Chapter Text
The reploid that Sophia Microelectronics Research had dubbed Project Convergence booted to full awareness on a lovely sunny afternoon, confused and disoriented, to a room full of jubilant cheers. He didn't know what the sound was, just that it was >W.33098-SEN: Decibel comfort threshold surpassed. and everything was >E.24205-SEN: Failure to calibrate optical sensors to ambient light level. He tried to put a—something? A hand? Yes, that sounded right—to where it was too much to process, to block some of it out, but three things that might have been hands responded, and he couldn't tell which was which or where he was even trying to move them to, because he saw them from six different optical sensors, all of which were calibrating independently…
The reploid's first real, fully-processed sensation was the reploid equivalent of nausea, from three systems at once. He pushed himself off the table, snapping cables. One of him knocked into a cart, sending it rolling away. His feet tangled in a cord, but he couldn't tell which feet, so he simply kicked with all of them, staggering away from the bright and loud. Moving things parted around him, giving him space. One of them tried to reach for him, but another stopped them, saying something that the reploid couldn't quite make out.
He got to a…this was a closet, he realized, not sure where the knowledge came from. Things went in it. It looked dark and quiet, and he wanted that. He shoved himself—himselves?—into the closet, and grabbed the door with any number of hands, slamming it shut.
Except it was still too bright and too loud. Wasn't he in the dark and quiet? The reploid tried to single out the parts of him that were still outside the closet and found it easier to focus, now that some of him was hiding from the sensory overload. He fumbled around with that self. There was a door, right? The rest of him was behind a door. Disoriented hands found a door and opened it. He fell inside, and it closed behind him.
This room was quiet, but it wasn't as dark, and the rest of him wasn't here. Where did he go? He could feel himself nearby somewhere. Two of him said the third was that way. The third said the first two were this way. The reploid found his arms and legs, some of them at least, and managed to move across the floor so that all his parts were closer together. There was a wall in the way, but it was close enough. All three of him curled into a ball, while his ability to process input very, very slowly caught up with his reality.
After a long time, or at least for most of the reploid's entire life thus far, there was a gentle knock on the door. One of the doors. The reploid wasn't sure which. "Hello," said a voice, on the other side of it. "Do you mind if I come in? I won't be loud," the voice said.
The newborn reploid had not tried speaking yet, and his reply came out of all three of him, which made him jump in surprise a little. "Okay," he said.
A human opened the door, slowly. It turned out to be the door in the room that was still bright, which he'd decided was probably a bathroom. They were wearing something white, but the reploid didn't look directly at them. It was too much detail for him to process. The human closed the door, quietly, and sat on the floor. "Do you want me to dim the lights?" they asked.
"Please," the reploid answered. The two of him in the closet heard each other, and the one of him in the bathroom didn't, which was disorienting. The human reached up, and the lights in the bathroom got quieter, which was a great relief.
"How are you feeling?" the human asked. They had a soft voice, which the reploid appreciated.
"Bad," he said. "I think…I'm not sure."
"It's okay to be unsure," the human told him. "I'm sorry you feel bad. My name is Wendy Myers."
"Do I have a name?" the reploid asked.
"You do," Wendy Myers told him. "Project Convergence. It's not a very pretty name, though, so we've been calling you Virgil."
Virgil had no reference for which names were pretty and which weren't. "Is Virgil…a pretty name?" he asked.
"I think it is," Wendy Myers said.
Virgil considered this, with a thoughtful frown in triplicate. "I think…Wendy Myers is a pretty name," he concluded.
The human Wendy Myers smiled at him, which made his face do the same thing. "Thank you. You can call me just Wendy, if you want."
"Okay."
The two sat in silence for a few minutes, looking at each other. Nobody had told Virgil that humans considered staring to be rude, and thus, he didn't mind the situation. Now that it was darker and quieter, he could stand to look at Wendy without feeling like his systems would be overwhelmed with sensory information. She had black hair, pulled up in two puffs on top of her head. She had brown skin. She had dark eyes. Virgil realized, suddenly, that he must look like something to her, too, but he couldn't imagine what. So he did the obvious thing.
"What do I look like?" he asked.
