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“Will it kill him?” Proto Man asked, gesturing to his scrambler chip, and Albert could see how much he was trying not to care. His psychology doctorate was useful!
“No,” he said, because technically it did not have to kill Mega Man. “But it will put him out of commission with a nasty headache.” If Albert wanted it to, that is all it would do. “Think of a human with the flu.”
“Can’t relate, not human.”
Albert knew the answer to the question he was about to ask. Still, he wanted to give Proto Man a chance to at least deny it. “Do you want something that kills him?”
“Don’t worry, I got it,” Proto laughed, taking the scrambler chip and utterly failing the test. He could at least pretend!
How annoying. Albert did not have time to figure out his second in command now. Proto Man would be grateful when he no longer had such attachments.
Planting the chip on Mega Man did not bother Proto Man.
It really should have.
Proto Man signed off of the call from where he was at the election headquarters, far from where Mega Man lay in the lab alone. Albert pressed the button, laughed, and sat back to watch.
Mega Man did not feel well, and he knew that the diagnostic scan was only at 1%, but that did not explain why he was starting to feel worse. His titanium armor was meant to protect him from extremely high temperatures, but as his body heated up, Mega Man became aware that it would not protect him if the extremely high temperature came from inside his armor.
His usual body temperature ranged from 20.84 to 30.62°C, and he was now pushing 36.90°C. He wished that Dr. Light would have left a fan or two on for him.
36.90°C might have been manageable, but his warning messages flashed, telling him that his temperature was climbing still, and he was beginning to get scared.
“Met?” he called. Met came. “Can you get the phone so I can call Dr. Light? I think something might be really wrong.”
40.02°C. Mega Man knew what happened when robots overheated too much. First, at about 67.21°C, a robot’s software systems would fail: speech first, then movement. Then, at 75.67°C. every part of a robot that was synthetic, such as his fake skin, would melt. At 92.33°C, a robot’s internal metal components would begin to melt.
Mega Man was at 42.06°C. At 1370.05°C, steel would begin to melt and a robot’s metal skeleton would be mush. Titanium did not melt until 1670.21°C. During all of this, a robot might or might not catch fire.
Mega Man did not know when a robot lost their pain reception. It would make sense if it happened when the motherboard melted, at 104.35°C, but it could also be earlier, as the skin melted, or later, as the skeleton melted. The interconnectedness of an advanced android’s systems made it impossible to be certain without actually melting one.
Mega Man was at 48.16°C when Met brought him the phone. He was at 53.84°C when the last ring went off with no answer.
Mega Man tried not to panic. He would most likely be fine. His rising temperature had to plateau before 60°C, surely. But, if he got worse, then he would need Dr. Light. And if he didn’t get worse, he’d likely need to protect Dr. Light from whatever Proto Man was up to. Either way, he needed to get to election headquarters. Time to see how well the new flight suit worked.
Deacon won the election, like everyone thought he would, it was showtime for Proto Man, and he tried to feel good about it. He took out the security so pitifully easy that it was not even fun. Capturing Deacon was also one of the easiest things he had done for Wily. Somehow he had thought this would be more fun.
And then he was face to face with Roll and Dr. Light. The robotisist’s eyes drooped, even as his lips formed a hard line, and Proto Man felt annoyed at his obvious lack of faith even as it was entirely justified. It didn’t hurt at all, especially compared to the glare Roll was leveling at him. She equipped her rotating saw and pointed it at him.
“Mega Man was right!” she yelled, but her eyes were more narrow than wide.
“Don’t take it personal sis, this was always the plan!”
“That’s,” she growled, “The.” She swiped at him with her saw, and he dodged. “Problem!” She swung again, and he dodged again, and he did not have time for this, so he pointed his blaster at Deacon. Both her and Light’s hands went up.
For Proto Man, it was all easy from there.
Mega Man took the flight suit and assumed that he could at least pilot fine for a while.
Mega Man assumed incorrectly, and crashed onto the roof of a skyscraper.
61.33°C. He would call Roll’s communicator, but they probably wouldn’t have enough time to get to him. Well , he thought, never assumed I’d die on a random roof somewhere. Of all the ways to die, a mysterious new illness was probably the worst.
Roll sat with Dr. Light, Rush, and Deacon in the very cramped back of Doctor Wily’s van. Sharing the space with Cuts Man and Guts Man was not fun. Being tied up and gagged made it even less fun. She placed her foot on top of Dr. Light’s to try to provide him some kind of comfort, and began brainstorming.
She needed to get them out of this. Mega Man would be on the lab table for another 9 hours, and the robotic doubles Dr. Wily had made would keep him and everyone else from realizing there was anything wrong. It was up to her.
As she was thinking, her wrist communicator buzzed, indicating an incoming call from Mega Man. Guts Man reached out to stop her, but before he could she slammed her wrist against the wall behind her, hitting the pick-up button.
