sent it to the physics guys at UGV, but apparently the powers that be grabbed almost all the statisticians with enough clearance to be in the same room with it for the HPGR review."

The human population growth rate was, with the species having been so nearly wiped out and still in danger from residual damage, highly classified. When it had been publically announced slight changes in it had huge effects on the entire world's behavior: to avoid that sort of chaos they now kept analysis of it under strict lockdown to avoid leaks. The data was gathered yearly, analyzed in a secure complex, and no one there left until the project was completed and they could all be searched at once. People going in and out meant data could, and had been, smuggled. After that had caused a riot once… the people with the training to convert data that esoteric into a usable form and check if it fit the physicist's hypotheses might as well have been on the moon. "One person filed for clearance after HPGR started so they wouldn't get grabbed for it, so they rushed the check on them."

"Thank god. I don't know what they're thinking, grabbing everyone in the field without any advance notice for so long every year. More people means less time, yes, but," Dr. Cain shook his head: no time for a rant on that, even though he'd had several experiments highly disrupted by that. Every scientist needed basic training, of course, you might as well throw darts to get your test results as run an experiment without knowing the basics, but when you were doing things as important and expensive (in money and lives) as Dr. Cain did, you could not afford to have your experimental results be completely worthless because something not basic applied and you hadn't had someone look it over to check for design flaws.

Dr. Cain was highly trained and well aware of the issue, so he checked and it had always been enough, but a company running failure rate tests on a component material and using an analysis shortcut without checking to make sure they could get away with using that shortcut had made the experiment show that there was no difference in performance between the more expensive material and a cheaper one.

There were probably thousands of irregulars, most of them willing to come into treatment and be easily fixed at the expense of the company after the class action lawsuit, resulting from that. The statistician they'd had testify had been very helpful at getting the concepts across by boiling it down to: you don't tell the program to crunch the numbers that way without having it also check the preconditions. Not unless you want a 1/10 on the problem in the intro course I teach. It's on the same menu screen on the program they used, you check those two boxes, click ok, and you're done.

Distributions were invented when they didn't have good computers to simplify the math enough people's heads wouldn't explode trying to do things by hand. We only keep them around so students can learn the basic principles through practice without their heads exploding. Now that we have computers that don't suck we have them do non-parametric calculations for us. This was only a menu option to give the user a quick snapshot of what the data looked like to help figure out how to do the real analysis to check that the picture was accurate, this distribution is classic because it's usually accurate unless the data's so wrong for it someone a week into my class would know better than to use it before they'd even heard of the idea of checking to make sure, and they still messed it up. Who let a manager who'd taken an intro course for business majors sixteen years ago open up a program they'd never seen before and try to figure out the menu options when the company had this much zenny riding on this?

Malice or stupidity, the money and pr losses had killed the company.

The fact that the person who would be performing the analyses the physicists wanted on data this vital was someone who had only just qualified for that level of trust was very, very scary.

"Anyway," Cuff was here about the security issues: physics that made Schrodinger's cat look simple and trying to figure out the odds of humanity going extinct and the best ways to fix the bet were the problems of people with doctorates. "Kilroy's been grabbed, Spin too so she can't sub for him, so since I run the Interpol setup and this is similar they thought I was the best to go here and Crystal's taking my place: no idea who's subbing for him. I don't know who's managing this reshuffling, but I don't envy their headache. Specialties, system compatibility, training, clearance levels and types…" Oh my.

"Why did Kilroy fall unconscious if the problem was with the Environmental Management System?" Kilroy wasn't hooked up to it. Right? X had found the concept of people being hooked up to systems creepy enough, but the EMS being linked to HQnet via Kilroy… something that important being linked to something that likely to be attacked? By people who didn't like humans?

If the EMS went down, without weather control normal wind patterns would spread radioactivity to all the carefully cleared areas very, very fast. Reploids would survive that without difficulty: reploids were built to survive uncleared areas.

Humanity, however, was still too close to the edge.

