Disclaimer: I don't Rockman, X or otherwise, or anything else Capcom does. Please don't sue.
According to the version in the notebook, this is the second to last chapter, then there will be an epilogue as soon as I decide what to put in it. However, the notebook version can change wildly in length in the process of being mentally revised while being typed up.
"You have paranoia and you can't delete it?" That was Cain's query. Most other people would have said that in a tone of utter, utter disbelief. Androids, and Reploids, had been built to have absolute free will without the risk of being reprogrammed. That meant that if they wanted to change their minds they could. No compulsions, no programming. There was, however, one catch to this, as Vile demonstrated.
"I can't move farther away from X than five feet because I can't be further away and keep him alive, and I can't let him die because he's my friend. You get it? It's a logic chain. The only way to erase it without knowing why my systems are reaching those conclusions is to delete the first link, and I don't want to stop thinking of X as my friend." Zero's… friend? Amazing progress, and brought a smile to X's face despite the circumstances.
Rho was clearly considering ordering, no, wrong department, asking Sigma to order Zero to delete that. That, that murderer! Daring to think of himself as X's friend? Like hell Rho wanted someone likely to flip out at any time following his father twenty-four/seven! He'd had enough words with Sigma over the training alone, and probably had been the reason why there was always, always off-station shift security practicing in the training rooms during that time. The hunter work day was divided between on-call, at-post and time spent preparing for duty, like training and so on.
"I don't want you to either, Zero." Zero's arms hadn't left X's shoulders when he'd turned to speak to Dr. Cain, and now he looked back, caught between relief that X was okay with Zero considering him a friend (honestly, as though he hadn't been making that clear!) and stress.
"But the tabloids!" was Zero's cry. Then he seemed to remember that oh, he'd seen Rho when he'd turned to face Cain. "You!" He got up, striding forcefully over to him but was forced to stop at the limit of those five feet and was stuck there, impotent and glaring. He clearly, or clearly if you had X's senses and could check his buster readiness, wanted to shoot that grin off his face if he couldn't punch it off, but even with X's protection, even with this newfound courage and confidence, grappling with a fellow officer was one thing but actually shooting was another.
"Kilroy?" Rho asked, grinning.
"You knew he knew?" X raised an eyebrow: Kilroy had implied the method would get him in trouble. Oh! He'd known by his system access, and he'd have ended up in jail if he let random people know about the interface system and what it did.
"He's the one that gave me the idea. I thought he'd gone soft, but that was great!" Rho, Rho, Rho. The boy never did have any sense of self-preservation. He knew how upset X was, and he was rubbing it in?
"You!" Zero growled, meaning it far more than when he had at Kilroy. He was angry, Rho was making it worse, what was he thinking?
If Zero fired, he would be kicked out of the hunters. Not even Sigma could prevent that. Since he couldn't leave the base for obvious reasons, he'd be relegated to lab rat status again. That would destroy him. Losing his chance for redemption because he lost his self control and did something so violent and irrational: X didn't think even he could bring him back after that, despite Zero's amazing resilience under the circumstances.
Kilroy had said that the comment had been a joke, not a hint to Rho, but if Rho was used to Kilroy and hidden meanings, then, well. He thought his best friend had finally stopped having loyalties that should not be divided, had given him the perfect way to drive the killer of his lover and friend out of the organization he had murdered so many of. "Rho," X started calmly.
"Don't worry, the circus will blow over?" Rho thought X was upset because he was embarrassed by this? Wordlessly, narrowed eyes saying that he thought that Rho wasn't even capable of understanding words of one syllable, he gestured at himself, shifted the focus to Zero, and then slowly waved the hand back and forth, sketching the distance between them on the ground.
I do not care about the tabloids, Rho. Not only have you failed to grasp that, do you honestly think this will blow over with Zero glued to my side?
X was very, very disappointed in him. Rho jerked, shocked and hurt that X would care about Zero enough to be angry at his own son. Dr. Cain was highly amused and Cuff seemed familiar with and amused by this sort of interaction to the point of nostalgia. "How much got released?" X wasn't going to lecture Rho now. He wasn't going to try to get him to understand what he had done wrong, why it was wrong, and give him an opportunity to get back into X's good graces. Normally, he would drop everything to instruct a child on this serious an issue, but, his question informed Rho, taking care of Zero was more important now. Rho would just have to think about what he had done and wait until X had time for him and his immaturity.