“Roll? Dr. Light?” Mega Man’s voice rang out, and it sounded much… fuzzier than normal. Roll tried banging her right wrist some and making noise through her gag, but he must not have heard her, because he continued on. “-thing’s… -ong. I-” a loud beep was heard, “Light, plea-...” More static. And then, once, clearer than everything he’d said thus far, “-on roof. Help!”
“Rock!” Roll and Dr. Light yelled together. “Mega!” repeated Roll.
A voice spoke through the communicator again, but not Mega Man’s. It was robotic, and Roll recognized it as the same voice that dictated things from Dr. Light’s computer when he’d rather hear them than read them. “Rock dot E-X-E,” it said in its normal monotone, with slightly more static than normal, but not near as much as when Mega Man himself was talking, “is experiencing system failure. Speech dot C-P-P status: false. Movement dot C-P-P status: false. Reception dot C-P-P status: true. Thought dot C-P-P status: true. Memory dot C-P-P status: true. Communications dot C-P-P status: turning false in three… two… one.”
The part of Roll’s code that controlled her emotions felt like someone deleted a “;” from it, rendering it entirely non functioning. But no “;” had been removed, and so her code started to loop, looking for an appropriate emotion for this situation and finding that even horror was not strong enough.
She was still processing enough to be able to hear, and that was good, because it was only what Proto Man said next that broke her out of a potentially infinite loop.
“What did you do?” he asked Dr. Wily, and his voice sounded lower than she had ever heard it.
Dr. Wily laughed, bright and vindictive, both at once. “Don’t you mean, what did you do?” Roll and Dr. Light’s eyes snapped to each other’s, both equally wide.
Do Proto Man and Wily have something to do with why Mega Man is doing so awfully? Roll wondered. If Proto Man really was working with Dr. Wily this whole time, it made sense. She tried again to form any of her weapons. She was going to kill him!
Proto Man formed his blaster and pointed it at the doctor, and slammed his other fist on the dashboard. “No,” he snarled. “I meant, what did you do! You said that chip would just make him sick!”
“What chip?!” Roll tried to yell through her gag, and Wily laughed harder. He turned around in his seat, still driving, and grinned at her and Dr. Light. The car swerved on the road.
“That’s why Proto Man was pretending to be good! He got close, and then planted my brilliant chip on Mega Man! It was a very versatile piece of technology! It could do anything from giving Mega Man the robot equivalent of the flu to...” Wily’s smile widened even more then, like a kid who’d just received a new toy. “completely melting that blue dweeb down into a waffle iron!” His voice lowered in contemplation, he added, “Assuming I had made a mold for such a thing. Should I have made a waffle iron mold for Mega Dweeb’s remains? Heh heh, probably!”
With his looping foot twitches and clenched fists, Proto Man looked as horrified as Roll felt. It made her angry to view. Her father had tears running down his face, and Roll could feel some forming in hers as well.
“You said,” Proto Man hissed, “that it would just incapacitate him!”
“I said-“ Dr. Wily corrected, patting Proto Man’s shoulder while continuing to steer with the other, “that it could only incapacitate him!”
Proto Man reached across the front to grab Dr. Wily’s collar, and the mad scientist finally realized that he might be in trouble. His eyes blew wide and he strained to look anywhere other than Proto Man.
“Stop. The. Car.”
Wily stopped the car, huffing about how Proto Man should've been happy for both of them all the while. Keeping his blaster on the doctor, he released Dr. Light and Rush, grabbed Rush and leapt out the back of the van.
Cuts Man and Guts Man were more confused by the turn of events than anyone else, and didn't even try to fight them as Dr. Light released Roll and the two jumped out the back to frantically follow after Proto Man.
In the protected functions of his code, Proto Man was surprised that Rush even let him ride him, but he supposed the robot dog had to have copious programming on recognizing bad situations.
And this was most certainly the worst situation. Mega Man’s Communications.cpp file was down, leaving the only way to find the robot as the old fashioned way, with his own eyes.
He traveled the most efficient route between Deacon’s headquarters and Light Labs and found a building with something visibly robot-shaped and metallic splayed out on its roof in under ten minutes.
There was not much left of Proto Man’s brother when the earlier robot came up close enough to see. All there was was the titanium armor, and some rods sticking out that must’ve had higher melting points than the mixed metallic and synthetic soup pooling in and around the armor. Where Mega Man’s face must have been previously was only a perfectly round puddle that expanded slowly outward.
<<ProtoMan.Thought is in state: “Shock”.
ProtoMan.Thought::needToDoSomething = True;
<<ProtoMan.Movement is in state: “DoWhateverItTakesToFixThings”.