Cuff looked at him, clearly thinking "he's not cleared, but he's X." Perhaps he was an actual reploid, to have that view of him, that he was the trusted father. Or was it that he was family? "That's why Kilroy went unconscious. He had to in order to disengage from the net here. His repair nanites then converted his uplink system into the one that connects to the EMS. They're totally, totally incompatible, and the switchover physically destroyed the necessary hardware to connect to your net. Every single person involved is going to need a replacement unit. His body control systems then remained off to mimic that he was unconscious from a hack attempt. People with the 'destroy' option in case of hacks could stay walking around and pretend things were fine using manual controls, so that's why so few organizations out of the number that had their system monitors used for this noticed it. They either seemed fine or found someplace out of the way and woke up afterwards pretending nothing happened. Kilroy and two more got found unconscious and had to stay that way."

"How many did you have to call up?" Dr. Cain asked warily.

"Everyone with an interface and enough clearance, which is everyone with enough clearance to get an interface from Lament, one with the option for this built in. We've had drills, but this was the first real thing since the surge protector system was finally put into place."

The EMS had been designed to ideally have robot masters hooked into it to manage it, as robot masters had been created to manage systems composed of several robots. Sadly, the parts they could find in storage were barely enough to set up the system itself to gain control of the weather satillites and self-destruct the remaining rampaging robots. The push to set it up had been so desperate, so many dying in the process, that once the basics were in place and they had the breathing room to worry about taking precautions with it they found that there was no one left capable of creating a robot master with all the specialized chips used up and all the program versions as lost to the world as their inventors and copyright holders.

Until X was found, the surge monitoring system had been shut off. There was nothing anyone could do: so there was no point in knowing about every bullet dodged. Then Dr. Smith had turned it back on and started the project of trying to figure out how to use reploids in place of robot masters. X himself was utterly incompatible.

Cuff might not view physics as his problem, but as someone key enough to this system to end up posted to Interpol this was his specialty. "First actual surge since the system was put up: everyone got called in. Lament's blocked a lot of potential ones, as well as some minor surges back before the network option got set up, and this is the third time he's brought Kilroy in to check if a call-up's needed. It was, so then everyone started being called in to be given the game plan. People with the knockouts were called in last, as per the drills, so they'd have time to find someplace to system crash. Prince didn't have enough time even with the delay and headed for a lounge chair to fake sunbathing but someone decided to use throwing a yellow beach ball in the pool as a pick-up line, got angry when he ignored her, and really worried when he didn't wake up when she shook him. Then they started calling around, you and the UN found out Kilroy and Couer were down, and now we need to pretend there was a mass hack." Since that would cause less panic in the streets than a system surge.

"That was what we assumed when Kilroy went down, and so did they. The best lie is one told by someone who doesn't know they are, so it should hold up." Rho nodded, seeming very Kilroyish at the moment: not in the sense of wordplay but in the sense of storytelling. So, Rho was Kilroy's half-brother's half-brother's son? Was there a term for that? There probably was, X would have to look it up.

Oh, so that was what Kilroy had meant by bringing up the Spaceballs reference! "Was that why Kilroy didn't notify me?" Rho frowned. "And what do you mean, third time he's been called in?"

"No, he's called him more than that, usually for thirty seconds or so, whether it's a potential surge or something else he needs a perspective check on. System setup."

"I wasn't aware of that." Rho was, as head of security, displeased that he hadn't been notified. As Kilroy's friend, he was hurt. If there had been warning for things like system setup, why hadn't, "Kilroy could have used me to help cover scheduled periods of unconsciousness."

Cuff was clearly too disciplined to express the measure of his irritation with a superior officer or equivalent thereof with something as juvenile as eye rolling, but the feeling came across clearly that these were Kilroy and Lament. They did things on their own without getting others to help them in a way that was inconsiderate constantly because they didn't take into consideration that some people wanted to be of help to them. "The EMS has been pretty customized by Lament since he was the first one hooked into it and the only one at all for quite a long time. He doesn't perceive the universe the way we mere mortals do, and system interfaces are designed to match someplace the user feels at home in, has in control over, and knows like the back of their hand. When I hooked in for the first test the fact that this was what he thought was normal, or how the universe appeared to him, that he perceived this much on that many levels just as an everyday thing explained a lot, really, and it was fascinating for the half-second before my processor crashed from the data overload. So he needed someone to check on the filters he set up."