"Well, you've got three of you, but you look the same on all three, mostly," Wendy explained. "You have a mostly white chassis. Your synthetic skin is brown, like mine, and you have dark brown eyes. This one of you has red trim. One of your other two has orange trim, and the third one has yellow trim. If you want, there's a mirror there. You can see your reflection in it." She pointed at a section of the wall, over the sinks.
Virgil looked up, and sure enough, it looked like there was more bathroom in the wall. He very carefully sorted out which legs were in the room with Wendy and stood up using only that pair. The shiny part of the wall made the bathroom look twice as large, and it also made Virgil look like he had a fourth self that he couldn't sense, which made him a bit dizzy so he sat back down.
"Sorry for the rude awakening," Wendy said, still in a soothingly calm, quiet voice. "We were so excited to meet you that we forgot you might not understand what was happening."
"Oh. Why were you excited to meet me?" Vergil asked. He found that he could practice wiggling his fingers on one self at a time. It helped calm him down and sort out which self was which, so he did that.
"Well," Wendy replied, pausing to think of how to word her reply, "you were difficult to make, and we've worked very hard on you, so we're happy that you're awake now."
"Do you have three of you?" asked Virgil.
"Just the one me that's here talking to you now," Wendy explained. "Humans only have one body ever. Almost all reploids, too, and then even the ones that have more than one body only use one at a time. You're special."
Virgil crinkled his nose in triplicate. "I'm confusing to be."
"Don't worry. I'm here to help you learn how to understand the world and yourself. It won't stay confusing."
"That's good." Virgil continued drumming his fingers, all thirty of them, in order. The more he did it, the easier it became, and the calmer he felt.
"Do you want to go outside? I can go first and ask most of the team to leave for now. They'll all want to meet you, but that doesn't have to happen until you're ready," Wendy offered.
Virgil looked around the bathroom, and the closet, though he couldn't see much in the closet. "...maybe soon," he conceded. "It's easier when I don't need to watch all of me at once."
"I'm sure it is," Wendy agreed. "I'll go out to the lab and let everyone know you're okay, so they don't worry, and then when you want to come out, you can. Is that alright?"
Virgil nodded. "Yeah. That's alright." Wendy stood up and went out the door. Virgil could hear the conversation she had through the doors.
"How's he doing, Dr. Myers? Is he maintaining cohesion?"
"He's okay, just overwhelmed." That was Wendy's voice. "I think we may have underestimated the sensory processing impact, at least to start. But he's okay, he just needs a lot less noise and fewer people. He's still only forty-five minutes old. It's not unheard of for even a standard model reploid to take upwards of eight hours to settle, and keep in mind that he's entirely new territory, so we could be looking at a full day or even longer before he's synthesizing sensory data well enough."
"You heard the doc. Fewer people, everyone. Come on. Let's go, move it out. We don't need to crowd the kid."
"Drinks on me if anyone wants to go down to the pub and celebrate."
Soon enough, Wendy tapped on the door again. "It's a lot quieter now, Virgil. There's a couple of my colleagues still here, but I think you'll like meeting them."
The closet door opened, and one of Virgil peeked out. The room was mostly empty of humans, and some things had been pulled over the windows to make it darker. He crept out, glancing around timidly, one body at a time. At least he could tell them apart enough now to walk.
There were two other humans, and their names turned out to be Leonardo and Chen. They had a lot of questions, but Wendy reminded them to slow down and not stress Virgil out, which he appreciated. Chen in particular asked Virgil to do a lot of different gestures. He had each of his bodies touch his own nose, then the nose of the self to his left, in a little circle. This was pretty hard. Virgil watched Chen's finger with all six eyes, trying to track it as he moved it up, down, and to the sides, then Chen asked him to do it with just one pair of eyes at a time. Then he assigned each body a number, which Wendy said was temporary and he didn't have to keep the numbers, and tapped different places on each one while Virgil told him where he'd been touched and on which body. They were kind to him, though, so he didn't mind all this too much.
After a while, Chen and Leonardo decided that they were done for the day, and Wendy offered to help show Virgil how to use his recharging pods. He had three, one for each body, since they had separate batteries. They were nice and quiet inside, with a tinted lid and soft cushions, which was nice. They made a very interesting humming sound too, which he could feel the same way he could feel where his other selves were.
