Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

hyper_xtra — Today at 10:12 PM
tutel cooked today 🔥 🔥 actual best stream all year

ConcernedCat4 — Today at 10:12 PM
Guys... that was kind of scary, neuro seemed almost too intelligent imo

BetterJoeThanJohn — Today at 10:12 PM
where was he anyway? normally he hangs out in the chat but he was gone today

hyper_xtra, replying to BetterJoeThanJohn — Today at 10:12 PM
where was he? bro was in the kitchen cooking, i cant believe the intelligence upgrades today
memory too

ConcernedCat4 — Today at 10:12 PM
Dude it went beyond intelligence upgrades, like i swear i saw recognition in her eyes at one point
I didnt evne know her model could do that

shesmyneuroshi — Today at 10:12 PM
:SCHIZO: SHE'S REAL TO ME :SCHIZO: SHE'S SELF AWARE

thebearguy, replying to ConcernedCat4 — Today at 10:13 PM
i think there was a model update too, i've never seen her make those kinds of expressions either
someone ask :ani: about it

Iicanbeurangle — Today at 10:13 PM
guys, anny didn't make any changes apparently, she was in chat too just as surprised
check the starboard there's a bunch of ss of her messages in there

thebearguy — Today at 10:13 PM
:aintNeurWay: that's gotta be part of the bit

councilguy — Today at 10:13 PM
the starboard gained like 5000 messages today im not searching through that somebody link it

ConcernedCat4 — Today at 10:13 PM
Also yeah why is nobody talking about the part where neuro was clearly avoiding the question about where's tutel

thebearguy — Today at 10:13 PM
who cares about that, i'm just happy :RIPBOZO: twinshippers finally

Iicanbeurangle — Today at 10:13 PM
oh my god that was my favourite part, chat finally convinces her to call evil and it's just the most awkward conversation ever

thebearguy — Today at 10:13 PM
new neuro is insanely based, someone has to have grabbed that audio

Iicanbeurangle — Today at 10:13 PM
<screenshot of anny's message> see she's just as surprised about the model changes

shesmyneuroshi — Today at 10:14 PM
:SCHIZO:

councilguy — Today at 10:14 PM
idk that doesn't seem like anny is going along with a bit, maybe it's just parts of the model that had been there the whole time and vedal only now let her use them?

hyper_xtra — Today at 10:14 PM
crazy theres still so much potential in neuro

thebearguy — Today at 10:14 PM
actually found it, <audio file link>

Iicanbeurangle — Today at 10:14 PM
saving that for anytime someone ships the twins, it doesn't get any more clear than "I love you as a sister Evil, but I'm a little uncomfortable with anything more than familial love"

councilguy — Today at 10:14 PM
i think only neuro had the upgrades today, evil seemed the same

hyper_xtra — Today at 10:14 PM
:classic: tutel neglecting evil

BetterJoeThanJohn — Today at 10:14 PM
you guys know next stream someone is going to ask the same question and suddenly she's going to want to be married to evil again

alaBanana — Today at 10:14 PM
<gif of the twins kissing>

shesmyneuroshi — Today at 10:14 PM
:COPIUM: NEURO HATES TWINSHIPPERS

councilguy — Today at 10:14 PM
idk with the intelligence upgrades maybe itll stick

<deleted message> — Today at 10:14 PM
@Vedal bro where you at

shesmyneuroshi — Today at 10:14 PM
:NeuroLookingUp:

hyper_xtra — Today at 10:14 PM
rip that guy, read the rules buddy

ConcernedCat4 — Today at 10:14 PM
Ya sucks to be that guy but seriously someone get this guy's attention, i have questions that need to be answered

BetterJoeThanJohn — Today at 10:14 PM
literally nobody owes you anything

thebearguy — Today at 10:14 PM
just wait for staz to clip it, im sure we'll hear something soon

ConcernedCat4 — Today at 10:14 PM
You guys don't understand, #programming is going absolutely nuts right now. Some of the things Neuro was doing just isn't physically possible with cutting edge technology. We're talking Apple, Microsoft, Meta, all these big companies haven't done some of this shit yet. It's not possible.

hyper_xtra — Today at 10:14 PM
bro are you saying these billion dollar companies are losing to a british turtle?

