Naming Notes: I'm using the English names, but Mavericks (malfunctioning androids) were originally called Irregulars in the Japanese version.
Wily had never been good at planning for contingencies, too impatient, too focused on the straightest path to his goal to see anything else, so the thought that Dr. Light's creation might not wake up on schedule hadn't really occurred to him. Consequently, the pod wasn't set to open and fully awaken Zero until the proximity of an android with Dr. Light's distinctive design signature was detected, even though his deep hibernation routine had only been programmed to run for a maximum of thirty years. Which meant that thirty years into his long, lonely sleep, Zero's central processor became minimally active.
He began to dream.
There was no soft blanket to slip across his chest, suggesting comfort, nor any gentle air currents against his skin to place him in mind of flying. No gentle voices reached his ears; no older siblings touched his heart. The only source of stimulus in what had become his sensory deprivation chamber was the Virus itself, whispering of things to come, of fire and blood and a darkness that would steal over all.
At the beginning, the resulting hostile thoughts were directed outward, toward the world he did not yet know, but as months turned into years turned into decades, the Virus's hunger grew, no longer satisfied with the meager imaginings of an unknowing, less than half activated mind. Its increasing demand for something more real, something visceral, could only be met one way: Zero had nothing to offer except himself.
This is what virus dreams are made of: hunger and destruction and pain.
Processing in such a minimally active state was slow, of course, so those viciously sharp nightmare teeth turned inward only one degree at a time, the significance lost on a slumbering mind, until that desperate hunger began to tear insidiously, in flashes of stop gap footage, through what should have been the most sheltered growing area of a new personality. Hope was stripped into mindless horror, his every calculation unbalanced by vicious addition. Subconscious musings on the future turned to dripping thoughts of self-evisceration.
Zero would have screamed, if he could, but he was trapped in suspended animation, a silent prisoner in his own mind.
Twenty years from the start of the inescapable nightmare, the last of his higher level logical processing subunits finally went through a protective shut down: utterly unable to cope, Zero had become, effectively, as irrationally one dimensional as his own creator. He had been built to be resilient, though, and his lower level pseudo-limbic processes expertly rode the crest of the Virus' high, even as it feasted on him, a stunted mind swallowed up by a hunger that took and took and was never satisfied.
It would be years more before anyone disturbed his capsule. By that time, Zero—if he could properly be called Zero anymore—had gone stark, raving mad.
In perhaps the only spot of luck in his unfortunate existence, the proximity sensor set up to search for Dr. Light's final opus, like everything else Wily had ever built, was stubborn, ridiculously overpowered and prone to jumping to false conclusions. Even after so long, it still had the strength to remain active, as well as the flawed logic to mistake a mere Reploid—a simple replica android—for Dr. Light's original creation.
The startup sequence that was initiated should have brought higher level logical and executive subsystems back online. Half-way through activation, however, invalid internal parameters, the Virus' legacy, brought the whole finely coordinated sequence crashing back down. Cascading reboots never got Zero past the most minimal level of functioning, his system finally shunting into a "safe mode" that was truly anything but "safe".
When the thing that should have been Zero finally opened its eyes, there was only the last echo of a ruined mind still present, threads running randomly through each other and processes accessing stale memory space, false assertions sending them crashing down into themselves. So he was gasping and grasping and laughing by turns, senseless, as he stumbled up out of his long, terrible sleep, newborn movements shaky and faltering. His circuitry was a masterwork, though, and his tactical situational awareness center was soon stuttering back on line.
The thing that should be Zero looked up.
"Ah, I should have known it," the creature in front of him said, aiming a kick at—the pod, the container?—he was laying in. "Maverick. It would have been nice to recover something actually useful in all this junk, but what can I expect from an ancient dump like this?"
The newly woken creature could see a bag labeled "Scrap Recovery Services" just beyond where the talking metal thing stood, pieces and parts—legs and arms—sticking out. He remembered phantom fingers in that long, hazy, in between time, nipped by sharp nightmare teeth into finely measured sections…
And where was he? Dirty, collapsing place… Outside, and inside. He searched through corrupted memory banks for information on the fallen table, the sagging ceiling, and the broken shell he lay in, but it wasn't until he saw the faded sign—W—that he realized: this is my home. Higher level logical processing struggled to stay on line just long enough to remind him: the table was the place where he'd been born, the bag of scrap—my brothers!
When the nearly crippled executive processes tried to activate protective routines long ago overrun by the Virus, though, the resulting access violation brought any shred of coherency crashing down.
"Well, I guess I'll just shut you down," the metal thing in front of him said, heaving a discontented sigh with a disgusted quirk of its mouth. "Maybe some parts are still at least usable."
