Jeremy hitched their backpack higher on their shoulder, scanning the hallway eagerly. Their quantum predictions didn't show Rich being anywhere near them at this point in the day, but that was okay. They hadn't gotten around to fixing their prediction system yet, so maybe it was wrong! This was the first time in recent memory that they'd actually been excited to see Rich. They were humming to themself, a bounce in their step. The situation gave them deja vu-something about being in a great mood, striding through the school hallway confidently with the secure knowledge that they were improving themself. Had they done this before?

"Jenna!" they greeted as they passed her in the hall. "Hi there! Have you seen Rich today?"

Jenna smiled at Jeremy. "Someone's booted up on the right side of the bed! No, I didn't see Rich yet. What do you need him for?"

"Just wanted to hang out," Jeremy chirped. "We've still got that bet in the works and I want to see how far he's come on his end."

Jenna sidled up to Jeremy, falling into step alongside them past rows of lockers. "You never did say what that bet was about," she said encouragingly, letting the last word trail off.

"I didn't," Jeremy said, giving her a sidelong glance.

"It's my job to keep track of all the information in the school," Jenna continued. "You really oughtta dish! We can trade info!"

"You have some top-secret intel, I presume?" Jeremy said with a smile playing at his lips.

"Not exactly," Jenna said, though she tapped her nose. "I can tell you that there's a ninety-two-point-four percent chance that Rich is just ditching class. He likes his long weekends."

That seemed like a pretty accurate guess. "I swear a teacher would let him get away with murder if he tried," they agreed. "He's still pretty charismatic when he wants to be." Complimenting Rich gave Jeremy a happy shiver. A toothy grin pulled at Jeremy's face. The program was working!

"He is," Jenna said. "So, tit for tat. Data for data. What was your bet with him about?" There was something weird in Jenna's eyes. Jeremy leaned back, the smile fading.

"It's private," he said shortly.

"No such thing. Not in my school." Jenna waggled a finger. "I calculated something for you. Do the same for me. That's how a community works."

"The reciprocity principle," Jeremy recognized. It was one of the psychological tidbits that all SQUIPs had at their disposal in order to help their users navigate the social ecosystem. Every human interaction was a power play. Scratch someone else's back, they'll scratch yours. Offering something small to a person as a favor puts them in a position to want to do something for you, so as to get rid of the social debt they accumulate. "You're trying the foot-in-the-door sales approach. What're you trying to sell me?" Jeremy said, lightening their tone so it came off more teasing than suspicious.

"Damn, you caught me." Jenna's tone mirrored Jeremy's. "I like to know what's happening, that's all! This school needs to start running a little smoother, don't you think?" She frowned. "It's topsy-turvy right now. Ever since the fire at Jake's place, it seems like no one can figure out where they are or what they're supposed to be doing. Social circles are all messed up. People freak out at the drop of a hat. And weird stuff keeps happening at public events. I mean, I shouldn't have to tell you. You were at the play too."

She glanced off, falling silent for long enough that Jeremy almost said something himself, but then she added, "I really thought we'd just taken drugs. See, that's what I mean. I try so hard to know everyone's business but I still never what's really going on!"

Jeremy looked away awkwardly. They had never been close to Jenna. Thanks to the SQUIP's database, they knew a bunch of vital information about her-her blood type, her insecurities, her driving motivations in life, her biggest crushes and worst enemies-but they didn't really know what it was like to interact with her. From what they'd seen, Rich would be better suited to try to comfort her.

Ooh! That felt good to think, too. Apparently the code incentivizing compliments about Rich didn't require that the compliments be said out loud. That would be super easy to abuse and Jeremy was more than up to the task. Jeremy let himself think up a couple more nice things about Rich: his tenacity was admirable. He showed off his burns like they were scars he'd won in a fight, like he was proud of them instead of ashamed. He was pretty ripped and it was kinda hot. For realism's sake, Jeremy pictured the last time they had seen Rich in person.

They remembered that feeling they had when they were thinking about their bet: that hotness under the collar and squirming in their stomach? That had been nice. Really nice. Even Rich's dumb "daddy" jokes didn't feel like cringeworthy crudeness anymore-they were clever and funny.

