Chapter summary:
Hard! To! Talk! With alcohol. Or! To! Walk! With alcohol. Gay! On! Main! On alcohol. Freeze! Your! Brain! With alcohol.
「電源を切って います」 Jeremy said blankly. If they had been expecting pain or passing out, which seemed to be a universal constant when someone messed with their SQUIP, they were surprised. Something felt like it was changing, turning off, but they couldn't grasp exactly what had happened.
"Dank on what and kitty huh?" Michael attempted to parrot what Jeremy had said. "Hold on," he said, taking out his phone. He propped it up against the beanbag, where it fell over. Then he propped it up again and it fell. Michael made a frustrated noise and grabbed a few video game cases, sandwiching the phone between them so it stood up on its own. "I'm recording this for posterity, just in case we don't get to do this any time soon, okay? The SQUIP's been unpredictable…" Michael looked at the camera display and then at Jeremy. "Is it hurting you?"
"No," Jeremy said, baffled, because they didn't feel anything. They looked down, taking stock of themself. Nothing was amiss-they weren't missing any body parts, they didn't have any injuries, no cuts or bruises appeared. "Hurting me?"
"Dude, you're shaking like crazy."
Jeremy kept staring at themself. They weren't hurting. There wasn't any pain, no warning pop-ups or error messages-but Michael's words still rang in the air and Jeremy repeated them, trying to figure it out. But, oh! Now that they paid close attention, they could see their right hand was shaking. Their leg was jittering too. They ran their left hand up and down the side of their body, trying to feel what was going on, then rested the hand on their face. Their mouth was twitching too, only on one side, and they could feel their eyelashes fluttering beneath their palm. "Michael?" they said shakily. The word didn't come out properly, but the desperation in their voice was at least getting broadcast. "Said safe."
"You are safe," Michael said, coming up to Jeremy and grabbing his forearm as though the shaking could be stopped by force. "You're doing good. Just ride it out." Michael kept talking, saying some kind of theory about what exactly was happening to Jeremy and what the SQUIP was doing, but Jeremy closed their eyes and let the incomprehensible words wash over them.
Sleep. Sleep and they could update their system, figure out what was going on-
"Hey, I know you're not that much of a lightweight," Michael said, shaking them gently. "C'mon, Jeremy, I got to talk to you about something."
Jeremy grimaced, cracking open their eye. "Let me sleep," they said.
"Oh shit," Michael reacted to something Jeremy didn't see. His face was only inches away from Jeremy's, and Jeremy's heart involuntarily fluttered, but Michael's skin was ashy. "I'm sorry, I don't know what's happening. This was a bad idea. Should I call an ambulance? If something else happens I'm definitely calling an ambulance." Michael swore loudly.
Confused, Jeremy sat up straighter in the beanbag chair. But they were off-kilter, falling into it instead. They groped around blindly, eventually being able to lean their weight on their left hand and push themself up. "It's okay," they said, but their stutter was back. Since when did they have a stutter? That was a bug that got removed in Jeremy 1.0.
Apparently Michael thought the same thing, because he pulled back and gave Jeremy a watery smile. "You're actually back, though," he said hopefully.
"I've…" It was physically hard to form words since half of their mouth didn't seem to be responding, but more than that, Jeremy kept short-circuiting. Their train of thought as they searched for the right words to say was getting derailed, but Michael was watching them eagerly and waiting to hear them talk. "I've. Here?"
"Yeah, that's your name," Michael said with relief. "Here, lemme help you up. Are you sure you're not hurting? This is, I mean, if it weren't SQUIP stuff, I'd be getting you in the ER like right goddamn now. But it's got to be a SQUIP thing. But, no, what if that thing's throwing a temper tantrum in your brain right now? Trying to mess the place up before you got to be in charge of the body again?" Michael stepped back, pacing as he talked. "You weren't like this when you had beer on Halloween. That was a whole other can of worms, of course, but you didn't have a… stroke?" he guessed.
"I'm," Jeremy repeated louder. Michael hadn't reacted much to their words and they were important to say. Jeremy's thought process wasn't optimal right now but they remembered how Michael would trust a drunk but SQUIPless Jeremy more than a sober Jeremy-and-SQUIP mind meld. "Here. Still here."
"Yeah, you're…" Michael trailed off. "You were saying something like that at the mall, too."
Good. He was starting to get it.
"Jeremy," Jeremy said haltingly. "I'm Jeremy. I'm SQUIP."
"No," Michael said firmly. "No you're not. We just shut off the SQUIP." He gestured at the open bottle of wine for emphasis. It looked sad beside the discarded cheese puffs and the video game cartridges, like an empty promise of a fun evening for Michael and Jeremy together. "You're not a SQUIP! You're a person!"
Jeremy stammered, searching for the right thing to say. Screw that-they were having trouble coming up with anything to say. "Both," they offered.
