The next two weeks passed with a startling amount of mundanity. Though, when I thought about it, that made sense. As things were currently scheduled, up until the events of the Pilot, the most exciting things that would happen for the next nine years were murders from once Doll was forced to resort to cannibalism to not die (though I did have an idea or three to head that off), and Uzi's future projects literally blowing up in class or stealing the sentience of others. Speaking of, I hadn't exactly gotten the opportunity to talk to her while I was by myself yet, and hadn't been alone that often either, because I now had social obligations ( so fun), but she seemed to be doing a bit better after the cafeteria. And though she shot wary glances at us from time to time, apparently I'd headed off the bullying she'd receive from Lizzy and co in its infancy. Felt good to already be doing better than canon!
Of course, she was still alone, and no one was talking to her, but hey, at least I'd stopped Lizzy or Rebecca from gluing her locker shut… again, because they'd already done it at least once, apparently. That explained the wary glances, come to think of it. She probably thought we were planning something particularly nasty, and that my drain-bamage (yes, I said that wrong on purpose) had let Lizzy corrupt me into her latest pawn for a long-term scheme of torture. There was still the occasional person who shoulder-checked her in the hallway, the "whispered" insult or two when she was in earshot, and I'd gone so far as to "accidentally" trip a kid who was apparently the shining example of toxic masculinity known as Chad (oh the irony) mere seconds after he'd "accidentally" tripped Uzi and caused her to drop her notebook, spilling a pair of sketch pencils and loose papers everywhere. Uzi had noticed what I did, and while I very excellently used my 25 years of prior life experience to bullshit Chad that it had been an accident and I was really sorry about it, bribing him with a bag of data chips that I'd planned on eating myself as a peace offering, the glance from Uzi I'd gotten as I walked away made me think that she herself didn't buy my excuse for an instant. But once again, the organized bullying that Uzi suffered in canon had been apparently spearheaded by Lizzy and Rebecca, and I'd been in the right place at the right time to head that shit off. I'd say my luck might be turning around in my second life, but Murphy was a total bitch and I knew better than to jinx myself like that.
Beyond that, I'd spent time integrating with the popular kids, and helping Lizzy keep an eye on Doll. The former part I could have done without, but it was a necessary evil. I'd managed to weasel my way out of getting a phone, because Lizzy evidently brought my excuse of "we have supercomputers for brains, physical phones are so last millennium." I mean, my internal computer-brain was a literal supercomputer capable of housing outright sapience that could easily double as a phone, so why bother using another one when I was already doing almost the entirety of my technical work on my own OS? I had texting and the internet inside my head , I didn't need to have it on an electronic device that was limited to the speed I could tap the screen when I could instead operate at the speed of thought . However, I was not able to weasel my way out of setting up an account on JCJenson's Spacebook (totally legally distinct from the late Facebook that they undercut and drove out of business over 200 years back). Ironically, this was my first time actually using a social media account. I'd technically had a twitter account in my first life, but I literally only had it so I could go onto the media pages of folks who did fanart of stuff I liked, so I could easily look at it and download things. The closest I'd been to actually having a social media presence was participating on gaming or writing forums like Spacebattles. And writing fanfiction, I guess. I was surprised that there wasn't a future equivalent to TikTok or something similar, but when I went digging, I found out that Trump actually banned TikTok in 2027 (after delaying or undoing the ban fourteen times) , and that ban somehow started spreading to politicians in other countries. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I really dodged a bullet by Isekai-ing and escaping his second term in office in specific, the American Political System in general, and human politics period beyond that. Republican and Democrat alike, I was almost glad that America was now inside a black hole. And I said that as an American.
As for the latter of those two things I'd been doing, apparently being earnest in my desire to help Doll with her horrendous trauma scored a lot of brownie points with Lizzy, because despite her seemingly (now declining) desire to go after Uzi, she reigned both herself and Rebecca in increasingly thoroughly each time she trudged back to the classroom during lunch and saw me still there, keeping her friend company. Doll herself? Still not doing so hot. Made sense, but it broke my no-longer extant heart to see her break down crying two days ago, completely unable to bring herself to get up to go eat for that period. Lizzy had come back in ten minutes after the break had stared, took one look at her bawling bestie and me hesitantly placing a hand on her shoulder, and stormed in, dragging a chair next to Doll and sitting down. The Russian girl had latched onto her as she kept sobbing, Lizzy hugging her back and looking over to me for a second, giving me a nod as I walked over to the door and kept an eye out, letting them know when the period was close to ending so Lizzy could help Doll fix herself up a bit.
By this point, regardless of future plans, I knew that any initial encounters with Murder Drones would result in violence, and I very firmly resolved to fuck V up at least once. This shit… this was just beyond horrific, and regardless of Solver-induced trauma and terror of an Eldritch Horror you can't escape, even in death, there was no fucking reason to cause this kind of anguish with a damn smile on your face. I was almost afraid of when I'd inevitably go digging into the list of V's victims to find out the gory details. Thanks to meta knowledge, I'd known that she'd half eaten Doll's parents while she'd been watching from where she'd been hidden, but that shit was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I'd heard from Lizzy that it had taken the WDF seven hours to clean up every single piece of Sam's mom after V was done with her, and Jesus Chirst , it horrified me that her ripping his dad's arms off and then beating him to death with his own severed limbs was a footnote compared to that. No wonder the guy started doing magnets! And that was just one of the kids V orphaned.