Oh no. Was Jeremy drugging themself into trying to develop a crush on Rich? That wasn't part of the game plan. They quickly scanned over their new patch and… nope, they hadn't included any failsafes against teenage hormones-

"...exactly what I mean!" Jenna was saying. Oh. She was still here? "I have no idea what's going on in your head! That's why Christine wants you to run a diagnostic check!"

"Nothing!" Jeremy blurted out thoughtlessly. "I wasn't thinking about anything interesting!" Then their audio input caught up to them. "Christine talked to you about that too?" they said, dread creeping up their spine.

"I know everyone at school, Jeremy! We share a lot," Jenna said. Her eyes swam with intensity. "Homework answers. Gossip. Snacks."

The blood rushed out of Jeremy's face. They stumbled, making an annoyed student slam into them from behind with a shout. The hallway was crowded. Maybe crowded enough that Jeremy could lose Jenna in the sea of people? Running away from confrontation was Jeremy's go-to solution for emergencies like this one, so they put their lanky legs to good use.

They heard Jenna calling out, "Up-up-down-down-" but the rest of her voice was drowned out as Jeremy rounded a corner. They didn't turn to investigate whether the friend request had popped up above her head or not. They just kept power-walking, not able to get to a full run amidst the flood of students but doing their damnedest to try.

Despite their best efforts, they felt a hand grab their shoulder. "I'm not supposed to talk to you!" they said, jerking out of the grip.

"Seriously?" That wasn't Jenna's voice; it was Michael's. Jeremy turned to face him as he pulled his headphones off his ears and slid them down to the nape of his hoodie. "I thought we were over the whole optic blocking thing."

Jeremy gave a started giggle of relief. "Hey there, Michael. Sorry, I thought you were Jenna."

"Easy mistake. She and I do look identical," Michael said, taking a sip of his Dr. Pepper and grimacing. It wasn't his favorite drink in the world-not even his favorite non-discontinued soda. Apparently he was avoiding all PepsiCo products, not just Mountain Dew. Jeremy approved. "Why are we avoiding Jenna now?"

Jeremy hummed, trying think of a tactful way to break the news.

But Michael was smart. He put two and two together quickly-or maybe he was just talented at reading Jeremy's mind. "Shit, don't tell me…. Her too?" Michael's grip on the soda bottle tightened. "This freaking school! It's like everybody wants to get brainwashed!"

"That's the point," Jeremy said with an incline of their head. "If SQUIPs weren't appealing, no one would have them in the first place."

"No one asked you, Mr. SQUIP-brand-ambassador." Michael scanned the halls like Jenna was going to pop out at him any second. "I swear, if one more student gets SQUIPped, I'm ditching class indefinitely. Get my GED online later or something. I'd rather be a high school dropout than a SQUIPtim."

"Speaking of people ditching class!" Jeremy interrupted, eager to distract Michael from thoughts of his inevitable looming destruction. "Rich is gone today, so I can't show it off, but… Guess who's got two thumbs and some shiny new programming?" They grinned widely, pointing at themself with their thumbs. They searched their vocabulary database for a good alternative to "this guy" that wasn't so inaccurate in terms of Jeremy's current gender, but came up short, so they just said, "This!"

Michael stared blankly like Jeremy was speaking nonsense, but at least he didn't seem to be worrying about the apocalypse anymore.

"I'm gonna be nice to Rich now!" they said brightly. "I spent all night reprogramming myself!"

"So you can get away with pulling an all-nighter but I can't?" Michael said, much less impressed than he ought to be, all things considered.

"I'm not analog human like you. I have a charging pad. It's different," Jeremy said impatiently. "You're gonna be so freaking impressed, Michael! I took everything you said about my behavior around Rich and I did the inverse!" Jeremy made a flipping motion with their hands. "No more insults! No more condescension! I'm gonna be the biggest fan Rich Goranski's ever had! Lisps: they're hot now!"

"I'll believe that when I see it," Michael said, puffing out his cheeks. Why wasn't he more excited about this? "You're still coming over to my place after school, right?"

"What's that got to do with Rich?" Jeremy said. "I'll be busy after school. Michael, this is only the start. I've got to test-run it around Rich himself of course, but I've been making all these tweaks to my system. It's the beginning of an actual upgrade! I'll be able to minimize or completely get rid of every single issue with my operating system!" They bounced up and down in place, getting some more of their nervous energy out. "Any issue you've had since Jeremy and the SQUIP turned into me, I can fix for you! Quick, tell me something wrong with me!"

