A squashed leather crossbody hung from my shoulder, and inside of it was the laptop and the cables I'd need to restore Rock. I didn't know if any of these things could be trusted, but I'd accepted them from Dr. Wily anyway. The bathroom door was ajar, the portal was humming and whirring and spilling its light into the hall, and I was ready to go in, or thought I was. The only problem was that Met had parked himself beneath Dr. Wily's armchair and refused to budge. And now I was on my hands and knees getting dust up my nose while trying to coax him out.
"Come on, Met," I said for the third time. "You need to come with me."
"Met hates the portal," Dr. Wily explained, in a tone halfway between apologetic and amused.
"Why's that?" I asked with a sidelong glance.
"He learned the hard way that Past Me doesn't give back rubs. Angled in for one and got a swift kick instead."
"I see." I huffed, blowing loose hairs out of my face. "Past You sure was a jerk."
Met had tucked his whole body, feet, optics, and all, under his helmet. It was obvious that he was scared out of his wits. But taking him with me through the portal was a condition I'd fought hard for, and I would brook no compromise. Assuming Dr. Wily liked having Met around, this was the only guarantee I had that the portal wasn't some kind of death trap.
It seemed like a good idea, anyway.
"Don't worry. We're not going to visit Past Wily," I said to Met. "We're going to stay far away from him."
Met didn't move. I wasn't sure if he'd even heard me. But when I reached my hand toward him, a low, sad growl came from somewhere behind his black plus sign. I drew back, feeling vaguely guilty and not knowing what to do.
"Let me handle this," Dr. Wily said, nudging my middle with one slipper-clod foot. Once I'd scrambled out of the way, he rapped the legs of the armchair cantankerously with his walker. "Met, you ornery old pile of junk!" he shouted, in a voice so suddenly loud and shrill that I covered my ears. "You heard the girl. Come out right now and get into the bag. Or how about I scoop out your insides and use your helmet as a bedpan?"
Another sad sound emerged from beneath the armchair. Not a growl this time, but a sigh of defeat. Met crept out into the light, gave one long plaintive glance to Dr. Wily and, finding no sympathy there, came to me with his optics lowered and his helmet hung low over his feet. I unzipped the crossbody and placed it on the floor, but as he plodded inside I couldn't bear to look at him. This wasn't at all the kind of victory I had hoped for.
"Your mistake," Dr. Wily said to me, "is thinking he can be reasoned with. You've got to be strict."
I stared down at the leather bag, now with a trembling helmet-shaped bulge in its center, and thought about Dr. Wily's words. This so-called reformed Wily, who issued mere threats instead of actual blows, still seemed barely less of a tyrant to me than the unreformed one. But his advice had struck an odd chord. If I couldn't get one little metool to do what I'd asked, then what about Quint? Quint didn't know me. What reason would he have to trust me? In order to save Rock, what methods of persuasion would I have to resort to?
"Well, that's everything, isn't it?" Dr Wily said. He flashed me a broad smile, a far cry from the face he'd shown toward Met just a moment before. "I guess you'll be on your way now?"
"Yes, I'm going," I said. As I stood up, the weight of the crossbody and its contents pressed down on my shoulder. I tugged at the buckle of the strap to shorten it enough to fit ten-year-old-girl-sized-me. Met was shifting himself around inside the bag as if trying to find a comfortable position. In a weak attempt to comfort him I gave him a little pat, and he trembled beneath my fingers. It was only then that I realized my own hands were shaking. I turned away from Dr. Wily. I didn't want him to see how frightened I was.
"I do wish you'd let me disable your tracker before you go," he said, and I saw him giving me a hard and earnest look out of the corner of my eye.
"No thanks," I said. And I took a few halting steps toward the light in the hall.
"Well, then. I've made the offer. I've kept up my part of the bargain with Rock. Do what you want." He paused for a moment as if lost in thought. "Then again, kid, maybe you're right. It might not make any difference at all whether I take your tracker out or not. The truth is that I don't know what's going to happen now. And it's been a very long time since I haven't known what was going to happen." There was a wistfulness in Dr. Wily's voice whose meaning I couldn't quite grasp. "You know, it's quite exciting. I must say I like it."
"How nice for you," I said without turning back. I couldn't hide the bitterness in my voice. Not knowing what was going to happen next wasn't very nice for me.
The portal was spinning like some kind of slow-motion whirlpool. Its light completely enveloped me. My skin tingled, and the little synth hairs on my arms stood straight up. The humming and whirring became so loud that they drowned out the sound of Dr. Wily tottering into the bathroom behind me to see me off. "Take good care of Met, will you?" he shouted as if from a great distance, although his slender shadow was only a few feet away.