Michael kept shaking his head. "Jeremy's in there," he said desperately. Michael was getting worked up and Jeremy didn't understand why. "Jeremy, come on! Stop messing around! I don't know what's going on, but if that computer's doing something with you, you have to fight it!" Michael's breathing was speeding up. Jeremy thought it looked unhealthy but when they tried to search the web with their mind for diagnostic tools, they got nothing, not even so much as an error. They stood up, trying to reach out to comfort Michael, but their right leg was unresponsive and collapsed under them.
Normally, Michael would notice and help them up, but Michael's agitated breathing was a clue that he wouldn't be much use. Michael was looking in their direction, but not at them.
Jeremy remembered something, a conversation with Rich. Rich had said that Jeremy was dead. Is that why Michael was panicking?
"Not gone," they murmured. They weren't going to be able to pull themself back up on the beanbag chair very easily, and Michael was in no state to help them, so they grabbed their unresponsive leg with their good arm and straightened it out, getting as comfortable as possible without slumping all the way to lying on the floor. "Just ride it out," they said to Michael, hoping that that same piece of advice was still applicable. Only one is mine. Only one is mine. Only one is mine.
Michael was still gasping for air, but nothing else medically wrong showed itself. Jeremy patted the ground beside them with their good hand, and Michael had enough presence of mind to scoot over to Jeremy's left side. Jeremy looped their arm around Michael's shoulders. Ideally, they would be sitting up straight and letting Michael lean on them, but the entire right half of Jeremy was dead weight right now. They slumped against Michael, pretending not to notice the water that was on his face as he wheezed.
Jeremy hummed. They struggled to remember the name of the song, or any of the lyrics, but it was the Marley song they had played earlier that day. They hummed it on loop like a lullaby until Michael's breathing slowed and he seemed to come back to himself.
"I'm sorry," Michael said, voice raw, and Jeremy kept humming. "I miss him," Michael said, his voice cracking. "You're my best friend, Jeremy. You promised you wouldn't let it take you away again. I miss you already."
The song ended and Jeremy started it up again, because it seemed to be helping to ground Michael. They squeezed his shoulder too, an acknowledgment of the words, even if the sentences ran together into meaningless mush in Jeremy's ears.
"I thought I'd see him again," Michael said, slipping his own arm around Jeremy's to help prop them up. "You're supposed to be able to explain everything, to show up and have you be the big damn hero for once." He chuckled wetly. "I can't always do it for you."
Jeremy broke off the song to whisper, "Still here." They didn't know what else to say. "Still Jeremy."
"I guess you are," Michael admitted, holding Jeremy closer. With Jeremy leaning so far, their head was at the right height for Michael to tuck it underneath his chin. They stayed like that for a minute, just breathing and, in Jeremy's case, trying and failing to turn on their SQUIP again.
Michael let out a long breath. "I should call somebody," he said. "Or drive us to the ER. You have any idea how bad you look right now, dude?"
Jeremy looked up, catching Michael's eyes with the corner of their own. "No."
"You've got this, uh, Two-Face look going on right now." Michael gestured at his own face. "Half your mouth isn't moving when you talk, even. That seems like a pretty serious medical thing?"
Michael was talking too fast, so Jeremy had to spend extra time parsing out the meaning of his sentences. If half of Jeremy wasn't working, it made sense, Jeremy thought. If Jeremy was half-SQUIP, and they'd shut off the SQUIP, they should be half-functional, right? Though they wouldn't have expected to get split down the middle. "Basic math," were the words they picked to convey their thoughts.
Michael gave them a questioning look, so Jeremy started over. They kept stammering, but they got out the word, "Computer."
"The SQUIP's a computer, yeah…?"
Jeremy couldn't shake the conviction that this issue would fix itself. That's how the SQUIP always responded to alcohol-it gave warnings and shutdown notices in its default language, then it turned off until Jeremy's blood alcohol level was low enough for the SQUIP to function normally again. Even if the SQUIP part of Jeremy's brain had shut itself off, there wasn't any physical trauma involved or any reason to think that it couldn't boot up again like normal. It should get better in time. Maybe after a nap. "Sleep," they said, hoping that one word would communicate their thoughts.
"A computer going into sleep mode?" Michael guessed.
Jeremy shook their head, or tried to as best they could with half of their neck stiff and unresponsive. "T, tu, turn off. On again."
When it clicked for him, Michael actually laughed. "You think if you sleep, it'll turn you off and on again? And fix the whole thing? Oh my god, how long have you worked in IT?"
Jeremy smiled from their resting place on Michael's chest. "Trust me," they said.
Michael looked down at them, weighing his options. "If it gets any worse, or anything weird happens, we're going straight to the hospital," he said, which Jeremy knew meant that they'd won. But Michael felt stiff against their body. "I'm sorry," he said again. "This was a bad idea. I didn't think it would turn out like this-" and he kept talking in a way that Jeremy was too sluggish to catch up to. Jeremy let the words wash over them, picking out keywords they recognized here and there-"SQUIP" and "love" and "tell your dad." "We're never doing this again," Michael said and went quiet.