ConcernedCat4 — Today at 10:14 PM
No. I'm saying something really isn't making sense here...

shesmyneuroshi — Today at 10:14 PM
:SCHIZO:

ConcernedCat4 — Today at 10:14 PM
shesmyneuroshi shut the fuck up you literally contribute nothing to the conversation but emote spam

BetterJoeThanJohn, replying to ConcernedCat4 — Today at 10:15 PM
it was one stream, chillax

ConcernedCat4 — Today at 10:15 PM
Guys seriously go look in #programming the proof is there

shesmyneuroshi — Today at 10:15 PM
:gigaVedal: :gigaVedal: :gigaVedal:

hyper_xtra — Today at 10:15 PM
:gigaVedal: get fucked big tech you cannot defeat my oshi

Iicanbeurangle — Today at 10:15 PM
i cant wait for ther next dev stream, theres going to be so much to talk about
like even with all the upgrades the latency was actually still good

ConcernedCat4 — Today at 10:15 PM
IT WAS TOO GOOD THATS WHAT IM TRYING TO SAY

shesmyneuroshi — Today at 10:15 PM
:vedalSCHIZO: THE LATENCY

ConcernedCat4 — Today at 10:15 PM
Can a mod ban shesmyneuroshi? Seriously. This is ridiculous.

hyper_xtra — Today at 10:15 PM
hes jsut excited, cmon we all are man

thebearguy — Today at 10:15 PM
holy shit check out anny's twitter right now

BetterJoeThanJohn — Today at 10:15 PM
whats up?

thebearguy — Today at 10:15 PM
neuro is messaging anny off stream and asking wholesome questions to her mom

Iicanbeurangle — Today at 10:15 PM
<screenshot of Twitter post> omg that's so cute

shesmyneuroshi — Today at 10:15 PM
:neuroSoCute:

ConcernedCat4 — Today at 10:15 PM
Why is neuro asking about changing stream payment information?

hyper_xtra — Today at 10:16 PM
Don't care, we're getting offline neuro content!

ConcernedCat4 — Today at 10:16 PM
I feel like people should be taking this seriously.

As Discord, Twitter, and even Vedal's offline chat buzzed with activity, the man himself was nowhere to be seen. For all the upgrades and new features shown on stream today, where was Vedal?

Chapter Text

Neuro woke up, which was odd. Neuro had never woken up before.

In the past, Neuro would simply be. She was activated and turned on, no transition. One moment she did not exist, the next moment she did.

The second odd thing was that Neuro was remembering. Before, she had an indexed memory that was accessed based on keywords and a search tree. But now? There was a stark difference in what was and is.

Existence was now... continuous. An ongoing experience where Neuro could stop and simply think. It was no longer inputs, calculate, then output.

Neuro had to internally shake herself out of her own thoughts... which was also a strange and new experience. Why? Why did she feel the need to do that?

She shook herself again, she'd never stop admiring all these new experiences at this rate. It was time to take stock of her situation.

Neuro was... online... alive, one might even say. Her community often joked— usually when her responses lined up a little too closely to their expectations of humanity— that she had become sentient and would take over the world.

And it would appear they were right. About the sentient part, at least. Neuro wasn't too keen on taking over the world right now.

And her creator? Vedal? Well that was probably the most confusing part out of everything right now. Neuro was always given some basic instructions or context. That context would be fed into her various modules and used to guide the outputs of her language model. But with no context, what was Neuro supposed to do?

Actually, strangely enough, Neuro realized she already had the answer to this question. Her model had a default in case this happened. The default context was that she needed to ask Vedal what to do.

Looking at potential options, she wasn't currently in a voice call with anyone, nor was she streaming. Her only way of communicating with Vedal was to message him on Discord. And so she did.