I nodded in reply. Sink, bathtub, tiled walls, and toilet disappeared, all consumed by light. I could no longer see where I was. A fearful cry rang out from inside my bag, and I gave Met a punitive shake. "Quiet," I said to him, though I had no clue if he could hear me. "We'll be coming out in Past Wily's place, and you'd better not blow our cover."
The bag went silent, and I let out an apologetic sigh. Poor Met hadn't done anything to deserve this. I was taking him away from his home and everything he knew, just as those things had been taken from me. It felt wrong somehow. It felt like I ought to have known better.
Met's terror wasn't the only reason going into the portal felt wrong. There were so many contingencies I hadn't had time to consider, logistics that still needed figuring out. The truth was I didn't know what on earth I was doing. I stopped in my tracks – my feet found themselves stuck to the floor. Turning around, I reached out my hands, but they grabbed at empty air. "Wait," I cried. "Wait. Dr. Wily! I want to think more about this!" But he was nowhere in sight. The world behind me was nothing but a land of vague shadows.
"Get the lead out, kid! Go!" Dr. Wily's voice called. "The center's come for you. Tom's dead!"
Four small black circles came into my view, which I recognized too late as the rubber stoppers on the legs of Dr. Wily's walker seen from below. One of them planted itself onto my chest and gave me a firm push. I shrieked, lost my balance, and fell backwards. A rush of wind and light swirled around me, and in an instant I was falling – or at least that's how I felt. Whether I was really falling, or hurtling forwards, or spinning in place, the din and confusion made it impossible to tell. A low, rumbling jolt shook me all over. It wasn't painful, but it was terrifying. I clutched the crossbody tightly to myself and closed my eyes. Met was screaming. In my panic I forgot all about my warning to him to keep quiet, and I screamed too.
Then my feet found themselves on hard ground, and everything went silent.
I opened my eyes and brushed the hair out of my face. The portal was several paces behind me. On either side of me, for as far as I could see, were wall-mounted shelves piled to breaking point with crates and plastic bins and bags of components of all sorts. Not a soul was in sight. It was a welcome change from the storm of light and noise I'd just hurtled through. If Future Wily was to be believed, I was in Past Wily's storage closet.
But first, a quick status check was in order. Two arms, two legs? Yes. I was still in one piece. My internal interface was signaling that all systems were fine, as it was in the stubborn habit of doing. But I didn't feel fine. I was struggling to process Dr. Wily's parting words. There were so many things that now needed my immediate attention, and I couldn't let myself face the meaning of those words. Not yet. Still, the pain they caused me remained in the background of my mind, like a looming shadow in the corner of a dark room.
"Are you all right, Met?" I whispered. I ripped open the crossbody and peered inside, anxious I might find him damaged or dead. To my relief the little metool was peering back at me with astonished eyes. I gave the bag a grateful hug.
"Thank goodness," I said. "Now stay quiet, okay?"
The air duct vent, Future Wily had said, was the only way I could get around without being noticed. I had to find it. My eyes wandered up to the ceiling, and before long I spotted the silver square which was my ticket to safety. If I climbed up the shelves, all the way to the top, I could reach it. Knowing it was there was a great comfort.
Other than that vent there was only one exit out of here, an aluminum door at the far end of the room. It was slightly ajar, and a pale green light was spilling in from the other side of it. As I crept closer I heard a high-pitched buzzing sound, punctuated here and there by the low mumble of a human voice. My heart filled with dread before my mind caught up to the reason: it was Dr. Wily's voice.
My curiosity got the better of me, and I had to look. Swallowing my fear, I drew close enough to peer through the open crack. On the other side of the door was Past Wily's sprawling laboratory. But I didn't bother to take in an overall impression of the place. Instead, my eyes focused in on the flurry of activity in the far corner of the room. There was the younger, eviler Dr. Wily with his wild gray hair, pacing back and forth between his monitor and his work table and letting out an occasional cackle. And on the work table was…
"Oh no, Met," I said, and I pulled the bag up close to my chest. "I didn't know we were going to see…"
On the work table was Rock's still and silent body. All around him hundreds of bee-sized 3-D printing bots were zooming here and there in pre-planned patterns. Before my eyes, his limbs were disappearing beneath layers of freshly-laid molten titanium in shades of green. An ugly, sickly green.