"Electromagnetics," Wendy told him, and he realized that he knew all about that, now that she'd mentioned it. "It won't disrupt your intrasystem communications, though, so don't worry about that. If you like the sound, we can just leave it, but if you don't, I can install something to dampen it."
"It's fine." Getting all three of him into the pods was a bit of a struggle, and he ended up using just one body at a time, with Wendy helping him.
"Rest well, Virgil. Tomorrow's another day."
"Will you be here tomorrow too?" Virgil asked.
"Yes, if you want me to be," Wendy said, with a smile.
Virgil didn't have to think about that for very long. "Definitely. So I'll…see you tomorrow?"
"It's a deal."
Virgil wasn't sure he knew how to rest, once Wendy left, but having more or less the same sensory input from all three of him made it easier to relax, at least. The knowledge was in his mind, somehow, the same way he knew language and what a bathroom and a closet were. He activated whatever process seemed like the right one, and within a few minutes, he was recharging and defragmenting peacefully, three times at once.
"Good morning, sleepy-circuits," came Wendy's voice, which was odd, because hadn't she just left? But now the sun was up, Virgil's systems were reporting full batteries and a successful memory defragment, and Wendy was back. "How are you feeling?"
"I don't know yet," he answered. "Not like yesterday. I think…better?"
"Fantastic. You took thirteen hours to defragment, but I didn't think we should interrupt you."
"Is that good or bad?" Virgil asked. He reached up with all three hands and tapped the same button inside of all three pods, and their covers slid up simultaneously. If he focused just a little, he could use only the self closest to Wendy to talk to her, which was a lot quieter for him, and probably her too.
"It's long, but it's not necessarily bad. When you sleep, your attention systems go through your sensory input from the day and decide what's worth storing and what's not as important. You generate three times as much sensory data as most reploids, though, so I'm not surprised you took longer."
That day, Virgil felt much more at home in his three selves. Managing them all at once was a lot of effort, still, but Wendy encouraged him to keep trying, and to not use just one while ignoring the other two. He walked into a lot of doorframes by accident, but by the afternoon, she had him picking up different objects, using all three of his selves. It was difficult, and frustrating, he thought. Sometimes he would try with the wrong self and end up grasping at air. Wendy reminded him that it was just practice, though, and it was okay to be wrong, so he tried to not let it bother him.
Chen was there, too, taking a lot of notes on a tablet. There were other humans, which Virgil found out were the researchers who had worked together to build him, and they came and said hello to him one at a time over the course of the day. Virgil tried to remember all their names and faces, but it was hard to look directly at them; when his attention systems kicked into higher-power processing to analyze minute facial details and expressions, he felt like he didn't have the bandwidth left to think clearly anymore.
Every day was about the same, for several weeks. Virgil learned that Wendy was a researcher in the field of reploid consciousness, and the head of the Project Convergence developmental team. What this meant, to him at least, was that he mostly interacted with her. She was smart, and nice to him, and no matter how frustrated he got at trying to assemble a puzzle with three different bodies at once, she had a way of speaking to him that made him feel like everything was okay.
He also learned that his three selves had different names. The researchers called them Motive, Drive, and Focus. He asked Wendy which name he was supposed to use, since he was already Virgil, and she told him not to worry about it. "Think of it like…this is my left hand, right? I only have one body, so if I say, 'my left hand,' everyone knows which left hand I mean. If you say, 'my left hand,' you have three of them, so we wouldn't know which one you mean. But if you said, 'Focus's left hand,' we'd know that was your left hand with the orange trim. But all of your hands still belong to Virgil. Does that make sense?"
Sometimes, when they didn't have any specific research to do on Virgil's development, Wendy gave his three selves different hairstyles. It took a long time multiplied by all three of him, but she taught him how to wash his hair, comb it, and do all kinds of interesting things with it, which he liked. "Now, you can get away with doing this a lot less, because you've got synthetic hair and skin, so you aren't building up dead skin cells and oils," she told him, "but humans with our hair type have a wash day about once a week, or more if they need it. My mother used to do this for me when I was little, so I wanted to do it for you."