Mechanically, Proto Man reached down, opened up the hatch door on Mega Man’s breastplate, only blinked at the soupy mess he saw more of, and reached into the mess to feel for his brother’s I.C. chip.
He felt nothing. He hoped Light would have a way to restore his brother that did not require the most recent version of Mega Man’s personality that was mixed in with the rest of the slush.
Proto Man looked over the side of the roof, saw Dr. Light and Roll staring back up at him, jumped on Rush, and glided down to meet them.
“Don’t go up there,” he warned them, wishing his visor were even darker so that he could not see the looks on their faces. “His I.C. chip is melted… as is everything else.”
Tears formed in the eyes of Dr. Light and Roll.
“Can you restore him?” Proto Man asked, and Thomas could see how much he was trying not to care. It did not take a psychology doctorate.
“Maybe,” he said, because technically he could rebuild Mega Man. “But I don’t keep backups of his and Roll’s memories, out of respect for privacy. If I rebuild him, he will have the same disposition as Rock did when he was first built, with no memories.” As much as he wished it weren’t, that was all Thomas could do. “Think of a human with an extreme case of amnesia.”
“But humans with amnesia sometimes recover their memories,” Roll pointed out. “Could we- I- could I give him some of my memories of him? Would that help?”
“Yes, the more memories we could give him the better.” Thomas truly did not know the answer to the question he was about to ask, and he was scared about what the answer could mean. Still, he wanted to give Proto Man a chance. “Would you be willing to help him?”
“Of course, who do you think I am?” Proto Man intoned, looking far more robotic than normal. Thomas wished he knew if Proto Man was pretending.
Proto Man promised he’d be by later to copy his memories over, grabbed Albert and went who knows where, and all the while Thomas could only think of Rock.
Thomas did not trust Proto Man, could not trust Proto Man, and so he needed to see whatever there was of Rock for himself.
Proto Man was not wrong about Rock’s fate.
It took four days for Dr. Light to design a new body for Rock, a testament to how fast he had gotten at robotics engineering, and then it was time for Roll to copy over all of the memories she had with Rock in them.
The memories took a day to upload from Roll and another day to download onto Rock, and then they both waited for Proto Man to show up, not having any way to summon him.
Proto Man showed up exactly a week after Deacon’s election, a day after Roll’s memories had been added into Rock’s memory bank.
He showed up, and no one had seen Wily in the past week, and as much as Roll blamed Proto Man for this, she felt a vindictive smile cross her face at the thought of Wily finally getting what he deserved. She didn’t need to ask.
Proto Man was ushered into the lab, clearly uncomfortable with being there, and Roll allowed her saw to turn back into her hand.
Thomas didn’t talk to Proto Man at all, just showed him to the machine, hooked him up, and left.
He likely should’ve asked what happened to Dr. Wily. He thought of the perpetually excited man who would get into fun competitions with him during college and tell off all of the bullies who tried commenting on either Albert or Thomas’s perceived square-ness.
He thought of the boy always willing to help him out in the lab, who listened to classical music with him and enjoyed learning as much as he did, who was always willing to fight a fight he never wanted for others’ sake.
Thomas did not ask Proto Man about Dr. Wily’s fate.
Two days later, the robot Thomas had built and Roll and Proto Man had copied their memories onto awakened for the first time.
Rock came into awareness with a headache. His code had just been through all of its initialization sequence, which meant he should have been ready to open his eyes and begin the process of collecting and processing memories.
So why did he already have some?
He shouldn’t have already had memories. He shouldn’t already have had memories of looking at his own body, hearing his own voice, from two different points of views that were decidedly not his.
His Memory.cpp file did what it could to process them. In run-time, he picked up on who the people in the memories were: predominantly his sister, Roll, his creator/father, Dr. Light, and his estranged brother who seemed to fight and help him both quite a lot, Proto Man.
He learned of the life of the previous Rock: Rock’s awakening, Rock’s transition into becoming Mega Man, Rock’s love of his sister and brother and father and chemistry, and Rock’s dislike of violence and of being Mega Man.
It made him dizzy, knowing that he was Rock, and yet he wasn’t Rock . He tried to make sense of it, but he felt as though he was three different people.
The easiest memories to reconcile were those where the point-of-view was standing directly beside Rock. For those memories, Rock’s processors photo shopped it so that he was the one with the point-of-view, and that the person standing next to him was either Roll or Proto Man instead of Rock.
For the rest, he tried to learn as much as he could about previous Rock and Roll and Proto Man and Dr. Light from Roll or Proto Man’s point of view.
The original Rock made a lot of choices that did not make sense. Why did he fight Proto Man when neither Proto Man nor the previous Rock truly wanted to be at odds? But Roll’s memories showed her time and time again distrusting Proto Man, and the previous Rock had been closer to her. And yet, Roll had come to like Proto Man towards the end of the memories, and still Proto Man’s most recent memories showed the previous Rock being a jerk to him.