"Just a few seconds of you petting him?" Rho offered in a small voice, and it was effective placation.
Rho could have released the footage of Zero attacking the guards, acting like a wild animal, so many damaging things that would have ignited a wildfire of public outcry demanding that Zero be contained somewhere safely away from X. Instead, he had showed Lion as a tame Lion, not a threat. X should have figured that out from the public reaction being interest in them as a couple instead of demands to have Zero taken apart.
So, actually, that was still wrong, still immature, but he'd just tried to embarrass him a bit when, yes, he could have driven Zero out and to the brink so very easily if that had been his intention. "Could we try telling the media that I was helping him with his hair and that you are very sorry for releasing such an out-of-context clip as a prank on Zero?" They would be talking about this later, yes, but X was sorry he had thought so badly of Rho and Rho was relieved that X found him worthy of consideration again.
"There was an all-base alert about him, and you were doing his hair? I think we can say the split personality, or something along those lines, is public knowledge by now." Dr. Cain looked at Cuff for confirmation.
Cuff nodded. "I'm more interested in those hair care nanites someone was talking about on the way."
"Hair care nanites?" Zero was lost at sea now.
"Zero, how did you think your hair stayed so nice?" X asked, actually curious. He'd never thought about it, and he should have.
"Um, I wash it every other day with shampoo like you're supposed to?" Zero was still adrift, with no knowledge that the cloud his origin cast over his life had a golden lining.
"Our theory is that the hydrocarbon-filled strands with the odd structures are to make nanites," Dr. Cain explained.
"I have nanites just to take care of my hair? My builder really did want a girl, didn't he?" Zero was so very, very sick of fembot jokes.
"You could just try the truth," Cuff, the detective, suggested.
"What truth? That my inner self is a catgirl?"
"No, Zero," X answered calmingly. "They think you were built as a bodyguard." Oh, but he hadn't been. An android, meant to have the same freedom to choose from limitless potential futures, selves and options: he wanted Zero to know that he had never been just a tool. But not right now.
Why not? Only family here, except possibly Cuff.
Zero paused. "That makes one hell of a lot of sense, but it doesn't explain why it wants to be pet."
"Sensors."
"Sensors?" Zero blinked, then paused. Oh, right. Zero might have been a lab rat but he didn't understand enough to be able to draw the obvious conclusions from that word. X really was starting to think he'd been rather rude to Omega, not understanding the difficulty. "What the hell is that?" Zero wasn't pausing to think, he had paused to check his sensors, since X had mentioned them.
"What is what?" This reminded X of Omega: the same sort of seeing without optics being involved, though Zero's lenses were trying to get something in focus: something beyond the walls.
"The…" Zero hesitated, knowing this was going to sound really weird, but it was weirding him out and he wanted help. "The black-purple skulls that smell like, like a field of corpses and glow with a light that makes everything look wrong, twisted enough you feel like it's twisting you just looking at it?" Zero's gaze first looked through the walls, moving, seeing one and another and another, then he looked away, wondering about his sanity and not helped by the fact that, "You don't see them?"
They didn't.
"Oh hell, now I'm hallucinating." Zero gave up, flopping down on the couch and leaning on the armrest nearest X. "They're, gah! Why do I taste them?" He spat, trying to get rid of a sensation that was making him literally nauseous, X's sensors confirmed.
"Unintegrated sensory data." X and Dr. Cain exchanged nods. "Hear anything?"
"It's like someone's playing a bad horror movie in the next room. And your couch feels like it's falling apart."
"That's what happens when you get data from a new sensory system that you don't have software set up properly to handle. It gets converted by base programming and spread across all the ones you have," X explained. "So given that you have base programming below conscious level and how that ties into it you're probably not hallucinating."
"I should be really relieved to hear that but I wish I was. How do I get this to make sense? Because if this is subconscious interpretation, then whatever I'm getting readings on is bad."