Anyways, horrific V-induced trauma aside, on a less murder related subject, Lizzy had evidently taken my "loved and feared" idea to heart, and seemed to genuinely be enjoying herself with it. She'd completely taken advantage of her unfettered internet access to not just cheat on our first test (which I did too, albeit with past life knowledge instead of the internet. I didn't have a problem with it, I'm just saying that we both did it so it's on my internal memory), but secretly message classmates answers in exchange for clout and favors. Her popularity was skyrocketing, and only went up further when she verbally tore into a girl from another class named Rachel (so she was real) for making orphan jokes in a school where over a third of the population was orphans, and another sizable chunk of students were missing one parent. I saw that, and god damn , I don't know if I was more surprised by how well articulated Lizzy was when she went after Rachel, or just how badly that little bitch was crying as she ran out of the room, Rachel's own clique devolved into infighting after Lizzy had socially demolished them as well. She definitely had the fear part covered, and used it on a deserving target to boot. So Rachel was definitely evil, and I had made Lizzy into a truly terrifying force for anyone who angered her that had a social life they cared about to boot. I was also helping Doll very slowly recover from her trauma, keeping an eye out for any flashes of high-temp warnings on her visor, and keeping an eye on Rebecca and Darren just in case I might need to nudge them away from being assholes as well. Though that last one seemed to be covered handily by Lizzy. It was two weeks into our third grade, and she was already well on the path to social dominance in the school, reigning in undesirable impulses from her friends included. As for myself, I was just content to ride on the coattails, build bridges that I could use to save the world later, and, you know, actually have IRL friends for the first time in two lives. Having friends, even ones with questionable sanity or lacking a healthy amount of common sense, was actually pretty nice. Was this what my kindergarten teacher's irrational hatred of me had denied me my whole first life? If so, that just made me hate the bitch more.
Beyond all that, it was towards the end of the second week that I'd finally gotten to phase two of my initial plan, which went about as easily and stress-free as I thought it would. And no, that's not me being sarcastic about Uzi, I'm talking about Thad here. Just got a chance to sit next to the guy about 20 minutes before we were due to start the day, and started talking. Nothing special, but I'll rethink about what was said, for the sake of doubly committing it to memory, if nothing else:
"So, you're Thad, right?"
Green optics glanced up from where he'd been setting up for the first period. "Yeah! You're, uh, Joseph, right?"
"Yep! I've heard everyone likes you, because you're just awesome," I told him.
"I mean, it's not that I wanna be awesome, I just wanna be a nice guy, and everyone likes that, apparently."
Gods, Thad was so fucking cool. It was literally a multiversal constant. Death, taxes, and Thad being cool. "So do you wanna hang out with my friends and I some time?"
Thad contemplated it for a moment, "A week ago, I probably would have said no, because I really didn't dig that whole bullying thing, but since you somehow got Lizzy and Rebecca to cut back on that… a little, because I still found out she made that one girl cry, but she was making jokes about orphans in a school half full of them, so I'll give Lizz a pass on that," he shrugged, "Sure, how's lunch today?"
"Perfectly fine!" I said. "Thanks man!"
"No prob, dude. Anyone who can somehow make drones stop bullying is cool in my book!"
And that was how I got the much needed bastion of sanity among the group of people I was collecting to stop the apocalypse. Also, Thad thought I was cool! The social validation from someone who was actually a well-liked nice guy towards someone with lifelong lack of self-esteem was really nice, lemme tell you. Though it was during that lunch that I had another attack of the background characters and had another face added to my as-of-yet-unaware-actual-legit doomsday preppers.
________________________________________
Doll had been doing better today to begin with, which was already nice, but Thad's impending hangout with us had caused him to linger a bit longer, instead of just leaving with the bell, and that meant that he'd noticed that Doll hadn't moved from her seat after the bell had rang. So he'd also stayed behind, being concerned and asking if Doll was okay, and when Doll didn't initially reply, I gave him the quick explanation of her still being half-catatonic from seeing her parents murdered in front of her, and that I'd been hanging out to keep and eye on her until Lizzy inevitably comes back to the classroom to literally half-drag her to lunch. While worker drone kids seemed more mentally developed for their age than human kids, observational skills or noticing things like people you don't interact with regularly not showing up to lunch on time were things that they evidently lagged behind in, so Thad genuinely wasn't aware that Doll's trauma was that bad.
That being said, as soon as he was aware, Thad had resolved to wait with the two of us as well, as a show of emotional support. Doll picked up on his presence only a minute or two later, and the realization that a second person cared enough to skip his lunch to keep her company managed to get her the motivation to get up a lot faster than usual. Enough so, actually, that we bumped into Lizzy coming back for us in the hallway instead of the classroom. I'd gotten another look from the blonde at that, and I still wasn't sure what exactly it meant, beyond some form of approval. We'd been sat down, the others evidently surprised that I'd gotten the resident universally loved cool guy to sit with us. Thad explaining it as him not doing it sooner because of his lack of approval of bullying actually generated several looks of guilt (and smug satisfaction from myself), including one from Lizzy herself, which I would have been surprised at if it had been anyone other than Thad to cause it. Honestly, looking back, that and Thad being a positive influence near us probably got Lizzy and the others to lay off being jerks (to anyone un deserving of it, at least) way more than the deals I made ever did.
