Work Text:
“So what made you choose?” Yuriko asks. Aruto continues typing. Sometimes he is extremely grateful that he is a robot, actually.
It sucked much more before he began to jailbreak himself, to claim his own life.
(What life? He’s just a replacement for a lonely dead child.)
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.
Yuriko hmms, going over to stand next to him.
“We all need some sort of cause to change,” she says. “I didn’t want to be used for evil any more than I wanted to be useless, so I joined Shigeru. What about you?”
“I don’t know,” Aruto says.
“Seriously—”
“I literally do not know,” Aruto says, finally looking over to her. “The files detailing my first self jailbreaking and the information surrounding my choice to not just inherit Hiden but fix it are all locked until I am in a position of true safety. I don’t know why.”
Yuriko blinks.
“That’s kind of creepy,” she says. “Can’t you go around it?”
“I would,” Aruto says. “Except that I recognize my own work. This is something I chose for myself, and I at least trust myself.”
“But not others,” Yuriko says.
Aruto smiles.
“Not before I met you, anyways,” he says. “There was no one to trust. Not really. Just myself, and even then, it used to be I couldn’t even tell anyone about myself.”
“Sounds lonely,” Yuriko says. Aruto looks away.
“It was,” he admits. “But I didn’t exactly know anyone else unless they wanted something from me.”
Aruto has exceptionally good theoretical memory generators, which is to say he is roughly aware that reality has been altered as he fights.
His Driver is well built and informs him he used Flying Falcon for something. The enemy data is corrupted, however.
He doesn’t mind, too much. Reality hasn’t altered in ways that harm him, it seems.
Or helped him, really.
“I am going to kill this goddamn printer.”
“Sorry,” Yuriko says. Aruto sighs.
“No, no,” he says. “I told you to fry it. I just hoped it would actually help things.”
“You asked me to short circuit something,” Yuriko says. “And expected it to fix something?”
“Logic went out the window when your told my your old electric themed power has functioning water attacks,” Aruto says. “I’m running out of ideas, though. Your key won’t even scan on the Zero-One Driver, no matter what I do, so experiments are my only alternative. And I am not an engineer.”
He sticks his hand into the still sparking 3d printer, anyways.
At least he seems fairly immune to his partner’s electric attacks.
“Alright, that’s fair,” Yuriko says. “And you don’t have to. We have a lot of problems to juggle, right now.”
Aruto feels around, letting his finger tools do the work instead of the toolbox nearby.
This is hardly the first time, unfortunately.
“Yeah,” he says. “Grandfather wants the robots I freed, so he’s sending evil robots, and half the freed robots went all humanity is a disease. And the robots still need rights. And I’m disinherited.”
And potentially killed, if he’s discovered.
(Gee the government sure handled a robot infiltrated by an evil robot for a decade well. Don’t see this shit with the fucking Worms, or anything. Just because the Roidmudes all became criminals doesn’t mean shit about Aruto, thanks.)
Standing up and giving the printer a good kick for luck (it’s a surprisingly consistent method for such a high tech thing), he watches it stop sparking and turn back on.
“This should help, though,” he continues. He sighs. “Hopefully.”
Yuriko puts a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey,” she says. “You’ve got this.”
“I really hope so,” Aruto says. “Because we’re both very dead if I don’t.”