"The usual method is to shut down the input from a sense that does have software to handle it. Then, it all will automatically go to the software for that sense while you adapt the programming to handle this new sense. Then, when you have it down, you turn the other sense back on and restore an unedited copy of the software for it." That was what Lament had done, or Yggdrasil. Or… would Dr. Light have given a robot master such a somber name?
Zero frowned, unable to decide which sense. He only had software for touch, sight, sound, and smell/taste from Dr. Cain. Despite that, he was the first to notice the look on Cuff's face. "What?"
"Oh?" Cuff looked like his mind had been a million miles, or maybe a hundred years, away. "Sorry, I was remembering something. You're going to have to go with sight, sorry. It's used for everything from infrared to radiation detecting, so the program's the most versatile."
"But how will I tell where things are?" Things? Zero wasn't just worried about doors and furniture. He didn't want to fight blind.
"Sonar?" Cuff suggested.
"I don't have… what the hell?" Zero's optics switched to split vision as a menu only he could see was presented to him through that sense.
"You have sonar?" With all those fancy capabilities, of course Omega had something that basic installed. The question was, did Zero have sonar?
"I have capabilities I don't even recognize the names of!"
"That's great!" X would have hugged him if he'd been a child or okay with that sort of thing. "We're making a lot of progress on getting you full control over your body!" That must have been the setting changes Omega had mentioned. But what about Omega?
Was it Zero's body? Lion had been a, a bodyguard? Yes, he was. An autopilot to protect Omega from being destroyed while his mind slept. Zero's OS had been installed by Dr. Cain. Omega seemed to not mind him, but he'd said that Zero would end up being destroyed no matter what and Zero had also said that.
"Oh, sweet!" Zero had barely noticed what X said. "Take this, Rho!"
Rho found himself flying up into the ceiling, dropping down to the floor, flying up again… He made various 'oof!' noises of complaint, but the way he decelerated before impact despite how fast the movement seemed to be showed he wasn't being actually hurt. Distance antigravity? The stuff of science fiction, but maybe this was applying the same principle Kilroy had used. At least Zero doing it repeatedly let X get data on how the acceleration and deceleration rates appeared, and… oh my.
Short-range transmissions of energy set up to converge and convert to kinetic on target. Dr. Cain was moving towards Rho and X had to signal him to stop: moving between the source and endpoint of a transmission of that much power might fry his chair. "Do you know how you are doing that?" X wasn't able to figure out how much processor capacity it took to calculate the necessary precision or the power necessary to pull it off. He was missing several variables, but the answer could probably be put in layman's terms as lots and lots.
"It's called DMtABF. I don't know what it stands for, though. I looked up what it did because I wanted to find out. I can't believe there's an entire subfolder with applications written for dealing with annoying people!" Zero was divided between fascination with the potential and the clear belief that whoever had done that had way too much time on his hands.
Well, yes, Omega did.
"D…" Cuff seemed to think his memory banks contained something similar and was hitting the search function.
"Zero, I know you're irritated, but this not the time and place for something this childish, no matter that Rho started it." Dr. Cain felt compelled to spoil Zero's fun, and Zero let Rho stay on the floor.
"Draco Malfoy!" Cuff exclaimed, search function having finally found something.
"Who?" Dr. Cain lacked a copy of the encyclopedia in his skull, although there was one in his chair's computer. Asking was quicker.
"A character in a series of children's books that were very popular in the decade or so before the cataclysm."
"DM, Draco Malfoy, t, the?" Zero had refused to install his copy. He'd rather not know, no thank you.
"Draco Malfoy the Amazing Bouncing Ferret. There was a scene a bit like this, only Rho wasn't turned into a ferret."
"The application's still in progress, which is why there wasn't any documentation." Bad programming form, that. In progress applications really needed explanations of what they were doing and how. "That would have been icing on the cake." Too bad. "So my builder was a fanboy of ancient books as well as ancient parts?"
"Hmm?" Rho asked.
"Zero was built mainly from antique, pre-Cataclysm parts," Dr. Cain explained.
"Apparently by someone rich enough to have them, crazy enough to waste them on a bodyguard, and enough of a bastard to hoard them."