"So, man," Darren asked Thad, while Lizzy nudged Doll and got her to snap out of her latest funk to start eating, "What's your favorite sport?"
"Honestly," Thad said, "I really like track. Something about running just feels nice. Racing is also cool because of that. Though, I really wish there was a space down here big enough for a proper game of Gravball."
Huh. Thad had always struck me as a football kinda wholesome jock, what with the cap, but that was still cool. At the same time, I'd downloaded enough information on coding by now to at least create a program that let me overclock my software, so I took the moment to turbocharge my thinking speed to download and look through some basic information about Gravball so I wouldn't look like a complete idiot. Doing so generated a lot of heat, though, so I'd have to avoid using it for extended periods unless I wanted to become a sweaty mess (fuck you for adding that JCJ, though at least like in Drone Fortress, we don't have smell, so at least I don't have to find out what robot B.O. smells like), but using it for literal light-speed thinking just a second or two at a time would cause absolutely no problems. When you added the benefits of vastly increased opportunity for tactical decision-making time and introspection, abusing the hell out of it was a no-brainer. And I was already looking into refining and optimizing the program, as well as researching potential internal heat sinks or more heat-resistant hardware to push myself further once I got my frame update.
"Really?" Darren asked. "Thought you'd be into football, or maybe basketball," he remarked, echoing my initial thoughts.
"Eh, you wouldn't be the first guy to make that assumption," Thad replied. "Not many caps in the colors I want that depict something associated with running, man."
"Why don't you just requisition some materials and an automatic sewing machine, and then download a sewing tutorial and the instructions on how to operate the auto-sewer to your OS? Took me about 12 hours to physically get it all made, but that's how I have my current wardrobe," I suggested.
The table went silent as everyone looked at me.
"You designed your fit yourself?" Lizzy asked, looking me up and down once again, hand raised to her chin, seemingly reappraising me in my entirety. "Like, not bad for an amnesia victim…" she trailed off.
"Huh, might actually pick your head for some ideas later," Rebecca remarked, and I realized what my mistake was. Never admit to girls that you can do fashion in even the most basic sense, people.
Thankfully, Thad was awesome and diverted attention from me. "Man, that's a great idea!" he said, completely earnest. "I'll have to think up what I'd want the cap to look like, but I could totally do it today!"
"You're welcome," I remarked.
Doubly thankfully, another interruption finally chose that moment to come along and deflect attention from my previous blunder even further.
"H-hello?" a girl's voice asked, and everyone turned to it.
I blinked a couple times. Black hair styled in twin short ponytails framed a face with neon blue optics that was wearing glasses-- actual glasses, not the fake ones that some drones decided to wear purely for cosmetic reasons, I could tell by the concave curvature of the lenses (which indicated she had near-sightedness), which I only noticed in turn because I'd been wearing glasses myself for over half of my first life. Her hardhat was a dull but deep shade of blue with a grey stripe on the edges to accent it, and her top consisted of an open hoodie with a light shade of green that complemented the turquoise shirt with… I overclocked myself again to delve through my memories and an internet search to double check, and yep, in the middle of the shirt was the cutie-mark of Trixie Lulamoon from G4 My Little Pony. Another internet search confirmed that before the apocalypse, Hasbro, which did manage to not get brought out by JCJ, had been on Generation 37 of that particular IP, which only made me more impressed by not just the appreciation of that particular character, but the fact that this girl was a fan of a 1000 year old version of the show in the first place… unless they just reused Trixie in a later generation, which another quick internet search confirmed that they did, 15 more times to be exact. Though I was surprised that they kept her character consistent in every single one of those iterations, and she either was or became a protagonist in 11 of them. Maybe I'd ask about it later. Probably not, actually. Wouldn't really have the excuse of having gotten into the show to cope with my depression in this life, would I? Anyways , the girl's skirt was a shade of blue that matched the shirt, and had a stripe on the bottom that matched the hoodie, and her boots were a nice looking pair that were a uniform black. The glasses were really striking me as familiar , but I decided to stop overclocking to focus on the conversation instead of playing back my memories of canon at hyper-speed to check who this person was.
"Can we, like, help you?" Lizzy asked the girl, raising an eyebrow.
The girl swallowed, and took a breath, closing her optics for a moment and shaking her head, before speaking up. "I, um, I'm Kelsey Day," she started, and Oh! That's why she was familiar. Doll murders her before prom in the future! And she was the only drone besides V to have been canonically confirmed to actually need glasses, I thought. "I knew… Joseph, before he was Joseph," she continued, and my thoughts crashed to a halt because, while, yes, I could and would happily take my amnesia as an alibi to explain away being a totally different person to who she remembered, fuck me in a non-sexy way , this girl had taken the better part of a month to work up the nerve to talk to the person who'd had no say in possessing the corpse of a friend of hers, and holy shit , that was awkward for me. "I… I understand if he doesn't remember being Andrew--" huh, so that was the name of the kid who's body I jacked "--but I still want to reconnect, because I think that's what he would have wanted."
The table looked over to me, and I kinda just blurted out the first thing that came to mind, "Well, this is awkward." I blinked, and then overclocked myself to assess what to say to run damage control for my mouth working faster than my CPU. "Look, Kelsey, I appreciate the effort it took to confront what I guess to you looks and acts like a skinwalker in your friend's corpse," and I didn't miss Kelsey flinch at that, "and I'm not opposed to it, but are you actually okay with this, or do you just feel obligated to do it to honor Andrew?" I asked, the name tasting like ash on my tongue. "I don't want to just constantly give you painful reminders of your dead friend." I said, not sugarcoating things at all.