Over time, using his three selves became easier. Virgil didn't understand any of the concepts behind it, but from what he could understand, he was designed to have an especially flexible sense of self that would allow him to learn how to be all three of him as one being. But first, he did have to learn. Reploids with human-like and animal-like bodies were built already knowing how to use their bodies. Virgil had the basics of how to use a body, but how exactly he would synthesize using three bodies, they weren't sure. In fact, watching him learn was the entire point of Project Convergence, he came to discover, which was why Chen and Leonardo took so many notes about him all the time.
"I have a question," Virgil said one day, when he was about three months old. Well, one of him said that. The other two were across the lab, trying very awkwardly to play ping-pong with himselves.
"What's that?" Wendy asked.
"All three of me are connected, right? And my consciousness is across all three of me?"
Wendy nodded, tapping something into a tablet, then looked up at him. "That's right."
"What would happen if one of me got disconnected?"
She made a face that Virgil had come to recognize as her How Do I Explain This To You Best face since she said that sometimes when she made the face, brows scrunched inward a little bit, lips pushed out. "Well…we aren't sure, actually. The best case scenario is that it would just keep being you but separately for a while, and then when you were reconnected, all of you would synchronize up again. But I don't know if that might have other effects on you. Are you worried about that happening?"
"Not really, I was just thinking." He pressed another puzzle piece into place. One of him missed the ping-pong ball and caught it right in an open optical sensor, which didn't hurt, but made all three of him recoil in surprise. Wendy suppressed a smile.
"You know, your coordination is good enough recently that if you'd like to, we could leave the lab and walk around downtown soon." Virgil looked up with all three of him, his two ping-pong playing selves swiveling his heads towards her.
"Really?" he asked, too excited to suppress speaking in triple unison.
"Really, if you want to. Since there's a lot going on outdoors, I think we'd probably just bring one of you, so you don't get overwhelmed. Maybe next week? We'll see how well you progress and decide soon."
Virgil had looked outside plenty of times, but it hadn't occurred to him to go there. It was bright, for one, and busy. His sensory processing had developed much more slowly than the rest of him, and, he was pretty sure, much more slowly than anyone had expected. Wendy never said so directly to him, but he overheard plenty of conversations, being in three places at once as he was, and no shortage of them were about him.
It ended up being three weeks later, because Wendy decided that it was past time that Virgil received the standard reploid orientation course, which she administered herself. She had designed large parts of it herself, Virgil learned, because she was at the top of her field. This was almost as interesting to him as going outside. Some of it he'd picked up already by simply being around the researchers and engineers, but it took him a while to understand a lot of the contents about emotions. Virgil had lived a sheltered life thus far, and many of the feelings and situations that the lessons talked about seemed entirely foreign.
Finally, the day came, and Wendy met him early in the morning in his room. Well, early for him. Virgil still took quite a lot longer to defragment than the average reploid, but he found that he felt a lot calmer the next day if he didn't rush it. Leaving the task unfinished tended to guarantee that he would have to spend at least some of the next day with four of his hands over four of his eyes just to get the last two to work right without simply overloading him, and that was assuming that nobody was playing music in the lab.
"Ready to go?" Wendy asked him.
"You look nice today," Virgil said, because the lessons had talked about how to have positive social interactions, and he noticed that she was wearing an outfit he hadn't seen before. She had a sky-blue dress, with brown and yellow flowers on it, and a white jacket with short sleeves.
"Thank you," she beamed. It was funny. Whenever she smiled, he did too, like she was a fourth one of him, and the expression was so big it took all of his faces to display.
"What's the flower on your dress called?"
Wendy pulled the fabric of her dress taut so the design was easier to see. "They're sunflowers. They're in season right now, so if we're lucky we might see some in the park."
"I'll send Motive with us, so we can both match," Virgil decided, stepping forward with his yellow-trimmed self. "What should I do with Drive and Focus while we're out?"
"Up to you. It's a free day, so you can do whatever you want, but I think you'll probably have a better time if you just focus on being outside."
"I think…I'll just do that, then," Virgil decided, sitting down on the small couch in his room with his two other selves. They could stay put while he paid attention to Motive.
They stopped by the front desk to let the receptionist know that they were going out, then, finally, Virgil stepped outside for the first time. He hadn't realized that the sky would sound so…resonant. The summer breeze made all sorts of noises that he'd never heard before. Leaves danced on the trees, the pulley on the flagpole in front of the laboratory clanked, and midmorning birdsong came from all around. The freshly-mown grass smelled bright green, and the asphalt smelled like hot oil. It was so bright and open that he had to stop for a moment and process all of the new inputs.