"Ah, Lament." Dr. Cain shook his head. "There's an irregular where something went terribly right."

X had been wondering. 'Mere mortals?' Did that mean modern reploids? Then he noticed the key word. "Dr. Lament is an irregular?"

Dr. Cain seemed to take a moment to realize that X had asked that question and remember that X didn't know the answer. Was it something he should have known but was out of the loop for? "Only technically. He's not what his specs say he should be. Dr. Smith tried to repeat what happened, but while Spin's certainly highly intelligent and can master almost anything she's not that much higher, score-wise, than I was before this." Before the accumulated damage from venturing outside the EMS-protected areas on archeological expeditions had triggered the nerve problem that was turning him old before his time. Wait, she! Was Spin his sister?

"Dr. Lament didn't seem that bright at first, but that was because he was still figuring out how to translate. A lot of the higher level human geniuses think in pictures, or spatial relationships, and so on, instead of words and have trouble translating in real time so they come across as slow in a conversation. From what I understand from Dr. Smith's notes, Lament thinks in terms of vibration frequencies and types, not just sound but light, radiation, electricity and so on, and that affects his worldview to the point that he doesn't see matter as solid. Which it isn't, the molecules in my body and in this chair are mostly empty space and I'd fall through it if it weren't for the electric fields, but apparently that's only a sample of how different his worldview is because of the extent he perceives the world not just in different terms, but on a much less simple level than even people who know better do. No wonder he didn't say a word for so long."

Reploid built by Dr. Smith, silent for a long time… No, X should have figured it out after hearing that he was the first to be hooked up to the EMS. "Lament is Yggdrasil?" What?

He should have realized it, but he'd thought that robot masters would turn up out of nowhere with fake identities, like Kilroy had, not be the most thoroughly designed and optimized reploid ever built, not counting X.

Or possibly counting neither X nor Zero?

"He changed it to Lament. Don't ask. Spin did, and he gave her a reading list, told her to finish it, and then ask him for the processor log download when she had five weeks to kill if she cared that much. He doesn't explain things. He tries, but he doesn't really get how stupid we are compared to him. His 'for dummies' versions in words of either two syllables max or exact technical terms and with short sentences we need her to translate. The best he can manage in terms of quick explanation is to give three sentences maximum of obvious hints and let us figure it out, because if we try to repeat his thought process with as much detail and re-analysis as he does for verification as a rule we'd take years. Other than that it's best to just have him tell you what you need to know and what he wants you to do. Thank goodness I'm not a scientist who needs to understand how he got his conclusions, although I'm a very good detective and it's a little demeaning to not be able to get the for dummies versions even with a week to kill and a good technical database."

…oh, so that was Omega's problem! If you thought as quickly as he did, then what others contemplated for a few seconds you spent much longer on and understood far more thoroughly. So if you tried to explain the why of something you understood on a very complex level to someone without the time for what you considered an adequate explanation, it would be very frustrating to try to figure out how to get them to understand it on the level they needed to, or you felt was basic, in the time they had. It had to be a workable understanding, but what was a workable understanding to someone with the time to understand everything that deeply? Trying to hit the 'sweet spot' between too complicated for them to understand and simplified to the point of uselessness must be like throwing darts blindfolded, especially if you didn't know how much the person you were talking to understood about the subject. And translating between words and frequencies? It made X's processor hurt just trying to handle the variables involved in calculating the difficulty.

Given that, it was amazing that, "He seemed normal once he started talking." He and Dr. Cain had been there when Yggdrasil had been hooked up to the EMS and activated for the first time, both because it was a landmark event and in case there was any chance whatsoever that they could help if something went wrong. They had been standing (this was while Cain could still walk with the help of a cane) on the dais itself, never mind front row seats.

After Dr. Smith had completed the startup procedures nothing had happened. Worriedly, he'd been verifying that everything was working, but had concluded that it was just interface setup on a vast level: the EMS by necessity was a larger network than anyone would ever contemplate creating for any less vital purpose.

Still, it had been very worrying, waiting there as his internal timer ticked.

A little over ten minutes in, the newborn reploid (theoretically) finally showed the first sign that his body functional.