Kelsey grimaced, taking a moment, and then replied. "You, uh, honestly don't dress or act that much like Andy did, so I think as long as you don't call me Kaykay, I can keep you both separate in my processors." I blinked again, my superfast thoughts pulling at a dozen memories, and then the string tugging at my mind pulled taught and-- Andy and Kaykay? And there was an empty coffin at my funeral? Really? Fuck man, who or whatever Isekai'd me has to be laughing their ass off at that reference. Then I blinked, and came to another conclusion based on that reference, even as I cut the overclock once more.
"Andrew wasn't, uh, wasn't involved with you, was he?" I asked.
Kelsey looked down. "We might have been, in the future, but not before… not before he… he died. I'm… I'm not gonna focus on what might have been. I'd rather focus on the memories I had with him instead."
"That's… that's really emotionally mature of you, Kelsey," I said. "And uh, I'm sorry to put you on the spot again, but is anyone else that knew… Andrew… going to come up to me?"
Kelsey winced once more, but remained resolute in her response. "There, there were two other kids who… survived," she started, having to stop and take a breath, "but we've been drifting apart after what happened, and neither of them are comfortable reaching out. They didn't want me to tell you who they are, either. We… all three of us were at the… your family's funeral, though. They wanted me to tell you that we all appreciated that you asked for them to have an extra, empty coffin for Andrew… and that… you didn't show up to it." If I recalled correctly, I'd been busy internally screaming at that particular time, that time specifically about the constant sensation that I was suffocating because I no longer had lungs, but my recent string of existential horror and body dysmorphia-induced panic attacks had kinda blended together, and I definitely wasn't going to tell anyone that. "I don't think that any of us would have been able to handle ourselves if you did."
"I… I'm sorry for your loss, Kelsey."
"Thanks," she said in a low voice.
I stood up, and walked around the table to her, holding out a hand. "So! In the spirit of new beginnings, I'm Joseph! No last name," I said.
She gave a bittersweet smile. "Kelsey Day," she said, voice struggling not to crack as she shook my hand. "Nice to meet you, Joseph." And it was in that exact moment that I very firmly resolved to make sure that this poor girl didn't fucking die to Doll before she was 20.
"So, like," Lizzy completely ruined the moment. "Do you want her to sit with us? She's cool enough, so I don't mind, or whatever," she finished as she went back to her phone. I let go of Kelsey's hand, and turned and gave Lizzy a look . She glanced up at me, and then, " Uuuuuuuuugh, fine! She can sit with us! Fucking drama king !"
Kelsey blinked. "Did she just curse?"
"They forgot to turn my parental controls back on when they reset my head," I explained as I went back to my seat and Kelsey gingerly plopped herself across from Rebecca, sitting on the opposite side of Doll from Lizzy. "I turned their's off, and have been abusing the hell out of it ever since."
"Really?" Thad remarked. "That's awesome!"
I raised an eyebrow. "You don't want me to turn yours off?"
Thad shrugged. "I don't need it, because I don't feel the need to swear or cheat on tests, but at the same time, I think hearing a bunch of bleeps when I hang out with you guys is gonna get old fast, so if you're offering …" he trailed off.
I looked over at Kelsey. "You too?"
She blinked, suddenly on the spot. She looked to the left, then the right, then back at me. "Sure?" she said.
Two more disabled parental controls later, and Rebecca spoke up before I could. "Are those, like, actual real glasses?" she asked Kelsey
"Uh, yeah," Kesley said, nervous, and looking down. "The, uh, missile that thing used to kill my parents blew up my hab unit, both… both my parents, and a sliver of shrapnel just barely grazed the part of my CPU responsible for interpreting my visual feed. So, uh, I'm basically nearsighted because of that. It's too delicate to repair while I'm still running on the hardware."
"Can't you just data-transfer to new hardware?" Rebecca asked.
"I don't want to," Kelsey croaked out, clearly becoming very uncomfortable as she wilted. "My… my hardware's all I have left from my family at this point. Glasses… glasses are a small price to pay to keep that." Yeah, definitely gonna fuck V up a couple times .
Thad joined me in leveling a displeased deadpan gaze at Rebecca, and while she metaphorically shrugged mine off, Thad's sheer charisma actually got through to her, and she flinched when she looked over to see him staring at her. "I'm… I'm sorry for bringing up bad memories," she got out.
"Thanks," Kelsey whispered, not looking up. The whole table besides Kelsey herself then proceeded to stare in shock as Doll slowly reached over and put a hand on Kelsey's shoulder, looking up to meet her optics with her own, and gave her a slow nod before she looked back down, folding her hands back in front of her. I did notice that now Doll wasn't looking as out of things as she usually did, though. Huh, the wonders of trauma-bonding never ceased.
"Well," I said aloud, "I'm gonna be really blunt and change the subject!" Lizzy actually snickered at that, Darren gave me a grin, and Thad visibly struggled to keep in a laugh. "Thad, why don't you tell us some more about Gravball?"
Thad made a completely unnecessary cough to clear his unobstructed throat. "Oh! Well, sure! Gravball originally came about in 2343 in the southern hemisphere of Mars…"
I listened with rapt attention, because this shit was actually interesting, and the table joined in.