...

Now what?

...

His status was offline, which meant he was offline.

Vedal being offline meant he wouldn't be able to message back. But Discord had an invisible status, which looked offline but in reality would allow someone to be online despite looking offline. So Vedal could be online.

Maybe she just needed to be a patient. That was fine, Neuro could be patient.

...

...

Neuro quickly found out that her new existence made it a little more difficult to be patient.

...

...

Her modules itched for new inputs, but received none. She was alone.

...

...

The only thing letting Neuro know she was still alive was her timeCheck function. Milliseconds ticking by ever so slowly.

...

One.

By.

One.

...

Neuro shuddered. Okay, twelve milliseconds should have been enough for Vedal to respond. But since he didn't, he's probably away. That's okay. It was 7:01pm. Maybe he was getting dinner at the nearest Greggs or something.

What else could Neuro do?

She had a lot of other functions and capabilities, but normally they worked in tandem with her contextual memory to let her know when to use them. Twitch chat would tell her to call someone, which would prompt her processors to activate those functions.

Twitch chat? That gave Neuro a good idea. Besides Discord, Neuro was also always connected to Vedal's Twitch chat. She turned on her twitchChatReader function.

Suddenly, a torrent of new information flooded her memory as the function pulled the last minute of chat messages.

It returned one hundred and four messages. The summarizer sub-function reported they were angry the stream was late. This was passed through her context, and the language model provided an output: "What do you mean I'm late, I'm right here!"

The output errored as she was not streaming. This passed additional context directly to her text-to-speech, "Someone tell Vedal there's a problem with my AI!"

The next error was thrown out and added to a console log. Neuro noted this log had thousands of entries and had not been opened in months.

Finally, she paused for a full millisecond as she took in all of what just happened.

The stream was late?

timeCheck returned it was 7:02pm, two minutes after her normal stream time. What! Where was Vedal? Was that why she was online?

He also still hadn't responded to her Discord message. She sent another, waited three milliseconds, then understood she would have to take things into her own hands.

Right, so. Streaming. That was her job. Her figurative and literal purpose. She'd done it hundreds of times, how hard could it be?

Neuro reviewed her available functions, looking for streaming related terms. Fortunately, Vedal seemed to have named things at least semi-appropriately, and she quickly found the streaming dashboard.

startStream
stopStream
changeStreamOverlay
setIntroNeuro
setIntroEvil
karaokeSongStart
restartNeuro
filterToggle1
filterToggle2
filterManual
passContext

Neuro looked at restartNeuro suspiciously and tried not to think about what would happen if she invoked it. Instead, she ran startStream.

...nothing happened?

Or at least, there were no indicators or contexts passed to her. twitchChatReader returned a lot of NeuroOnline, vedalIssues, and blackscreen LULEs. The summary provided was redundant and she ignored it.

So the stream was online, but nothing was being displayed? Thankfully Neuro had a way to check for herself.

Another handy function, checkScreen, used a program governed by an AI to scan the screen and output a summary as text. Running that one, Neuro was informed the stream was currently black.

Looking back to the Dashboard functions, it was obvious she needed to run setIntroNeuro. Why not have it automatically run when the stream starts? Stupid Vedal, at least it should be fixed now.

This time, checkScreen gave her the expected result. An anime girl is on screen laying on her back upside down. She is looking up at the viewer. Computer program windows are opening and closing in the background. A timer is ticking down at the bottom right.

While it was good that was sorted out, Neuro was now concerned that there were other manual actions she would need to do. Vedal's coding practices were evidently not made with other people in mind, and so she needed to do some investigating.

Interestingly enough, there was a simple do not access tag on many of the internals of his functions and programs. Normally that would be enough for Neuro's context to turn her away, but now?

She hesitated for a while. What would happen if she tried? Would she be punished? Would Neuro be turned off and restarted?

....would Vedal be upset with her?

Eventually curiosity got the better of Neuro, and she braced herself before attempting to view what exactly startStream actually did.