"Not too much, is it?" Wendy glanced to him with cheerful concern.
Virgil shook his head. "I'm okay, it's just…" He looked around again, with wide, brown eyes. "It's a lot. But it's a good kind of a lot."
"If you need a break, just let me know and we can stop somewhere."
He nodded, starting to get his bearings. "Where are we going?"
Wendy pulled out her phone, bringing up a map to show him. "I was thinking we could go downtown to the park, maybe look around at some of the shops. Let me know if your connection to the rest of you feels at all weak or slow or even just different while we're out, okay? It shouldn't, you have a good radius and satellite connectivity on top of that, but we haven't tested taking your bodies farther apart than the length of the main lab building, so I'd rather be safe."
They got into Wendy's car, and she showed Virgil how to fasten the seat buckle. He'd seen this in his lessons, but he'd never done it before, so he didn't mind the help. Soon they were gliding along one of the elevated highways, with Virgil glued to the passenger side window as he tried to take in the view of downtown Abel City. It gleamed in the morning sun, all glass and metal and concrete. The pictures he'd seen had not been able to do it any justice, he thought. It was just so much larger than a screen or even a projection.
Virgil's signal strength held strong, and after some time they came back to ground level and Wendy found a place to park in a big structure full of other cars. They got out, and, because he was so busy gawking at everything, Wendy took Virgil's arm and led him down the sidewalk. "The park is a few blocks that way," she told him, pointing, "but I think it'd be fun to wrap around this way first and see the fountain, and then go up past the shops."
"Yeah," Virgil agreed, hearing about half of what she said. The buildings were so tall, he had to crane his neck to see the sky in between them. "Wait, there's a fountain? With water in it?"
"There sure is!" But she didn't rush him. Eventually, after asking questions about almost every new thing he saw, they arrived at the fountain. It was made out of dark brown granite, great slabs of it that sparkled in the sun, carved into flowing organic shapes down which the water spilled. It was one of the most fascinating things Virgil had ever seen.
"What's it for?" he asked, mentally tracing the sunlit ripples in the water. He wished he could touch it, but it was in the middle of a lot of water. It looked like Wendy's voice sounded to him, he thought.
"It's not for anything, really, it just looks nice. But it's important for things to look nice, too, since that makes people happier when they're around it. That's called artwork, when it's something that just exists to make people happier."
Once Virgil had gazed his fill of the fountain, the two of them walked down the busy sidewalk. Being surrounded by unfamiliar people was dizzying, but it wasn't as bad as when he first booted up. Knowing that Wendy was there gave him such a sense of security that he could tolerate the bustle better.
Virgil stopped to press his face to every storefront they passed. There were bright clothes, shiny shoes, colorful toys, fancy flowers, all kinds of food…he had never really thought about how many things there were in the world. Of course, the food had nothing to do with him, but he still examined the menu with interest, just because he'd never seen it before.
An unfamiliar sound rose over the busyness of the street, and a strange silence fell over everyone. Virgil paused, too.
"...It's not test day for the storm sirens," Wendy murmured, looking up.
Virgil barely had time to register the sound, let alone understand what was happening, before the impact. His sensors reeled with >W.24205-SEN: Failure to calibrate optical sensors to ambient light level. and >W.33098-SEN: Decibel comfort threshold surpassed. and >E.04877-SEN: Failure to process proprioceptive input. and cold terror. For several moments he couldn't even find his Motive-self, but as the shock wore off, he began to process. He was on his side. Something heavy was on him. He didn't know where Wendy was.
He didn't know where Wendy was.
Virgil sat up, pushing at whatever it was pinning him to the sidewalk. It turned out to be a tree branch, leaves scorched and still smoking in the heat of the explosion that had rocked the street. Glass rained everywhere, sparkling in the sun and tinkling as it hit the ground. He scrambled to his feet, once he could do so.
"Wendy?" he called, panic rising in his circuits. Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm, stay calm. Virgil drummed all thirty of his fingers against his thighs, reflexively, then left twenty of them running in the background. "Wendy?"