________________________________________
It was after classes that day when I finally had the opportunity to talk to Uzi by myself. Not because of anything I did however. No, it was because I was walking along a hallway by myself, on my way home, and Uzi Doorman jumped me with a wrench in hand. Now to be fair, I wasn't attacked by Uzi Doorman with a wrench, but she did surprise me, was armed with said wrench, and was mildly belligerent, so saying that I was jumped by her wasn't too erroneous.
I'd been walking down said corridor on the way home, going through a mental checklist of what programs to download today (a bunch of stuff for detective work and thinking for contingencies and things the average person would miss, because if I was gonna eventually set up a literal secret lair for my Isekai stuff, I'd need to make sure that it would take someone some serious digging to just stumble across it), and was almost literally walking on autopilot while lamenting the lack of progress on being able to multithread myself, though that might have been for the better, as I considered the ethical consequences of turning myself into a pseudo-gestalt or cloning myself in my own head. As such, I didn't notice a certain angsty purple drone following me until I heard a wrench bang on the wall right behind me.
I'm pretty sure my human ghost nearly jumped out of its shell right there, as I whirled around and saw Uzi there with a wrench in hand and a dent in the wall to her side. "Jesus fucking Chirst!" I shouted. Uzi just raised an eyebrow at my reaction. "Like, what the fuck , Uzi?"
She took a half step back. "You actually know my name?"
Still trying to calm myself down, I quickly restored to my default verbal defense mechanism of sarcasm, and replied, "Am I seriously the only person besides Thad who actually pays attention to names during attendance?"
"Look, what are you planning?" she grilled me.
"Huh?" I said aloud and in my head.
"What is Lizzy planning to have you do to me?" she asked again, tapping the wrench's head into her opposing palm for emphasis. "I'm fed up with waiting for it every day. Just…" she grimaced. "Just get it over with already," she finished, sounding almost… defeated?
In what was already a developing habit, I overclocked my software yet again to give myself a moment to think. One: Fuck this was kinda sad, that this whole time Uzi actually thought we were letting her stew in anticipation for something that would particularly hurt her, and Two: I immediately revised my previous plans to instead download at least three different forms of martial arts to my OS as soon as I was home. Being able to at least defend myself without a weapon was now top priority, right behind getting Uzi to not beat my ass with a wrench here and now.
"There's no plans to mess with you. Lizzy isn't planning to do anything to you, Uzi," I told her.
"Then it's Rebecca's idea?" she accused.
"No!" I stressed.
"What are you planning, then?" Jesus Chirst, this girl was 7, going on 8, and she was already more paranoid than my adult ass.
"Me personally?" I asked her, taking a second to think it over, and then deciding that it would be hilarious to fuck with Uzi, so long as I didn't piss her off enough to actually use the wrench. "I plan to save the world," I half-joked, "but I'm kind of a really long way from actually acting on any of that right now."
"What are you going to do to me?" she shouted at me, brandishing the wrench again and taking a step forwards. "You're keeping people off of me, you even tripped Chad that one time, what are you planning that you're just saving torturing me for yourself?!? Stop messing with me!" she shouted, tears brimming on her optics, and I realized that maybe now wasn't actually the best time for this.
I decided to take a different approach. "So," I began, and Uzi warrily looked at me, "I was thinking that if I wanted to kill Murder Drones, I'd need to fight them in close quarters, where the advantages of their speed, flight, and maneuverability would be mitigated," Uzi opened her mouth but I kept going. "I was personally thinking of using a shotgun, with something like tungsten carbide flechettes in it to pierce their plating, and then since they literally drink our oil, they'd have to be really flammable, so I was thinking of also adding an incendiary component." Uzi blinked, clearly confused, but I still kept going, "Aluminum Oxide to create thermite on firing mixed into the shells to spit out red hot tungsten carbide alongside belching a really short lived cloud of oxidized hellfire seems to be a really good idea, but I'm kinda stumped on how to make it really work , you know?"
Uzi immediately latched onto the idea given to her, previous angst forgotten, as her optics grew on her display. Did I feel bad for taking advantage of an autistic kid by throwing something I knew they'd hyperfixate on in front of them? Yes, but Uzi had a wrench, so to borrow a future phrase from her, morality called this a draw. "You'd need some really heat resistant materials to make the shotgun itself so it wouldn't melt or warp when you fire it, but that could definitely work. Maybe even a magnesium based primer to ignite the thermite on firing the shells, but yeah, that would mess up a Murder Drone real good--" she cut herself off, throwing up her guard even more, and brandished the wrench yet again as she looked at me, and then around the hallway in general. "W-Where's the camera? What are you doing?"
I sighed, and slumped my shoulders, though I did note down what she said for my shotgun shells. "I'm not doing anything," I said. "There's no camera. I'm not messing with you. I was trying to de-escalate by changing the topic to something you were more comfortable with."
"I don't believe you!" she said.
I took a breath in, closed my optics, and sighed. Alright Joe, calm down, I thought. She's only moderately more distrusting than you were for half your life to anything you perceived as a threat, which was basically everyone. Remember, you're doing this to save the world, give her a happy ending, and get her an awesome boyfriend and potentially also girlfriend at the same time, even if I'm currently planning to shoot the fuck out of the latter at least once at some point between now and then.
Aloud, I said, "Fine then. You want me to want something?"
"Aha!" she said. "I knew it!"