Jeremy felt a twinge of sympathy. Michael had been desperately looking forward to getting Jeremy's opinion on what had happened recently without worrying about the SQUIP filtering his words. "Then, advantage," Jeremy said with an extra dose of stuttering in between syllables, trying to get across the notion of take advantage of the opportunity.
Michael didn't cotton onto their meaning, so they tried again. "Ask me. No SQUIP," they offered.
"Oh," Michael realized softly. "You think I should talk to you about SQUIP stuff anyway, since it can't keep you from lying about it."
The SQUIP wasn't interfering with Jeremy like that anymore, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that Michael still distrusted Jeremy if a SQUIP was in their brain. "Yeah," they said simply.
"It doesn't seem like you're much up for talking right now." Michael craned his neck backwards against the beanbag chair.
"Go slow," Jeremy advised. When Michael talked too much or too fast, they couldn't process it. "Simple?"
"Okay," Michael said. "Like, yes or no answers? You're up for that?"
"Yeah." Jeremy didn't stutter so much on that word and was proud of themself. They readjusted themself against Michael.
"That sounds workable." Michael turned to watch his cell phone, still propped up and recording the conversation. With the shift in weight, Jeremy accidentally slid down Michael's body, losing their left-hand grasp on his side. "Whoops. Sorry, buddy." Michael readjusted, helping Jeremy sit up independently against the beanbag, then sat cross-legged in front of him.
"All right. First question," he started, drumming his fingers on his knee. He was watching Jeremy with concern. Jeremy cracked a one-sided smile, hoping to convince Michael that he was fine. "Is the SQUIP holding you hostage at all?"
"No."
"Is it keeping you from being honest with me?"
"No."
"Do you like the SQUIP?"
That was a harder one to answer, especially after their recent revelation about the SQUIP's programming flaws. Jeremy used their free hand to pick at the carpet idly. Human Jeremy didn't like the SQUIP, but Jeremy wasn't that person anymore. They still felt like they were half-SQUIP as an identity, even if the SQUIP wasn't functional at the moment. "Yes."
"Has the SQUIP forced you to do anything you don't want to do?"
Jeremy wanted to say something to differentiate how they were now from the SQUIP's former treatment of Jeremy, which had been rife with tactics of forceful coercion. But it was easier to stick to the yes/no format. Michael was smart enough to understand the context of Jeremy's answer. "No."
Michael looked mollified. "And when you said you'd help me and Rich keep the city from getting SQUIPped, were you both telling the truth? Like, you're not planning to betray us halfway along the line and then secretly feed us SQUIPs yourself?"
Michael had shoved two questions together. Jeremy short-circuited again. They stammered nonsense for a minute before Michael realized his mistake.
"No, wait, sorry, I mean-were you telling the truth to Rich and me?"
Jeremy was able to answer that one easier. "Yes."
"Are you planning to SQUIP us?"
"No."
Michael stared at his shoes. "You're my friend?"
"Yes." Jeremy smiled again, though Michael didn't see it.
"Even when the SQUIP is on? You're really my friend?"
"Yes," Jeremy said emphatically. "Best friend. Told you." How many times did they have to say it for Michael to believe it? "I'm Jeremy."
"Okay," Michael said, and then again with more self-assurance, "Okay. I think that's all I need. Are you sure you're all right?"
Under normal circumstances Jeremy might have made a joke that right now they were "all left." But their verbal processing was on the fritz and it took extra concentration and effort just to keep up with the simplified conversation as it stood. "Fine," they said and yawned. Michael gaped at them. It probably looked pretty weird to yawn with only half of their face. "Sleep?" they offered.
"Yeah. Yeah, I guess you've had a really long day, huh," Michael said. He looked around the room. "I wanna let you crash on my couch, but that's up the stairs and I definitely can't carry you, no offense."
"Good," Jeremy said, settling in easier against the beanbag chair. I'm good right here is what he was trying to say.
"You're gonna be sore in the morning," Michael warned. "But maybe this is the best we got." He grabbed his own beanbag chair and heaved it over so Jeremy had extra cushion.
Jeremy took it gladly, though they looked at Michael pointedly.
"I'll be fine," Michael answered the silent question. Jeremy didn't feel like pushing it. They closed their eyes and let themself drift off without another word. They weren't aware of when their SQUIP sparked back to life in their brain an hour later, but when they moved in their sleep and half-woke up in the wee hours, they could hear Michael asking them if they were okay. They reached out and squeezed his knee-with their right hand-and said, "I'm good, Michael, thanks."
Michael said something in relief but Jeremy didn't hear it, already drifting off again.