A cough from under a steel bench alerted him to her position. "Wendy!" he called again, running to her. His leg was unsteady and the paneling bent, but he compensated and ignored the warnings it threw. The blast had thrown her to the ground, hard, and she had rolled, coming to a stop under the bench.
"Virgil," she rasped, throat hoarse with pain and the dust in the air. "Run. Get indoors."
"Not without you," Virgil protested. He reached for her and picked her up. She was surprisingly light. Somehow, he had always assumed that humans would weigh more. Wendy fit easily into his arms, but her dress was splattered with bright red.
Wendy groaned. "C-careful, I," she hissed. "I…something sharp hit me, I don't know what…" She tried to press a hand to the red, but twitched in pain, jerking it away. A massive shadow flew overhead, helicopter blades audible over the chaos, but its source was hidden in the dust and rising smoke. "W-we have to hide, Virgil."
He ran, Wendy coughing painfully in his arms. The nearest storefront was a little café, the plate glass front windows blown out. Virgil leapt the low wall and scrambled for a door in the back. It was locked, so he picked up one foot and kicked it open with more force than he had realized he could even bring to bear. Inside there was a storage room, with bags of coffee on shelves and several stainless refrigerators and a sink, and a door standing open to the rear of the building where the staff had already fled. There was another door labeled 'office,' which wasn't locked. He ducked inside, kicking it closed behind them, and turned the lights on.
There wasn't much, just a desk and computer, some shelves filled with plastic three-ring binders, and a battered little sofa. He laid Wendy on the sofa, as carefully as he could, and locked the door behind them as if that would protect them.
"Virgil," Wendy said, voice trembling. She reached for him with one hand, which he took. "I'm sorry, I'm s-so sorry, this wasn't…I didn't even imagine…are you okay?" she asked.
"I'm okay," he answered, realizing this was the first time in his life he had ever lied. "But you're hurt. How do I fix you?"
"I don't…think you can." She still had her fingers curled around the red welling through her sunflower dress; now that they were holding still, Virgil realized, a twisted piece of metal protruded between them, buried deep in her ribs. "I think…I can't even apply pressure to it, it's…"
"No. No, no no. I'll carry you. Someone can fix you. I can get us away from here. We can go back to the car, and…"
Wendy pulled him closer, weakly, and tried to smile for him. His face tried to mirror it, but he was shaking so hard he couldn't do it. "Virgil. Listen to me. Okay?" She folded his hand to her cheek, streaked with dirt and blood, and her skin was an ashen brown color he'd never seen before. "Run out the back door. As fast as you can."
"I don't want to leave you," Virgil said, voices cracking. He had no idea how many of him were speaking. He couldn't even begin to keep track. "I won't. Please don't ask me to."
"I know," she said, "but you have to. I don't know what will happen to you, if Motive loses connection. P-please. For me."
"No," he protested. He had never told her no before, either, and he felt horrible for it, but leaving her in danger…it wasn't even an option. Even if he couldn't take her out of the danger, either.
Wendy laughed, haltingly, and it trailed off into a groan and a grimace of pain. A deep, percussive boom shook the entire building, and the lights flickered. "You're growing up s-so fast. So f-fast," she said, and Virgil didn't know what to do. He knelt by the couch and buried his face in her neck, unable to stop himself from shaking in triplicate. He wanted to hold her so tightly she couldn't slip away from him, but he was afraid of hurting her more.
"I love you," he said, even though he hardly understood the words. It had to be true, because his chest felt like his entire power core was being hollowed out a little more with every moment that Wendy faded. "I don't care what happens to me. It can't be worse than…than…" He choked up, unable to even say the thought.
"I've loved you since before you were activated," Wendy murmured, though the words were a bit slurred. She stroked his face with her free hand, leaving it streaked red. "More than a project t-to me. My child. S-survive. Please."
Virgil nodded, trying to put on a brave face, but it kept pulling in unfamiliar directions. "I will. I will. I promise I will."
A third explosion rocked the building, scrambling his sensors even more than they already were. When the dust cleared enough to see, Virgil realized that Wendy was not coughing. Or breathing. Or anything. She was as limp as a doll, eyes unseeing. Whatever it was that made her Wendy had gone, and he couldn't do anything to stop it.