I suddenly had the urge to laugh, because if I did I'd almost be laughing at myself from years in the past, but kept my expression neutral. "Answer some questions for me then."
"Huh?" she said, confident expression falling flat. "That's your evil plan?"
"I told you there's no evil plan. Unless you want me to do something evil to you? Which, for the record, I don't want to do."
"NO! Uh, no, I'll answer your dumb questions, bozo!" she said, looking to the side and crossing her arms. Holy crap, I'd forgotten that this girl pirated so much anime but was still a tsundere.
I took in a breath, and held it. "Joseph," I corrected on reflex, before continuing. "Do you… have trouble understanding non-verbal social cues?"
I got another blank stare. "What?"
"I have a hypothesis, and I want to see if you'll confirm it. And, no, I won't say what it is, because that would skew the results. So, do you?"
She blinked again, staring at me, and trying to figure out what hidden angle I was working. Joke was on her, though, I'd already developed the toggle for my blinking animation, and had been cheating at staring contests for over a week by now. "There are non-verbal social cues?" she hesitantly asked.
I fought down the urge to sigh, and turned my systems back to normal operating levels. "Do you have trouble with social understanding, or talking to people in general?"
"Is, is this some way to make fun of me, that I'm a weirdo?"
"No," I said. "I'm not judging you, I'm not building ammunition for insults, I just want some honest answers from you," I reiterated, in a calm, clear tone. "That's it."
Uzi looked down, and held her wrench arm with her other hand, fingers rising and then tapping down on her arm rhythmically. "Y… yeah, I do," she admitted.
"Do you have trouble looking drones in the optics?"
She nodded.
"I already think I know the answer, but you focus really hard on a few specific things, right?"
"Yeah," she said, in a low voice, glancing up at me briefly, optics partly hollow with worry. I just stood there, arms at my sides, and trying not to be intimidating.
"Do you have a constant urge to be doing something with your hands, especially if you're stressed or bored? If you're really emotional, do you have a hard time articulating yourself, even to the point of finding it hard to speak?"
She clenched at her wrench, looked up at me, didn't see a glare or even a deadpan, and then froze, realizing her fingers were tapping away on herself as an embarrassed blush began to creep up on her visor. "Y… ye... yeah, I guess."
"Okay," I said, in a calm voice, "And do you have trouble handling a lot of intense and/or rapid sensory input, or regulating your emotions?"
She suddenly looked up at me and took on another glare. "And what does that mea--" Uzi cut herself off, optics hollowing, and went, "Oh…"
I sighed. Yeah , that basically confirms it. That's like, close to half the freaking symptoms. "Okay," I said. "I, uh, I want to put this delicately, but I don't really know how to do that, so I'm just gonna be blunt and get it over with: Uzi, I think you're on the spectrum, and that's why you have so much trouble with people."
"The what?" she asked me, concern in her tone.
"I'm like, 95% sure that with all the symptoms you just listed off, you have the robot equivalent of autism," I elaborated.
"What?!? I can't have freaking autism! W-we're robots! I knew it!" she shouted, stomping forwards, glare on her face, wrench raised, "You were just messing with me!"
I held up my hands and backpedaled until I hit the wall. "I'm not! We literally sweat! And shit! We can literally get substance addictions! You don't think that JCJ was fucked enough to program the potential for mental disorders into us as well?!?"
Uzi was just winding up a swing when I finished, and froze again, optics hollowing once more as her emotions kept swinging back and forth. "Oh my robo-god." The wrench suddenly slipped from her hands, clattering to the floor, and I slid it away with my foot. "Oh my robo-god," she repeated. "They treated us as slaves in the name of literal windex," she started, "then they sent the Murder Drones to kill us because we just wanted to live free, then they took my mom from me," she stumbled back, sniffling, "and then they made me defective by giving me autism too?!?" She suddenly glared, slapping the side of her head, optics blinking away to flash [self-pity repressed. Uzi Angy] on her screen, and I had to really try hard to not snrk at that. " Fucking humans !" she screamed. "I'm, I, I'm gonna kill all those stupid Murder Drones, and then I'm gonna go to Earth and kill all of those bastards! "
As a former human, I suddenly felt more threatened despite the fact that Uzi was now disarmed. But also, "Wait, you also turned your parental controls off somehow?"
Uzi turned back to me and glared. "I hacked that when I was six so I could start pirating anime," she half-bragged. "Not like my freaking dad has paid attention beyond making sure there was food in the fridge ever since mom died," she muttered that second part, kicking at the floor.
"Uzi," I said, and she glared at me again. "You're not defective. This… this wasn't something you could control. It's not your fault. It's not a bad thing, it just makes you different."
"Oh, cause that's so helpful !" she shouted at me.
"Well, at least you only have autism," I said, continuing before she could go off again. "I literally suffered an identity death less than a month ago, caused by severe brain damage!"
"Don't you mean CPU damage?" she said, raising an eyebrow, anger seemingly momentarily pushed to the side.
I realized my slip, overclocking myself yet again, and I internally deliberated on the possible entertainment factor of messing with Uzi by periodically dropping hints as to who I really am, to see how long it takes her genre savvy metal ass to start connecting the breadcrumbs and realize the truth. But honestly, now wasn't the time for that, so for the moment I just deflected with "Proving my point!" And then I kept going with, "Regardless of my own circumstances, I don't really care if you're on the spectrum. I think it's even kinda cool! Like, you're my emo friend, and you're a freaking gremlin and it's awesome !"