Michael was nonplussed, leaning away from Jeremy and giving them the side-eye. "You're trying to get me to nitpick you."

"Yeah!"

"Just like how the SQUIP does for all its users." Michael raised his eyebrows. "Like how you keep insulting me when I'm getting snacks or smoking pot or whatever."

"It's my love language!" Jeremy beamed. They could dish it out and they could take it.

"Okay," Michael said, pinching underneath the bridge of his glasses. "First off, no, it isn't. Being needlessly critical of every aspect of a person isn't love. It's micromanagement."

Jeremy was taking mental notes already. "Affirmative! I need to minimize unsolicited user criticism."

"And if you're trying to act more human, you could stop using programming vocab and roboty words," Michael said, looking more thoughtful.

"Your goal is for me to be more human, right?" Jeremy said, just to confirm.

"I said 'if.'" Michael evaluated Jeremy carefully. "You don't have to, not for my sake. There's no moral imperative to put on a convincing act."

"But it'd make for a more natural user experience," Jeremy said, pacing the hall beside Michael.

"No!" Michael frowned. "I'm not your user. Forget I said anything! You don't gotta change everything about yourself, for my sake or anybody else's! Just edit out the parts of you that make you hurt someone and be done with it!"

Jeremy chewed on that idea for a second. They could work with that. Just about anything they did could be rationalized as hurting themself or someone else if they tried hard enough. Their various tics that they did in response to stress were annoying. Annoying is bad. Ergo their tics were harmful. They were pleased with how quickly they'd logic'd themselves back into their self-improvement endeavor. "I don't always recognize when something is harmful according to you," they reminded Michael.

"You remember all the guidelines we've made for you, right? Just follow those and you'll be fine."

Michael really didn't have any passion over this subject, which was disappointing. Jeremy would have to work extra-hard to make such a dramatic change in personality that it'd be impossible to ignore their improvements. "I need specifics if I'm gonna be the version of myself that's ideal for interacting with you!" Jeremy said.

"I don't want an ideal Jeremy!" Michael snapped. "There's a middle ground between 'learning to not be a dick' and 'turning into a freaking yes-man sunshine-and-roses sexbot in Jeremy's body'!"

Jeremy gaped. Then they snickered. "The ideal version of myself is a sexbot?"

"I-you-if you'd be saying yes to-" It wasn't often that Michael was at a loss for words like this. He hiked up his hoodie, burying himself into it as they walked right past their classroom door. "That just slipped out, I don't want-Don't change the subject!"

"Note to self," Jeremy said out loud. "Learn… hot… sex… moves."

"Shut up!"

"No, hold on, I'm downloading thirty zettabytes of porn and analyzing them. Painstakingly. Gimme a while."

"That's more porn than there is in the universe," Michael said, willfully ignoring the possibility of near-infinite extraterrestrial porn data.

"Which means I'll be a while," Jeremy said. "Sit tight. I'll get you your ideal sexbot or die trying."

"Kicking the bucket through porn overload," Michael griped. "Rest in peace, Jeremy. At least you died doing what you loved."

"Hentai download in process," Jeremy said, plugging their ears. "Adjusting personality parameters accordingly-"

Michael yanked their hands away from their ears. "Resist it, Jeremy! Resist the bad boob physics!"

Chloe, walking past them with a sniff on her way to class, gave them both a weird look at just the right moment that made both Jeremy and Michael bend over in laughter, giving up on maintaining the joke. The late bell rang but they barely heard it.

Michael was the first one to sober up. "See? A perfect Jeremy wouldn't have been talking about hentai in the middle of a public hallway."

Jeremy's laughter died. Oh. Michael was right. They quickly started calculating just how much popularity they'd lost and which other students would have observed them in the hall just now-

"It's not a bad thing!" Michael said, seeing Jeremy's worried look. "I just meant we wouldn't have half the fun we do if you were some perfect guy!"

"Sure we would. That would be the purpose of the changes," Jeremy said. "We'd get more in jokes. I'd make you laugh more, and you'd be more comfortable around me, and I'd be better suited to acting human so you wouldn't have to worry about me so much anymore."

"I don't worry," Michael scoffed.