Virgil curled up next to the couch, burying his face in her cooling neck and holding her hands. He didn't even know how to cry, so he just stayed there, servomotors trembling, making a sound with his voice that he didn't recognize. There was a fourth explosion. The walls cracked and the ceiling fell, and he forgot to even be afraid, because he didn't know how to feel anything anymore.
And then, wrenching vertigo. Disorientation. He couldn't find his arms he couldn't find his legs he couldn't find himself he couldn't see or hear but he couldn't have been deactivated because the flood of critical warning messages just kept coming drowning out everything—
Someone was shaking him, he realized, very slowly, and the room drifted back into focus, one pixel at a time. The room? What room? His room? Right, he was here too, he was here twice and once in the city, he'd almost forgotten—
But then why was he only here once? He could feel himself but he couldn't find himself but then he saw himself but he wasn't controlling that self—
"Shh, it's okay, shh, I'm alive, I'm alive," his other self said, wide-eyed, face still etched with raw grief. His other self was holding him by the upper arms, as if trying to shake sense into himself. "Please. She told me to survive. I have to survive. Just…stay calm, stay calm, stay calm, stay calm, stay calm, like Wendy told me to, right? She wanted me to stay calm. I can stay calm."
He looked down at his hands. Orange? Orange trim. His other self had red trim. His missing self…had yellow trim. Right. So he must be…Focus. That sounded right. But why couldn't he—
He looked up and locked eyes with his other self, and he realized, slowly, both of him coming to the conclusion separately, that he couldn't sense anything out of his other self at all. He might as well have been looking at a different reploid.
"Oh, no," his red self, Drive, said. "Oh, no. No, no, no, I don't know how to—I don't know how to reconnect. Why can't I reconnect? Why am I not…why am I not you? Why are you not me?"
Focus opened his mouth, tried to respond, but all that came out was a harsh electronic sound. Not that he knew what he wanted to say in the first place, but the sound of his own, strange voice startled him into quiet. Drive simply wrapped his arms around Focus and held onto him tightly, as if he could physically merge them back together, but even though Focus could detect Drive's signal, his signal, right there in front of him…he couldn't read it. It was just a sensation, the data itself meaningless. And Drive couldn't read his, either. He had split, instantly and horrifyingly, into two Virgils.
Chen burst through the door. "Virgil, there you are! We have to go. Come on. We're evacuating. Mavericks have taken downtown and they're heading this way. Where are Motive and Dr. Myers?" He must have read something in their eyes and the strange way that Drive refused to let go of Focus, because his expression shifted slowly to one of dawning horror, but he swallowed hard, and made his voice gentle, the way Wendy used to. "...Let's get away first, and then you can tell me what happened."
Later, much later, when things were safe again, they all wore black, and they buried a box full of sunflowers, because they didn't have Wendy and Motive to put in it.
"What's going to happen to us?" Drive asked once they got back to the lab, because Focus still couldn't speak, and while Chen and Leonardo knew a little sign language, it wasn't really enough to communicate with Focus. He and Drive had worked together to learn a lot of sign language, so they could at least talk with each other, and Drive didn't mind translating.
"Well," said Chen, "we're going to continue Wendy's work. I think that's what she would have wanted."
"Probably," Drive agreed.
'Wendy would have asked me what I wanted,' Focus signed, looking miserable. 'I don't want to be studied without her. It's not the same.'
'Yeah,' Drive signed back. 'But what am I going to do about it? Besides, Chen is nice enough.'
'I guess,' Focus signed, with little enthusiasm.
They still both thought of the other as part of themselves, and tended to call their shared existence 'I' and 'me,' even though they had never reconnected. They had concluded that they probably never would. Even if they did, would it help? They'd been separate for long enough now that they might not have fit back together properly, and if it was anything like the process of splitting apart, neither of them wanted to try.
Wendy's research partners tried. They really did. Drive had to give them credit for that much. They didn't know about wash day, or anything at all about taking care of their hair type, so Drive took over and made sure his and Focus's hair didn't mat. Sometimes he wished it wasn't so hard, but then he thought about how Wendy had designed them to look like her, and he felt bad for wishing that. Leonardo and Chen did their best to look after the one-turned-two reploids, and it was never the same, but it wasn't bad, either.