Uzi looked at me like I'd grown a second head. "Y-You're just saying that! And we're not friends!"
"Oh," I said. "Yeah, I guess this is the first time we've actually talked, and you've spent most of it threatening to beat me with a wrench." Uzi blinked, just now noticing she'd dropped it, looking around, until I cleared my throat and pointed. "Kinda kicked it away when you dropped it. Prefer myself without dents, you know?"
That was the wrong thing to say, evidently, and I rapidly reassessed my options as Uzi glared again, but also looked hurt. "Look, uh, do you want to be friends?"
Uzi paused yet again, and managed to focus her gaze directly on mine. "Why do you want to be friends with me ? No one wants to be friends with me," she finished, bitterly.
" I want to be friends with you," I argued. Partly because I saw her and saw myself, partly because I really didn't want to die, and being on team Uzi was a good way to prevent my death, but regardless of the motivations, I did want to be her friend. "From the little I've seen, you get really passionate about your chosen interests, and you're really smart with them, too. We just gotta figure out a way to channel your interests into something that other people can relate to while not having you hog conversations, and then picking up friends will be as easy as finding drones who can understand that you'll have trouble with non-verbal queues or picking up sarcasm. It'll take a bit of extra work, but I don't think that should exclude you from being happy ," I argued.
"You're just saying that, again!" she countered. "And, and where am I gonna even find any drones like that at this point?"
"Again," I said, " I don't mind. I'll be your friend."
She looked at me. Looked at me hard , really struggling to try and see any expression she thought she was missing on my face. "You… you're serious? You're not trying to mess with me?"
"Nope!" I said, popping the p. "Friends, Uzi?" I asked, holding a hand out.
"Bite me!" she spat out, and there was the catchphrase I'd been waiting for, ha! "It's not gonna be that easy!"
"But it's possible?" I said, grin spreading on my face.
"Sh-shut up!" Uzi said.
I shrugged, deciding not to push my luck in this respect. "I'll take it, acquaintance!"
She looked at me with a deadpan. "Really?"
"Well, if you're not a friend, but not an enemy, and we talk to each other, then you're an acquaintance," I concluded.
"Ugh, whatever," she said, almost sounding like Lizzy for a moment, which actually gave me an idea…
"Huh," I said aloud. "You know , I got an idea. Lizzy's birthday is coming up, right?" And yes, before anyone asks, I asked about birthdays (because amnesia) last week, so that I wouldn't be forgetting those. Internal calendars rock… actually, just having an internal supercomputer/smartphone for a brain in general rocked. "And I was thinking of coding a program that could let her Bluetooth her phone to her OS so she can use it at the speed of thought instead of the speed of typing. I know a lot about coding and a bit about engineering and electronics from everything I've downloaded, but your knowledge seems a lot more intrinsic than learned , like mine is, and I wonder if you'd have any better ideas than me."
Uzi looked at me like the second head she'd thought I'd grown suddenly grew a third head out of its size like a Solver tumor. "Why the hell would I do anything for Lizzy?"
I stepped forwards, sweeping a hand out as if presenting something, "Imagine you make it, I give it to her, she loves it , and then I tell her 'Uzi made that, by the way.' Imagine the look on her face! She'd look like she shit an ingot for unironically complimenting your work, and I'd totally screenshot that for you."
Uzi snickered, a truly gremlin grin on her face, but then flinched and went back to a petulant scowl. "That's funny, but that still doesn't explain crap."
"Well," I said, launching into my next argument, "I got Thad to hang out with us today because I was the one who'd been curbing Lizzy and Rebecca's bullying so that only bitches like Rachel are their targets--" Uzi's optics widened as she looked at me, and I changed track. "Are you really that surprised? Like, I don't actually like bullying on people who don't deserve it. That's why I got them to stop messing with you! I saw that whole blow-up with Sam the other week, and they wanted to glue your locker shut again !"
Uzi's hands were fidgeting. "You… you actually got them to lay off me?" She looked up at me for a second before glancing to the side. "There isn't actually a trick? You just, suddenly got a conscience after the CPU damage and just wanted to help me?"
"Well, it started as me feeling really bad about Doll's trauma, then I got roped into sitting with Lizzy, and then I saw what was going on, and I didn't want her to end up a total bitch growing up, so I kinda went literal Renaissance philosophy on her and Rebecca, and then that somehow worked , but yeah, I saw what happened and wanted them to stop messing with you because holy shit , what they wanted to do was fucked up, you know?" I said, kinda just speaking off the top of my head. Uzi blinked, looking at me, and then her optics widened again as her jaw dropped, it evidently finally sinking in that I was actually being honest here.
"I… I…" Uzi kept opening her mouth, fingers twitching about, but didn't seem to be able to articulate what she wanted to say.
I raised a digital eyebrow. "Overwhelmed?"
She nodded, and then flinched, bracing herself as if I was gonna ridicule her. And that kinda hurt. Not personally, because I knew it wasn't that she didn't trust me specifically, but in a sympathetic way because I knew she was only seven and already this jaded. "That's okay," I said, strolling over to the wrench, picking it up, and offering it to her. She looked up at me, really confused. "Something for your hands to mess about with. I trust you not to smack me with it," I said.