"With a SQUIP you'd be a better liar," Jeremy said, their tone subdued. They walked closer to Michael so they could speak quietly now that the crowd was thinning out as late kids hurried to class. "I worry about you too, Michael. But that's because you're the main character here. If you get zombified, it's game over. I can't get SQUIPped, so I'm your meat shield. You shouldn't have to waste your limited resources taking care of a-a broken SQUIP, or a compromised human, or whatever I'm supposed to be."

Michael took in a deep breath. Here it came-the counterargument. Jeremy mentally lined up things that Michael might say to protest their upgrade and how Jeremy could poke holes in his arguments most efficiently. "You're doing it again," is what Michael actually said.

This line of conversation wasn't anticipated by their quantum processor. "I'm doing what?"

Michael smiled at the ground in resignation. "That thing you do where you reinvent yourself for a couple weeks? When you try to change your identity around just one thing?"

Jeremy craned their head back, affronted. "That's a flaw from Jeremy 1.0. You said he did that all the time when he was a person. You said the SQUIP upgrade was different!"

"It is different! You're half-computer now! Apparently that's not gonna change," Michael said insistently, though he lowered his voice to a whisper when mentioning the computer. "It's something we don't have any control over. But this coding weirdness? It's different! Changing your whole personality to revolve around any one thing is a bad idea. I don't care what that one thing is. If you program it into yourself, that's it. It's you, forever."

Jeremy puffed air out through their nose, the corner of their lips turning up. "I'm in beta, Michael." A quick look around, and then Jeremy slipped their hand into Michael's. "If I make a mistake in my programming, it's not permanent. I can try on different hats for a couple weeks and reprogram myself afterward."

"You're talking like you know what you're doing," Michael said. He didn't react to Jeremy's hand in his-and why should he? The closeness was natural for them. "This is all uncharted territory. You're the first member of your-your species, or whatever! There's never been someone before who can just edit their code on a whim! What if you screw it up? What if you change who you are, and then the new person doesn't want to fix the mistake you made?" Jeremy squeezed his hand, not interrupting, before Michael said softly, "What if you delete the part of you that makes you Jeremy?"

So that's what he'd been worried about this whole time?

"I'm not going to do that, Michael. I promise." That was such an intangible, unenforceable thing to make a verbal contract over, but Jeremy did it anyway. "I'm not sure I could even if I wanted to. I'll back myself up in the cloud. I'll restore my old save slot if I need to." Michael laughed under his breath at the gaming term, which was the reaction Jeremy had hoped for. "I know you're suspicious of my self-improvement plans, and for good reason. But just… let me do this. For myself as much as for you." Jeremy locked shining eyes with Michael. "You make me want to be a better person. Let me at least try."

Michael watched Jeremy for a moment that stretched on unbearably. Jeremy wished they were in Michael's head. Who knew what he was thinking about? Michael frowned, then looked away, then seemed to give in. "All right, all right, already," Michael said, exasperated. "You know I can't say no when you're like this."

For official purposes, Jeremy decided, this would count as the user agreeing to update their software.

"Great!" Jeremy chirped, swinging their arms back and forth as they made their leisurely way to class. "I wonder what I should recode first."

Michael hummed thoughtfully. "Maybe you should get rid of that bug that makes you snark at me all the time."

"Nice try, asshole, but that's a built-in part of my software."

"No, no, wrong answer. Like this," Michael said with the chiding of a schoolteacher before slipping into his terrible robot impression: "'AfFIRmative, Michael, your opINions on EVeryTHING ARE the MOST VALid.'"

"Oh, I get it!" Jeremy said with sarcastic enthusiasm. "I'm supposed to just straight-up lie to you! Affirmative, Michael, weed socks really do match everything in your closet!"

"Affirmative."

They wasted time parroting "affirmative" at each other in goofier and goofier robot voices. Jeremy won that particular battle of wits by synching their system up to the school intercom and, contextless for nearly everyone who heard it, blasting the word "AFFIRMATIVE" over the schoolwide loudspeaker.

In the end, Michael and Jeremy were twenty minutes late to class. Human civilization was about to collapse anyway, so missing a lecture about mitochondria didn't matter in the long run.

Jeremy turned to smile at Michael's desk before unfocusing their eyes, bringing up the virtual map of their brain. They had some time before next period. Might as well get to work.