By bringing his hands up and opening his eyelids a mere moment before his fingers crushed his optics.

That was creepy enough to people who didn't know that destroying the physical component of a sensory network was a last ditch defense against sensory overload. Dr. Smith had fainted and had to be revived, adding to the drama.

They'd reviewed the specs in case of something like that: disconnecting him was a very, very bad idea. So X had to wait still longer as this child of his: though not built by his own hands Yggdrasil was still family one way or another, lay there silently, on the border between the complete destruction of his ability to ever have a personality and life.

Finally, he'd sat up and looked at them, intact eyelids closed and hiding the injury except for traces of fluid leaking from the corners. The iron in the fluid that had flowed to his eyes to give the repair nanites materials to work with oxidized quickly when exposed to air.

Yet despite crying tears of blood Yggdrasil had seemed utterly calm, eerily so, although the simplicity of his statements, lack of emotion, and lack of reaction to things were explained by him being newbuilt. They had no idea what was normal and what was odd, didn't have enough experience with emotion to really get it across, and tended to have difficulty with complex statements, much less complex statements about barely understood developing emotions. He'd taken Yggdrasil as someone of few words and great personal reserve. Great inherent dignity.

As the guardian of the EMS that was how one would want him to be, a rock in the storm, but… He'd been hard to question, one took his words as truth, and even X had not dared to press him.

Still, Yggdrasil being that odd?

On the one hand, the EMS being in such good hands was something you would think they would want people to know. On the other, Yggdrasil's intelligence not being explainable (being hooked to the EMS when he was turned on? Had he been within it all along?) would be scary, to have an unpredictable entity in charge of something so vital.

So Lament was a pseudonym to hide that he was a celebrity, as Kilroy had said.

"When did you find out about his mental capabilities?" How long had it been concealed, first from Dr. Smith, from Dr. Cain, and now from him?

"Dr. Smith was working with him from the beginning, but when he died I was given his files." Dr. Smith had died a couple of months before Ceta had. "I hadn't even looked through them all before, well," you know.

X knew. She'd died, and he'd thrown himself into studying his own systems. There was only so much examination possible without the risk of permanent damage. He hadn't thought of killing himself, Dr. Light had made sure that if someone killed X they wouldn't learn enough from his body to be able to build more innocent children to murder, but there were other things they hadn't done in order to keep him in perfect working order to study his optimal state in hopes of copying it.

Rho had been watching, though. Or maybe Kilroy had, in fact. Rho had been the one to come charging into the lab that night.

After that, X had been on suicide watch, not that he was going to commit suicide but they were worried, until a little after he'd decided to join the hunters. Sigma had been questioning him thoroughly to make sure he wasn't just seeing this as a way to get damaged enough the damage from the tests wouldn't matter.

That was also why Sigma had assigned X to Zero, who was so paranoid about keeping X safe from him that he didn't give X's death wish any opportunity to cause a slip even without knowing about it. If something happened to X, Zero would blame himself and all the hunters would blame Zero as well. X wouldn't let that happen to him, so he watched himself as well as Zero did.

X had known reploids were dying, and they were all his children theoretically, but it was different when it was one built by his own hands. One that he had failed to build well enough because he hadn't known enough to give her the same gifts the father he had never known had given him. He'd failed her.

"He never did replace the eyes," Cain went on while X was thinking this with only a second's pause, trying to move past the difficult moment. "It's symbolic, apparently."

X did a quick search for the meaning of blinding oneself. "Oedipus?" The king had done that when he'd realized that the man he had killed was his father and his queen his mother.

"Seers were blink," Cuff corrected him quickly, creeped out by the whole idea.

"Oh." Yes, that would have been creepy. Father and Mother, two creators, Dr. Light and Dr. Cossack? That had led in odd directions until Cuff had said that was, thank goodness, a wrong tree to bark up. A very wrong one.

"He normally wears a blindfold as part of that, unless he's in disguise."

"In disguise?" Cain and Rho chorused, disbelief evident.

"What? He's a celebrity as Yggdrasil, and Dr. Lament's got to deal with attempts at corporate espionage weekly. If they knew he wasn't a recluse and found him on his world-wandering trips it would drive him up the wall."