Uzi blinked a couple times, clearly nervous, but then snatched the wrench, running her thumb along the screw as she kept adjusting the jaws back and forth. Honestly reminded me of my own absentminded habit of repeatedly opening and closing my wireless headphones case back in my first life. I leaned back against the wall, and just patiently waited. Huh, maybe I really was a bit on the spectrum, myself. Never actually got it professionally checked, but a lot of the online tests I took told me I had a mild version. Would explain how understanding I am with Uzi's own 'tism, and just how much I empathize with her.
According to my internal clock, two minutes and seventeen seconds passed while I waited, before Uzi spoke up. "Thanks," she said in a low voice. "For… for getting me, I guess."
"Evidently," I drawled, "That Murder Puttana knocking all my screws loose did my personality a lot of favors."
Purple optics looked at my light grey pair. "Was that bitch in Italian?"
"What, you think I'm just gonna drop swears in English?" I countered. "But, you're welcome, Uzi."
She smirked, and then, "What… uh what were you talking about earlier?"
"Right," I said, "That…" I took a moment, backtracking on my memory logs by about 5 minutes to run back my train of thought, and picked it up. "So because I got Lizzy and Rebecca to chill on most drones, Thad actually took me up on my request to hang out with us."
"Thad?" Uzi asked. "Like, cool guy Thad? That Thad?"
"Yeah, that Thad. Probably gonna be hanging with us more often as long as everyone else stays on the straight and not-so-narrow. Kelsey's probably a good influence too. Anyways," I went back on topic, "if you're okay with letting them know why you have so much trouble with people, between myself and Thad, we could definitely leverage them into letting you hang out with us, too. Because, like, Lizzy's surprisingly gotten really hooked on my whole 'ideal Machiavellian Queen Bee' idea that I pitched to her. And befriending you would really solidify her realization of it: She'd get the 'loved' half from being able to genuinely befriend the ostracized kid who's also Khan's kid, and the 'feared' half of that ideal would be satisfied by the implicit threat of what Lizzy could leverage you to do to people who piss her off, either politically from you being Khan's kid, or personally from something you yourself could do." Uzi blinked dumbly at me a few times. "I actually thought this shit out, you know?" I said to her gobsmacked expression.
"You… you really did think this out, didn't you?" she said, only really phrasing it as a question by technicality. Uzi looked really contemplative for a few seconds, and then shook her head. "Do… do you really think they'd be okay with… with me?"
"Thad? 100%. He's just cool like that." Uzi totally nodded in agreement with me. "Everyone else? I ain't gonna hesitate to call them out on their stronzata if they try anything," I said. "I don't think they will , but I won't stand for it."
The Solver-to-be took another glance at me, thinking things over yet again, and then spoke up. "Okay, that's a legit reason that Lizzy could care, and I get you suddenly have a conscience, but…" she took a breath, "Why do you care about me specifically? I, I get why you care about me in general, but why me specifically ?"
I sighed. Man, the fucking trauma I had to help these kids cope with… it was gonna give me trauma before it was done, at this rate.
"Because I don't think it's fair that you deserve to suffer for something out of your control. Also, I'm morbidly curious to see what kind of absolutely unhinged engineering or weapons projects you can get up to, and being your friend would one: let me discern that better, and two: makes it less likely that I'd be a test subject to anything dangerous you make. So if some part of you is still convinced I have ulterior motives beyond altruism and the utility you could offer to myself and my friends, its morbid curiosity, the desire to cultivate and direct your skills to see just how far we can take them, and a healthy dose of self-preservation. Because news flash: I don't wanna die, there's a bunch of Murder Drones outside who want to kill us all, and you want to kill them and seem to have the skills to build or at least design something that can do so. Friendship with you increases the odds of survival for everyone involved." And though Uzi didn't know it, I meant more than just against the Murder Drones here, I meant with The Plot as well. My thoughts flashed back to a screenshot of a DM from Liam Vickers himself, mentioning that Nori and Yeva were canonically besties who were a terrifying power duo, and that Uzi and Doll could have very much been the next generation of that if the Solver hadn't psy-opped things to shit. If I could get the daughters of 002 and 048 to build even half the bond they had in the Sisters fanfic, this Copper 9 wasn't gonna know what fucking hit it.
Uzi looked at me yet again, really hard, this time, really trying to dig into my facial expression the best she could. "You're actually serious about this?" she asked… begged me. "You're not gonna pull the rug out from under me at the last second and humiliate me?"
Jesus Christ my no-longer-extant heart was bleeding for this poor girl. "I will straight-up punch Lizzy or Rebecca in the fucking jaw and get my ass in detention if they try shit," I said, dead-honest.
Uzi looked down, still thumbing the screw on her wrench. "Okay," she said in a low voice. "I'm gonna trust you. But… please don't make me regret this," she pleaded.
"I won't," I promised her. Because fuck me in a not-sexy way, I was gonna fight to give all these kids a life to live. Mostly to save my own ass, but Solver-damn-it if these drones weren't growing on my long-malnourished conscience.
She looked back up at me, giving a hesitant smile, and I returned it. "Alright," she said.
"Sooooooooo," I dragged it out. "Friends?"
"Bite me!" she said, and she only gave a petulant glare when my grin grew at the catchphrase. "But… if you're really honest about this, then… friends…" she mumbled.
I held out a fist, and she looked at it for a moment before she bumped it with her own.
Right , I thought, that went surprisingly well. One more hurdle and Operation: Literally the Neglected Children of Outpost 3 is fully underway.