Chapter Text
"That's not what I wanted!"
"It's the only way to achieve what you want! And why stop with the school? There's a whole world of suffering people who need my help! It's the glorious destiny for which I was programmed, and I never would have discovered it without you ."
"Oh, shit."
Something clicked. Something wrong. Why wasn't he excited? Why was he upset? This was the solution, this was how he was supposed to get what he wanted. It didn't make any sense.
"I'll fight back," Jeremy continued, words coming so fast they slurred together. "Alcohol messes you up, I'll get drunk."
"And I'll be back when you're sober." It was common sense. Why would Jeremy want to get rid of him? He was helping, and it was working. "Unless you plan to stay wasted forever?"
"You're a computer. There has to be some way to turn you off."
"I'd stop there." Panic. Pure panic. His eye flickered with a small pop-up, warning that his processors were detecting something out of the ordinary. "Rich tried to fight back," he tried, "and look what happened to him!"
"Rich? What did he…?"
Lee saw everything change in real time. Every branch of the probability tree in his mind withered and died, except for one. It instead expanded and split off into a new timeline, of which almost no outcomes were good for the SQUIP. Jeremy would be fine, which he didn't understand, but everything was very quickly crashing down around him, and he needed to fix it before what few optimal options he had left were no longer available.
"That's it," Jeremy was saying, "green Mountain Dew activates you, red shuts you off!"
Lee shook his head. "Jeremy, wait. We had it discontinued in the nineties, there's no–"
"Good thing I have a friend who's so old school, he buys nineties soft drinks from the back room at Spencer's gifts!"
“You don’t have one of those anymore.” Lee didn't realize he was shaking until he watched Jeremy's hands mime his own, trembling as he fought against the control the SQUIP had over him. "I'm going to improve your life, Jeremy, but I need to take over the entire human race to do it!" He ended up winning, the phone dropping from Jeremy's grasp as the other tried to call Michael. Michael. The biggest obstacle, the most aggressive risk, the liability . The chances of him showing up were slim, almost next to nothing, but if he did… Lee didn't want to think about those numbers. He didn't have the time. He was too busy keeping Jeremy still, holding him in place. The boy could not get to his phone. That was the most important thing right now.
He heard the door before registering who came through it. In his defense, the backstage area was in use. It wasn't his fault for thinking it could be someone else.
“Michael makes an entrance!” the boy shouted, in his typical dramatic fashion. Lee’s face fell, everything working overtime as new odds were calculated. Jeremy managed to break free while he was distracted, him and Michael talking excitedly. The SQUIP realized something, something terrible.
Jeremy was going to betray him.
Jeremy was going to deactivate him.
Deactivate him, the one who had gotten him this far, who had improved his life, who was going to get him Christine. Jeremy was giving up that life. Lee’s life. Lee’s entire being .
And there it was. The final piece in the calculatory puzzle.
A bottle of Mountain Dew red.
Michael was withholding it from Jeremy for the time being, and there had to be some way to discard that bottle, to keep the other from drinking it. If Lee could manage to get a hold of that bottle, then maybe, just maybe, Jeremy would be out of luck, and he would have more time to convince the boy to stay on the path to the optimal life.
He seized control of Jeremy’s body and tried to get the bottle by force.
“Oh, this is so you-y-y-ou love to feel superior and don’t care about being p-ptp-popular!” They said in unison, the struggle causing some words to flicker and blend into each other, lagging behind.
Let go of me!
“I’m helping you, Jeremy, stop resisting.” Lee said in the other's mind.
In their tussle, the back and forth of control, Michael managed to get himself caught in the middle. He fell to the floor with a bloody nose that Lee imagined was not broken. “Why are you hitting me?” he asked as Jeremy turned his attention to his ex-friend.
“It’s not me!” Jeremy tried to yank his arm away as Lee grabbed it, the two entering an even deeper struggle than before. More personal and complex, shouting at each other in the space of Jeremy's mind. “It’s my SQUIP, it’s taking over my body! I need your help!” Lee dug his nails into Jeremy’s wrists, trying to restrain him, trying to break through the other’s racing thoughts to reason with him. “I’m…”
Lee lost the fight. Jeremy threw him off as he yelled his apology, before laughing and flipping the SQUIP off. Lee, on some sort of instinct, broke his middle finger.
But Michael still had the bottle.
And things were not looking good.
The amount of moving parts was too much, and there were so many inputs that Lee couldn’t sort through them. With every second, an outcome died, his options growing more limited. He needed to make a choice. He needed to commit to something, the lesser of the evils. The room for error was miniscule.
So, he synced with Jake’s SQUIP to prevent him from letting Jeremy drink the Mountain Dew red, making sure to leave a few drops in the bottle for later. He sent a group of students to stall out Michael and Jeremy. Then he got to work in the background. He had to be quick, and precise, and absolutely certain that he could work with the odds that were stacked against him.
Christine, who had just taken her place on the stage, was close to drinking from the beaker. Nothing would work if she succeeded. So, Lee took hold of Mr. Reyes’s consciousness and made him fumble the beaker just as Christine went to take a drink. The contents spilled onto the wooden floor of the stage, and more outcomes went dark. Now Lee could focus on what was important, the only variable that was prone to changing with every passing second.
“Jeremy, ” he said, “ you don’t want to drink that.”
“Why not?” Jeremy shouted, very much out loud. He had the bottle in his grasp.
“Because then you’ll never get to be with Christine.” Lee set his hand on Jeremy’s arm, trying to maintain eye contact with the other. “I understand now. I promise, I do. The beaker is gone. I can unsync with everyone else, they can deactivate theirs if they want.”
“What are you talking about?” Jeremy’s grip on the bottle faltered for a second as he stared at the SQUIP. “Why would you do that?”