"Dr. Lament," Cain said carefully, trying to find a tactful way to do it, "has a presence."

"He's capable of acting like he thinks in the same number of dimensions we do, he can act like a tourist just fine."

"Ah, a tourist." Rho nodded. In the old days, it had been easy to tour the Irregular Hunter base. As security chief, those people had been Rho's problem.

"Sadly, his acting skills are not sufficient to tackle the difficult role of a polite person."

Roles made X think of Omega being both Zero and Lion, which reminded him of something. "Oh dear."

"What is it, X?" Rho's head turned to him in an instant, Dr. Cain focusing on him as well. Oh dear was to X what an obscenity was to others.

X pointed, wordlessly, at Lion.

The other three in the room had no words. X might be okay despite not having specific clearance, yet despite X not having gone to the effort of getting recertified for a bit he was anything but a security risk. An ex-Irregular with a split personality was so, so very not okay. They just hadn't thought about it, just sort of dismissing him as X's pet, or something.

Lion met each of their gazes briefly, uncaring.

"How about I say that quote from Kilroy and we see what Zero remembers. That doesn't talk, so it's not a problem." Dr. Cain, however, thought it might be. Why was Cuff so certain? "Here goes," Cuff started when no one objected. "'So, looks like the lion's out of the bag. If X is giving out animal nicknames, dibs on raven! Though Lament'll probably get that in the end.'"

That was very, very Kilroy. As such, if that wasn't entirely a coded message X would eat his helmet even if that did mean he'd have to get his teeth replaced afterwards.

Hmm. Lion was a big cat. Cat's out of the bag was an old (pre-cataclysm) phrase for a secret being revealed. So they knew X had found out. And since Omega was Lion and both were hidden in Zero that added another possible level. Omega was a member of the family that had been kept secret: Omega had been the one to reveal himself and spill the beans.

Ravens… one for sorrow, two for mirth: that was an old rhyme.

Kilroy was sorry, 'dibs' meant claiming something, so he really wanted X to think of him as someone who was sorry. Lament was also sorry, even more so. Lament meant a cry (or song! Lightbot?) of sorrow, so that was confirmation of the meaning. But the two of them were happy X had found out? He hoped so. From Norse mythology, like the name Yggdrasil was, there were two ravens Hugin and Munin, thought and memory. He was pretty sure that was a component of the message, but he couldn't interpret it at the moment.

In the end was obvious, omega was the last letter.

So, the translation could be, "Omega gave it away? I want you to know I'm sorry, Lament is too, but we're happy that you finally found out. Lament's going to get revenge on Omega for breaking it to you like that, though."

"Raven? You'd think he'd want owl." Classic Kilroy. Not knowing the code Dr. Cain, who X was well aware was smarter than he was, had let that fly right over his head.

"That was what I said, and Lament said an owl has to ask who: he already knows." Cuff didn't get those two either.

Did that mean something, besides Lament being all-knowing?

Lament was in control of an orbital satellite network, and X had thought Kilroy knew all and saw all.

That was when it clicked. "Oh my!"

X actually exclaiming? Not just 'oh dear' but with an actual exclamation mark? That was X's equivalent of the long-lost acronym OMFG, oh my fucking god!

Once again he was the center of attention, but this time he didn't explain. He didn't know if he would have, as that would have meant explaining so much, but his attention was diverted by Lion's head suddenly being absent from his lap and Zero's arms just as suddenly on his shoulders, turning him to let Zero look into his eyes, demanding to know what the problem was, the enemy or threat was with gaze alone.

"What made you wake up that time?" X asked that because you wanted mental state information as soon as possible and he was on scientific autopilot.

"When he started to quote Kilroy, although I have no idea why. What the hell happened? Were you attacked?"

"No," X assured him. "Why would you think that?" The threat of the weapon or anti-X or whatever on earth it was from a normal person's frame of reference?

"The reason I didn't move was that I was playing possum because I had to do threat analysis and if they didn't know I was awake than I might have thrown off any attacker's threat estimate. I don't think I'm going to be able to be more than five or so feet away from you, maximum. There has to be a reason I'm this paranoid!"