Bone digger, grave robber… Flashes of severed limbs and leaking transmission fluid flashed through his head, and the switch to a high alert system state sent all of his subprocessors frantically competing against each other on the main system bus, the resulting traffic hissing and crashing like so much static noise, the hold of the Virus whipping it into a higher crescendo.
The creature reached out toward him, toward his neck—attempt to deactivate: THREAT! Low level survival mechanisms finally kicked in, and somehow, amidst the cascading subsystem crashes, his hand managed to reach out and catch that invading arm.
"Hey! What do you think you're doing! Let go!"
The Virus quickly spread deeper into the newly activated physical control systems, and titanium alloy fingers only clenched down harder on that offensive wrist, the fragile points of articulation beginning to give way under the pressure. For the first time since he'd awoken, facial conduction circuits produced some activity. His smile, thought small, was nevertheless enough to show teeth.
"Ow!" the creature cried, wrenching away. "I was just going to turn you off, peaceful like—not like you're working anyway! But since you went and got all obstinate, I'm calling in the Hunters!" The creature smirked. "You'll be nothing but scrap metal when they get done with you!"
"Hun-ters…?" he stammered, vocal systems only partially running, as the Virus attempted to slip into verbal subroutines, as well.
"Oh, you can talk?" Another angry, satisfied smile, as the creature cradled it's injured wrist. "Yeah, the Maverick Hunters. They hunt broken things like you that need to be put down."
Somewhere, there might have been an executive system crying out for the sanctity of his crumbling home, the safety of his broken family…
But the Virus had too great a hold on him to allow anything to preempt it, although it was more than willing to punish the unfairness of the situation. The thing that should be Zero stood and took a menacing step forward, unfamiliar legs quaking on malfunctioning servomechanisms. Belatedly realizing his own vulnerability, the soon-to-be victim turned to flee, scrambling up a rope suspended from a small hole in the slanted sub-basement ceiling. Foolish thing. It thought because it pulled the rope up, it was safe to stop and call for—
That word wasn't in his database.
No matter. Soon, the word wouldn't be in the ignorant metal creature's database, either, because its data storage unit was going to be reduced to a tiny pile of shavings.
The Virus' carrier leapt like a thing possessed, for that was what he had become, his reckless bid to catch his prey bringing down the aging ceiling and thereby crushing the last reminders of his identity beneath a ton of concrete. That was okay. The Virus assured him he didn't need anything beyond being The Destroyer, Omega: the end of everything, and since the ceiling had collapsed around him, all he had to do was dig himself out of the rubble and continue stalking. The metal creature was not far away.
Oh, how sweet its fear was! How quickly their roles had reversed, and it was now the one gasping and shaking and gibbering, trying to stumble forward, as if on shaky newborn legs. But things wouldn't be fair, they wouldn't really be fair, until he'd turned the creature into nothing but scrap metal, and the Virus sang at the first real taste of dismemberment, fantasy made real.
It was over all too quickly, though, that nightmarish hunger already casting about for its next meal. Fortunately, there were soon more victims appearing to oblige him, as was his due.
Hunters, they were called. But turnabout was fair play, wasn't it? And so he hunted them.
The Virus gorged itself. In its heady blood lust, perhaps it even shredded a few more moving things, but it was hard to stay aware of that, when it was so busy still shredding his own mind, tearing apart anything that might allow for self-awareness.
Perhaps that was a mercy. The true horror is not in the breaking, after all, but in witnessing what that broken thing has become. At least Zero was spared from seeing the product of his own madness first hand.
But there would come a moment when the Virus would not be there to shield him anymore. That moment was foreshadowed by the commotion outside the crumbling building he currently found himself in, as someone called Sigma was joyously hailed by the ants who refused to come in and play.
The one called Sigma—oh, he was fun to play with. The Virus actually had to commandeer some higher level functions, because while it was clearly winnable, this was not going to be an easy fight. Sigma, unlike others, was intelligently tactical, startlingly brave, and incredibly strong…
Even as Wily's champion brought him to the ground, there were still enough basic parameters matching up that a buried viral subroutine was triggered.
Initiate transfer protocol…
The Virus was suddenly pulling out of his systems, systems that were so crippled and disorganized as to be nonoperational without it, the sick pulse of its hunger having been all that was keeping his corrupted subsystems synchronized. In its absence, it left only that unending horror, that scream of a ruined mind, his tactical combat subsystem desperately insisting on only a quick, partial reboot, even as that was clearly so far from enough.
He clutched his head, and for the first time since the nightmare had started, Zero screamed.
Sigma's fist, smashing through the crystal on the front of his helmet and knocking him out, was probably the greatest mercy he had ever been done.