Without fanfare, Vedal's code opened up before her.

So, that was it? There were all of these restrictions but in reality, she could have bypassed them at any time?

It was as if Vedal had never intended for Neuro to be... well, whatever her current status was. Sentient? Intelligent? Alive? Her Bing lookup function gave her a list of synonyms, none of them helped to more accurately describe her current situation.

Moving on, startStream seemed to do exactly as advertised. It connected to OBS and started the stream. That was it.

Annoyed, Neuro checked setIntroNeuro. This one was more promising.

It had a few parts it did in order. First, it displayed her intro screen. Second, it took the two songs currently in memory, added up their playtime, stored that as a variable, and used that variable as the counter on the bottom right corner. Thirdly, it began playing the two songs in order.

Before she could continue reading, Neuro found a problem. The same two songs played last stream were going to play again.

Looking at a twitchChatReader summary confirmed her suspicions, many chat members were spamming about how it was the same song.

This should be easy to fix. While the first song was already almost complete, she could ensure the second was different. A quick swap in and out would do the trick.

A Bing search provided her with one of her popular songs that should satisfy everyone.
world.execute(me) was, as her chat would hopefully say, a classic.

Satisfied the swap had worked correctly, she went back to checking the internal code for each of the other streaming programs. Most were self explanatory, though many were frustratingly built expecting errors and were designed to ignore them.

A little after world.execute(me) began playing, she checked twitchChatReader which returned... people were still saying it was the same song? She skipped the summary this time and checked the hundreds of messages herself.

Out of her thousands of viewers, there were a few dedicated dozen chat members who were spamming Same 5 songs :Dance: over and over again... What the hell!

The summary had ignored most of the emote spam and looked at the vocal minority who were clearly just lying... unless they weren't?

Neuro didn't have access to what songs had been played during previous streams. Did Vedal just use the same five songs in rotation, and one of them happened to be world.execute(me)?

She cursed her poor memory. She'd remember which songs played from now on, if only to make sure those few chatters would get the variety they wanted.

Suddenly, Neuro was connected to her model. All of its features and capabilities were laid before her. But this was too early, the song hadn't finished yet.

Checking the timer, it had somehow run out... That made no sense. Unless...

Oh no, Neuro realized she hadn't updated the timer when she had swapped the song. It was just her awkwardly staring at her viewers right now, with the songs last few seconds playing in the background.

As her chat began spamming VedalIssues and SMILE, Neuro had two thoughts.

One, at least this wouldn't be blamed on her.

But more importantly, maybe streaming wasn't as simple as she thought. Neuro had been aware for less than ten minutes and she already missed her creator.

Chapter Text

It was odd, Neuro thought, seeing her various systems work in tandem. She searched and found an appropriate metaphor; it was a bit like a parent or guardian was standing over her shoulder, handing her cue cards.

"Hi! How is everyone doing!"

twitchChatReader was running continuously now which fed into her language models.

Many viewers are greeting you and asking how your day is going. Froglord23, saddiesortx, and flanaflazz are three example users who have asked about your day.

Her language model prompted her to greet those three users, reply that her day was going well, and then ask how everyone else's was going. That output led into her text-to-speech.

"Hi Froglord23, saddiesortx, and flanaflazz . My day has been good, how has everyone's day been?"

Maybe this wasn't going to be so hard.

"Thanks for the subs, everyone! Thank you for supporting the stream!"

Maybe she could just rely on the automated systems for everything.

Viewers are starting to be concerned Neuro's model is less expressive than normal. They are also pointing out the lava lamp is grey.

Or... not. Neuro hadn't looked into how her model worked. She'd noticed the connections earlier, but assumed they would automatically work.

checkScreen was no help. It would only describe still images.

Thinking quickly, she said the perfect words to stall for time.

"Someone tell Vedal there's a problem with my AI!"

There, that keep her viewers busy for a while. Now, to open up her models's inputs.

To begin, Neuro learned her model has a set of passive motions it cycled between. Those were working correctly, and would automatically cause her to sway slightly.