But he didn’t have to be the previous Rock. He was himself, and he had none of previous Rock’s memories and a lot of other people’s, so he definitely was not previous Rock. He was his own person. And he would figure this out.
And so Rock opened his eyes, ready to make his own memories and figure out what he wanted to happen between him, Roll, and Proto Man.
Proto Man was not there, leaving him to put together any pieces he could get his hands on with Roll and Dr. Light.
“Hi,” he said, and thought of adding an introduction or a Nice to meet you, because he did not personally know them. Dr. Light was like someone he had seen in a movie, and Roll was… if memories made a person, then he was two-thirds Roll. That percentage would go down as long as he kept consciousness, but it would be a long time until he was mostly himself, and he would never be entirely himself.
“Mega Man!” Roll greeted, and he was not Mega Man. Mega Man was not in Rock1.0’s original coding, in his coding. Mega Man had come later. He was more Roll than he was Mega Man, but he could not say that.
Rock1.0… if the original Rock had been 1.0, and he had the same coding but none of the memories, did that make him less than 1.0? Was he Rock0.9? Less even than that? Software versioning almost always worked in ascending order as improvements were made, but it didn’t matter. Even if he was an improvement on 1.0, which he doubted he was, he couldn’t name himself, and Dr. Light and Roll would never give him a number of 1.0 or higher.
It would hurt, but he would understand.
“Rock, are you okay?” Dr. Light asked. “How do you feel?”
“I…” He didn’t want to say. But lying was bad, and he didn’t want to lie or hide things from his creator. “I feel like… three different people. And none of them are your Rock. I’m sorry.”
He saw Roll and Dr. Light share a look. She placed her hand on his shoulder, and then they turned back to him.
“That’s okay, Rock! I’m Roll, and that’s Dr. Light. Is there anything you would like to know?”
“What happened to the previous Rock?” he asked, and regretted it when they flinched. “Sorry, you don’t have to tell me. It’s just, the last memories I have are of me- I’m sorry, of Roll and Proto Man going to the party with Mega Man.”
Roll smiled more genuinely. “Oh, that’s pretty recent actually! Anyway, Wily had Proto Man implant a chip on yo- Mega Man that… that destroyed him.”
“But that makes no sense,” he cut in. “I- I mean Proto Man liked,” they flinched again at the past tense. He made a note to not do that. “Likes Mega Man.”
Roll’s face twisted. “Not enough, apparently,” she muttered.
“And- and!” He continued. “And I-you-we like Proto Man, at least towards the end. Did… did the original Rock not?”
“Stop calling him the original Rock!” Roll yelled, and it was his turn to wince backwards. “Sorry,” she backtracked. “Can you just call… him Mega Man for now?”
“Sure,” he agreed, and it was weird to see her emotions on the outside when he had so many on the inside of him, and he should be him, and she should be her, but he was her and he was also Proto Man and she had always been her and no one was who Rock was supposed to be.
“To answer your earlier question,” interjected Dr. Light, “it did not seem as though Proto Man knew the full extent of Dr. Wily’s plan.”
“Oh, so he might still like me!” he said, and smiled, since Proto Man liking Mega Man was a significant portion of what he knew, and he did not want to lose that just yet.
“He killed you! Intentionally or not, he killed you!” Roll yelled.
“No,” he said, quietly, and then got far more quiet, “he killed Mega Man.”
Roll got quieter to match him, and her face went slack. “You’re Mega Man, Rock,” she said kindly, placing her hand on his arm.
“I… I don’t think I am. I’m some other person. I’m… some other people . I am the original Rock’s code, and your memories, and Proto Man’s memories, and the memories I am making now. And I am not him .”
“What… what should we call you? Who are you?” Roll asked.
“My name is Rock,” he said. “And I don’t know if I’m one-point-one or zero-point-nine or something else entirely. You can… you can call me what you want.”
“Oh,” Dr. Light said, and the smile on his face was strained. “Nice to meet you, Rock. If you’ll excuse me…” Dr. Light turned around and walked briskly out of the lab.
“Yeah, nice to meet you, Rock,” Roll echoed, “I’ll talk to you more later, okay?” And then she too turned around and left.
Later, Roll and Dr. Light hadn’t returned, so Rock left the lab to look for them. He grabbed an energy can to drink on the way and began to explore the house. Eventually, he made his way to the basement, where, still drinking his energy can, he found Roll and Dr. Light on a couch, hugging each other and crying.
Ït was in Rock’s code to care for these people, so he asked, “Hey, is everything okay? What’s up?”
“We’re okay, Rock,” sobbed Dr. Light. “Just- just mourning Mega Man.”
“Oh,” replied Rock, and sat down on the armchair across from them. “That’s... cool,” he said, and took another sip of his drink.