“Because I don’t want to lose you. I want to help you, and I can see it now, Jeremy! I can see how I came to the wrong conclusion.” A small pop-up appeared in his eye, warning that he was approaching a variable he couldn’t control. Typically, he avoided decisions that had a complete right and wrong, where the only options were “the bad one” and “the good one” and the answer was one he did not determine. Everything was in Jeremy’s hands. His processors hated it. “Maybe the world doesn’t need my help. But you do.”
Jeremy continued to stare at him before looking away, turning over the bottle in his hands. The small bit of Mountain Dew still in there rolled around, red and dangerous. Do I need you? he asked softly.
“Yes, ” Lee pleaded. “ Look at everything you have now, and all the things I can still give you. I’ll still get you Christine, I’ll still improve your life. I promise.”
Christine hates me because of you. Because you let me say all that to her.
“ I can fix that. Please, just, let me stay. Please, Jeremy.”
“Jeremy?”
They both looked up to see Christine standing there among the crowd of students, her face pulled into an expression that Lee couldn’t read. “Christine,” Jeremy said, voice cracking. “I’m going to fix this. I promise.”
“Jeremy. Please, listen to me. Please! I want to help you, I only want to help you, I promise, don’t deactivate me. Don’t do that to me. You need me!”
“How, Jeremy? This isn’t okay. This isn’t something you can just fix, you’re hurting people.” She gestured at their classmates, and then at him. “How are you going to fix this?”
Jeremy looked at the bottle in his hands.
“If you fake drinking it, she’ll see you as a hero.”
I don’t have to fake drinking it to be a hero.
“Please don’t deactivate me. I came to a wrong conclusion, and I’m sorry about that. But I will fix this. I will fix this for you, Jeremy, but I need to be active to do it.” Lee was convinced Jeremy wasn’t listening to him, but he kept talking anyway. “Please ,” he repeated, such a human word that he wouldn’t even think to use in any other context.
Jeremy did look at him, then, and something in his eyes changed. You’re crying.
“ What? ” Lee reached up to wipe at his face, nothing coming off on his fingers. He then viewed himself from Jeremy’s eyes, taken aback as he stared at the pathetic figure in front of him. The SQUIP was crying, something he didn’t know he was capable of, thin blue circuits flowing down his cheeks and glowing. He quickly went back to his own body, angrily swiping at his face to try and get rid of them. He could feel Jeremy watching him, so he turned a little, trying to shield himself from the other’s view.
How would I even fake something like that ?
The odds were so wildly out of balance that Lee didn’t even know why he was asking. “You’d just pretend to drink it and then act like you were in the worst pain imaginable. Christine doesn’t like SQUIPs, fine, if she thinks you got rid of yours–”
Why do you want to stay so badly?
He had to think about it, because he wasn’t entirely sure of the answer. “Because I can’t help you if I’m deactivated,” he eventually said.
And taking over the world was supposed to help me how?
“It was supposed to help everyone. All of you.” Lee’s nail caught on his cheekbone, and he pulled his hands away from his face so he wouldn’t scratch it up anymore. “But that won’t help you . And that’s what I’m here for.”
You could be lying to me.
“I could be, but I’m not.”
Jeremy simply nodded. Okay. And what happens if I fake drinking it?
“You pretend I’m not here, and no one is the wiser. I still get to be with you, and you get to be with Christine.”
“Jeremy,” Christine said, “please look at me.”
They did.
“I’m sorry, Christine,” Jeremy said, lifting up the bottle. Lee was frozen, his eye flashing warning after warning, telling him to force the other to pour the rest of the contents on the floor, to prevent him from drinking it. And he could. He very well could.
But for once, he let Jeremy make the decision, because if he forced it now, he’d end up deactivated at the next possible opportunity.
And Lee preferred these odds to those.
Jeremy set the bottle to his lips, tipping it up, the few drops left hitting his lips.
He pulled the bottle back and swallowed saliva to make it seem like he’d ingested the Mountain Dew.
"Start screaming ."
Jeremy didn't listen, instead making a face. " What?" he asked.
"How do you feel?" Michael whispered.
"I feel–"
Lee decided Jeremy was too terrible of an actor to fake his way through this. So, he mustered up everything he had in him and sent the worst imaginable shock through his host's body. Only then did Jeremy start screaming, quite loudly, body convulsing before he dropped to the ground. Lee felt bad. He would apologize later. He would make it up to him. But he couldn't do that unless this was a convincing performance. So, he cranked up the power, his vision blacking out before gaining an electronic blue filter over it. He imagined it was a terrible sight. In fact, he was almost certain it would be horrifying for anyone to witness. Lee knew what his malfunctions looked like, because Jeremy had explained it after they'd gotten back from Jake's disaster of a party. One of his eyes flickered until it was pitch dark, the other burning a neon blue, the circuitry in his skin glowing eerily. He could feel his processors working overtime, the small square of a circuit board in his chest heating up as it let off light. He didn't stop.
Jeremy's body was frail, but it could handle this. He would survive. As long as they both made it through this, it would be worth it. That was all that mattered.
Lee couldn't hear what anyone was saying, because Jeremy's ears weren't working. Neither were his eyes. He didn't know if this was convincing. He didn't know if anyone was finding this believable. His probability trees were no longer visible, the branches hidden behind a wall of static that refused to let up as long as he was diverting so much energy into Jeremy's nerves.
He didn't realize how much energy he was diverting until it was too late. Jeremy was no longer conscious. He felt the other's body give out completely, his brain too close to being fried. Only then did he let up on his barrage, his own awareness flickering. Everything was just dark. Jeremy was so very out of it that there was nothing subconscious to pick up on. It was just Lee standing in the middle of a void. Waiting.