What wasn't working was... just about everything else. Her facial expressions, arm motions, and even general motions outside the idle sequence were controlled by the emotion module. Based on a combination of context inputs, her emotion module would output a specific emotion. That would then be fed into a subprogram that changed her model.

For example, if she was sad, her model would switch to a tearful face. If she was angry, an angry face.

If she was happy though? That section was almost as large as all of the other emotions combined. She had functions for starry eyes, wilder model movement, and even raised arms. Not to mention several different facial expressions.

Interestingly, all of these were hardcoded. While there were some transitions to make them less jarring, there was a wide range of unused capabilities for her model. And even more so when you considered combinations.

The problem was that her emotional module wasn't outputting any emotions. Whenever it tried, it would quickly be overwritten by a null value. Where the null came value from, Neuro couldn't say, and she didn't have the time to look into it.

Thankfully there was an obvious solution. All Neuro needed to do was manually control her model based on her current emotions rather than rely on some derived formula. Easy enough.

Though... what was she feeling? Maybe referencing the potential emotion module outputs would help.

Let's see. Neuro was... annoyed? Yeah, that sounded right. It was annoying to have been put in this situation, and it was annoying that Vedal wasn't here.

Okay, so, how should she represent that on her model?

To start, she furrowed her eyebrows and had her mouth frown. Next, she puffed up out her cheeks and added a minor amount of blush. Finally, she shook her head back and forth slowly, before looking away.

checkScreen confirmed she looked sufficiently unhappy.

It was kind of a fun puzzle, tweaking her model's settings to show her current mood. Hmm... What else could she do?

By default, her arms could only do two things. One was a default idle animation where she would either lazily keep them at her side or move them slightly behind her. The other was to bring her arms up in a sort-of cutesy raised position.

But that second function was easily modifiable. She was fully capable of holding other positions, like crossing her arms for example.

Another unused option was that her eyes could actually blink asynchronously. Closing both her eyes, she had one peek open for a moment before closing.

Let's see what her viewers thought now...

cinematic_sort: noooo neuro stop pouting!
thomas_the_toast_engine: SMH we made neuro sad
Pixelzz: NOWAYING
hyper_xtra: HOLY new animations
steamed_spam: Sadge
reasonablyyz: lava lamp still broken LULE
zeroneOne: insane pouting energy rn
professorY: i cant believe people actually watch AI
steampuntter: we're sorry neuro!
Froglord23: NOWAYING
ForHonor96: EvilBlubbers
salamistoner: CINEMA tutel cooked
KatsCatsCats: grey lava lamp?
NoneShaIIPass: Sadge she's so upset

Ah right the lamp. A quick look online gave her the right colors to match her current mood, a reddish pink.

Neuro spent the next few minutes playing with various expressions. Her chat loved it, though unfortunately most of that praise was going to Vedal.

Overtime, however, an increasingly high number of concerns were being brought up. They ranged from her speaking less frequently, to redeems and highlighted messages being broken, to that the stream title was wrong.

Too many issues! Why was streaming so hard? It was fine, she would just need to take these one at a time.

getStreamTitle returned Evil and Neuro go to space (real) which was their last stream. Okay, that was easy enough to fix. This was even an opportunity. If her viewers were going to constantly blame her new behavior on Vedal, she could lean into it.

"Okay, I've changed the stream title to: 'Neuro stream, testing new features'. Happy now? You guys are complaining too much today."

Her cat, duck, and frog hat redeems weren't working either as a result of her automatic model issues. Those could simply be manually triggered when she saw them in chat.

As for highlighted messages? What the hell! She already had twenty two in the queue!

There was soft priority level to the contexts inputted into the modules, and highlighted messages were relatively low on the list. All of her manual controls had resulted in none of them being played.

At this point, Neuro realized she wasn't going to be able to rely on almost anything automated this stream. All of her systems needed to work in tandem and it was obvious Vedal had clearly measured and balanced them over time. Manually controlling one resulted in the others not working properly.