Rho managed not to ask why Zero hadn't been taken apart for those valuable parts instead of having an OS installed, which would have made it murder instead of putting down an animal. They'd wanted to figure out the tricks and find the hoarder. Did they have more?
Where had these parts been when the world had been searching for a way to build more robot masters?
In a sleeping android, in a capsule, waiting to be woken up just like X.
Waiting for people who had never come, and X now thought he knew where they'd been all that time. It made sense, he could understand why people might have done it, but it was still horrible.
"Did he start off with a trophy wife design?" Rho really, really couldn't resist. He'd been around Kilroy too long. Although Omega had said something about Kilroy choosing that name being a sign of being around Lament too long. This sort of thing, though, really didn't fit with X's few but strong memories of the dignified, otherworldly Yggdrasil. Was there something else going on? Of course, if 'Lament' really had been… Then the reploid Yggdrasil might still exist.
Cuff's outburst of laughter overwhelmed Zero's attempt at a low, dangerous response. He was guffawing so hard his body shook. Amidst the gales of laughter they could hear, "trophy… wife… girlybot… always wanted a daughter… they're gonna…" Noticing that everyone was staring at him, he managed to calm down. "Sorry," one last laugh, "long story."
"It sounds like a good one?" X did want to know stories, especially what might be family stories. Hadn't Cossack had a daughter, though? Had the others called Omega a girlybot? That was mean.
"Have you met Lament's sister Spin?" Dr. Cain and Rho nodded. "Zero looks a lot like her. That Char said once that he'd make her his trophy wife after he beat up her brother, and she said she'd rip his metaphorical balls off if he tried and then he'd be the female his builder had never made."
So this was before Dr. Cossack had made Zero? A bot trying to beat a Lightbot's brother? Was this during the fourth war? He'd liked her but they'd been on opposite sides. On the one hand, tragic. On the other, it was hard to fit that scene in X's image of those more, more wise times. It looked like his and Megaman's sister hadn't been any sort of shy, cowardly reclusive damsel just because she'd been built to look female. He did want to hear more. "Why girlybot?" That had been part of the words he'd found so hilarious. Also, girlybot, although X didn't emphasize the syllable.
"Because Char's always going on about how he's the strongest and her entire rant also included a bit about him being an over-elaborate yet still obsolete before he was turned on piece of scrap metal consisting of nothing but useless ornamental stuff that just looked and sounded pretty and was he sure he wasn't a female model, because he had so many useless frills he was either one or wanted to be one… I wasn't there, so I don't know the exact words, but she called him a girlybot at some point and it stuck." Omega was also very elaborate, very on the cutting edge, more so than X's 'versatile and reliable' simple design. Simple compared to what Dr. Light could have done in terms of elaborate systems optimized for various things, anyway. He'd wanted X to have a strong foundation and choose what to build on it. That was very touching, but so was Omega's builder's desire to make sure his child had as much as possible, trying to give him everything he might need.
"And then Lament showed up and said, 'Hello Girlyman.' It was classic. I wish I'd been there." Cuff clearly deeply regretted his absence, and was also not entirely happy about something else. "I don't know what she sees in him, or why Lament let Kilroy stalk him so easily when it took me months sometimes to track him down to deliver a damn letter. That whole family…" Cuff cut off what was clearly an old rant about a long held grudge over a huge amount of piled-up offenses and looked at Zero apologetically, hoping he wasn't giving offense.
So Cuff wasn't a Cossackbot?
That glance also meant that yes, Zero, Char, Kilroy and Lament as well were related and Cuff knew it. So Cuff might be a Lightbot?
Might be X's brother?
There had been other people in the world who had built robot masters: the sixth war had happened when there had been a tournament, robot masters built for combat competing: the prize for their owners (they had been owned…) had been money, but for many if them the real prize must have been to meet Megaman, to maybe earn his respect and to fight alongside him.
Then Wily had stolen the champions and turned them against their hero. He'd said 'her brother' about maybe-Megaman, after all, so Cuff might not be a long-lost brother.
Something out of storybooks, but then those days were the subject of so many of them.
X's eyes caught and held Cuff's. "I want to talk to you, alone." It was not a demand, it was a request, but they both knew X had every right to make it and deserved to have it granted.
"No!" Zero forbade it.