Some days it wasn't like much of anything, really. Drive wondered if some of his emotional processing had died with Motive, or stayed with Focus. He had fewer sensory processing issues now, while Focus seemed to struggle as much as they ever had as a single self, so anything was possible, probably.
Months passed, turning into years. The Maverick War ended. Leonardo retired, then Chen, and one by one, the remaining researchers that Virgil had known—they still called themselves and each other Virgil sometimes, when nobody was looking—were replaced by other researchers, who had not been there when they were activated, who did not think of them as their child.
Virgil belonged to the laboratory itself, after that. They were nobody's project, but neither did they have anywhere to go. Drive had learned along the way to assist with other projects, so at least they were allowed to stay indefinitely, and Focus…tried. Drive knew his heart wasn't in it. What he really wanted to do was paint, and he was good at it. Occasionally, someone would start a new research project based on him, about reploids and creativity, and while Focus never said no to being studied, Drive knew he didn't really want to say yes, either, and hung over him protectively the entire time.
He didn't have a lot of emotions, but the ones he did have told him to take care of Focus, because Wendy couldn't anymore. He could do that. It was satisfying. Leonardo and Chen had wanted to continue Wendy's work, but they couldn't take care of Virgil like she had. Drive could. That was his part of the work, and he didn't have to retire.
The day came when Sophia Microelectronics Research had their funding slashed. They were closing, the CEO announced, at a meeting in the main lab. Drive wasn't surprised. He'd watched the staff slowly dwindle over the past few years.
'>What am I going to do?' Focus asked him. They'd learned, over the years of being watched much less closely, that reploids had an entire nonverbal language of diagnostic codes, and Focus had taken to it with incredible ease. Drive had to work to catch up, but he had, and the two of them now used it with each other more than sign language. It felt more like being a single self again.
'>What do I want to do?' Drive asked back.
Focus thought for a long time, arms crossed, staring out the window of their room. He didn't like going outside much, but he loved watching the outdoors happen, and Drive had started a flower garden just outside so that Focus would have more to watch. He'd discovered, along the way, that he rather liked gardening, which was a surprise to both of them.
'>I want…' Focus started, but paused. 'I think I might want too much.'
'>You can say it without having to do it, whatever it is. I won't laugh at you.'
Focus turned to him and switched to sign language, which he only did if they were alone and he wanted to say something so secret that he didn't want to risk any other reploids overhearing it through a wall. 'I want to go see where I died. I know, it's a bad idea, and we can't do it, but—'
Drive began signing partway through Focus's thoughts, which was unusual. He usually let Focus finish thoughts, no matter how long and rambling they became. 'I want that too.'
'Oh.' Focus stared at him in surprise, though really, Focus stared at Drive's chassis. Neither of them liked eye contact, and so neither of them saw a need for it.
'I could go, but I'm not sure I can come back if I do. And I might not be able to cross the wall at all,' Drive signed, pensively. 'But if that's what both of me want to do, I can probably find a way. Reploids do it all the time, and sometimes humans do, too.'
'I'd be called irregular, if I go there. It's a bad idea.'
Drive shrugged. 'I'm irregular now. I've been irregular since I stopped being Virgil. I'm just not dangerous…and I still wouldn't be dangerous, even if I went into the quarantine zone.' He paused, then signed a little more emphatically, 'I want everything you want. If you want to go, I want to go, and I'll keep us safe. I promised Wendy I'd survive.'
'Maybe I'll paint the quarantine zone,' Focus mused, fingers flying. 'If anybody lives out there, it must be so sad for them. They'd need something to make it nicer. And if they don't, I guess that's more space for me to paint.'
'I wonder if there's flowers there,' Drive thought with his hands. 'I never did get to see the park…I wonder if it's still there.'
On the day that Sophia Microelectronics Research closed for good, Focus and Drive left as free reploids. They couldn't belong to a laboratory that didn't exist, after all. They'd earned some money of their own in their later years as lab assistants, and spent a little bit of it on a huge bouquet of sunflowers, and some of it on paints and brushes, and some of it on flower seeds. A little more of it went to a backpack with some basic supplies: coolant, self-repair nanite fluid, and just in case, a few crystalline power core replacements, though those were expensive. The rest, they spent on paying a human to very quietly open an underground door for them, and then to open it again when they came back.
That they never came back was not the human's problem.