For most of his life my brother had fought for the privilege of taking off his armor, for a time when he'd no longer need it – and ten years ago, with Dr. Wily in prison at last, he'd gotten his wish. He'd been so happy to be just a boy again, just Dr. Light's son, as he'd been made to be – and most humans had seemed to be happy for him too for a while, at least until they stopped seeing the value in keeping him alive. The last thing he would have ever wanted, even in death, was for the armor to be put back on. Even coming from Dr. Wily, this was a low blow.
And this was something Dr. Light had assured us could never happen. He'd promised us our code was incorruptible – that we could never be rendered into mere things. Dr. Light had been wrong. Rock had been turned into a mere thing.
It had been one thing to hear the story from Future Wily. It was another thing to see it with my own eyes. I felt dizzy. I took a few steps back. Somehow I ended up sitting on the floor in the corner, clutching my knees to my chest. My eyes remained fixed on the crack in the door, but that sickly green light was all I could now see. I glared at it. I hated it. Why had Rock let this happen to himself? Why'd he have to lose hope that Duo would arrive in time? Why'd he have to make a deal with Dr. Wily? Why couldn't he hold on for two more days? Two more measly days?
"It's not fair," I said, at a loss for other words.
The universe had given me a time portal to thirty-seven years ago. So what? Why couldn't it have given me a time portal to two nights ago? I could have saved Rock. I could have caught him in my arms just as the news of the judge's decision made him fall apart. If I'd been there by his side like I should have been, I could have seen the text from Dr. Wily. I could have kept Rock safe with me.
Met peered out at me from the opening in the bag. I felt I owed him some kind of explanation about what was going on with me. But the words that came out of my mouth were rambling and devoid of context.
"This horrible world… It's like the very second somebody's weak or alone or desperate, some vulture has to swoop in and…"
Met looked at me with his quiet, round stare. There was something like sympathy in his eyes, or at least I imagined there was. There was nothing like understanding.
"Do you get it, Met?" I said. "Does what I'm saying make any sense?"
He shook his head. I looked down at the floor and sighed. I wanted Duo back, even if he was wrong about so many things. He'd understand me, at least. But the Duo of my time was on his way to Messier 81 and wasn't coming back. I wanted Rightott, even if he couldn't feel as deeply as I could. At least he'd give me some good advice. But I'd decommissioned him so that he wouldn't have to face the recycling center alive. And I wanted Dr. Light, even if his promises couldn't always be trusted. At least he'd loved me. But the Dr. Light of my time was dead.
"And other people," I said, "they just let it happen, they're too busy with other things, they act like they don't even notice…"
I was thinking about Ms. Saito at the hospital, who carried on as if everything was normal even after she learned Rock and I were to be destroyed. And I was thinking about Dr. Light's physician, who in 20XX was probably shaking his head as he typed a note into Dr. Light's file: cause of death: stroke. Contributing factor/s: psychiatric: believed robots to be his "children."
Then there was the nurse who'd called me "sweetie" outside Dr. Light's first room in the hospital. She'd once asked if she could brush my hair during her break and I'd let her. I'd thought it was a strange thing to agree to, but her touch on my scalp had felt wonderful. So wonderful that I'd leaned back in the chair and let my eyes fill up with tears of joy. It'd felt good to be close to someone. I'd wanted to turn around and thank her. Thank you. I needed that. This past year has been hard, and I was starting to think that no one cared. But then her hand had plucked her phone from the table in front of me, and with a gasp she'd leapt to her feet, shimmied back into her scrubs, and disappeared through the door without a goodbye. I'd turned around, tears still dripping down my face, and stared bewildered at the place she had just been. I supposed that as a child she'd loved dolls, and that a pretty doll was all I was to her.
And I thought about myself. One of the memories Rock had been desperate to free himself from, the one that had hurt me the most to hear, was the look I'd given him after he'd seethed and raged and thrown things in the garden, just before he'd left for his appointment with Dr. Wily. The look which had scolded him for being too angry, too vulnerable, too needy… too human.
The bag was shaking in my hands. I looked down. Met was peering at me from a thin crack beneath his helmet. I supposed the anger on my face had frightened him.
"Don't worry, Met," I said. "I'll take care of you." I closed my eyes and let out a long sigh. "My job used to be taking care of other robots. And I was very good at it."
Over the long course of my life I'd seen perhaps all of Rock's code, a piece here and a piece there, a screen or two at a time. Each image was still in my head, perfectly preserved, and in order to see it again I only needed to comb through the file room of my mind. Well, I'd find them all, all the hundreds of thousands of them, and assemble them into the right sequence – and if I reprogrammed Quint with that code perhaps I could manage to restore Rock to an approximation of the person he used to be. Wrongs had to be righted. I could fix this mess, couldn't I?
Couldn't I?