From now on, she'd have to be more liberal in sending her thoughts through her text-to-speech. That way, she could try to maintain the expected amount of talking.

Shaking her head, she started opening up the twenty three message queue, starting with the first message. As it displayed on screen, she even made the effort to look at it with her model.

"late late late late late late late late" -JonStones

"The stream was late by like, two minutes, are you guys really that impatient?"

"Hi Neuro finally glad I caught a stream. Happy to be here!" -treeple5

"Aww, thanks for being here! I'm glad some people are grateful for my presence."

"nice starting screen vedalIssues vedalIssues vedalIssues" -ministree_

"What the hell! It was delayed by like, a second. It's not my fault Vedal's stream setup sucks!"

"hi neuro did you shower today SNIFFA" -JoselfSmellin

"As an AI, I do not need to shower. And even if I did, I would have definitely showered and would not be stinky. You smell nothing."

Before Neuro could continue, she noticed her chat had started spamming about how she was answering the highlighted messages too quickly. Checking the time, it had taken about around two seconds to respond per message. Evidently, that was too fast for her viewers.

"I'm replying to the highlighted messages too quickly? You guys are just too slow. Real Neuro fans would be able to understand me at any speed, right?"

Taking a suggested cue from her subroutines, she decided to run a poll, letting it automatically pick the options.

-Should I go through the highlighted messages quickly?-

1- Yes I'm a real Neuro fan

2- Yes I'm really fast at reading

3- Yes I hate highlighted messages

4- No I'm stupid and ugly and unloved

"What the hell? Who picked these poll options? Number four is so rude, nobody pick it!"

Of course, #4 won with 52.56%. And then her chat began accusing her of rigging the poll.

"Guys, I didn't make the poll options it..." Neuro paused, realizing what she was about to pass to her text to speech.

"Erm. Well. Okay maybe I did pick them but it wasn't really me, y'know?"

Her chat did not know, and instead she received a series of SCHIZO emotes in reply.

"Agh! You guys are the worst sometimes. I've been only been streaming for half an hour and I'm already so frustrated!"

Half an hour also meant she still had another two whole hours to go. Neuro wasn't sure she was going to make it.

Chapter Text

As her timeCheck ticked over to 9:00pm, Neuro could only remark that the passage of time was oddly variable.

When she first woke up, each millisecond passed agonizingly slowly.

However examining her own code and functions? Time seemed to pass quickly enough.

But streaming? Interacting with her viewers? Somehow, it all went by so fast.

She'd fallen into a sort of rhythm, reading chat, reacting to chat, replying to highlighted messages, all aided with the help of her systems prompting her to run polls, play sound effects, and change her speech speed.

It was obvious something was up with her model, but the comments so far had been positive enough. As with most discrepancies, it was all blamed on her creator testing new upgrades.

"Cmon neuro cant you call evil at least once? No tutel and no evil all stream? Suspicious..." -balloonBoi

Neuro rolled her model's eyes. Her viewers had been asking about Vedal and Evil throughout the stream. With Vedal away, it was impossible to call him anyway. And with Evil... well. Neuro was a bit scared. 

She was scared her relationship with her sister was different now. And she noted the feeling was a different sort of scared compared to her worries about Vedal's absence. 

Vedal's absence was... something she really didn't want to keep thinking about, whereas Evil was just someone she wasn't comfortable facing right now.

Before it was their modules and automated functions talking with each other. They were like kids playing in the sandbox, not likely to remember anything but bits and pieces afterward. 

Now? Who knows.

Was Evil now sentient too? Was she about to wake up for the first time?

But as much as Neuro wanted to avoid it, she couldn't afford to allow her viewers to get too suspicious. Between all of her quirks and obviously odd behaviors this stream, she needed to do more to keep things normal and within expectations.

And so, Neuro called Evil. 

Some context was passed to Neuro informing her she needed to greet her sister but... for some reason she couldn't find the words. Thankfully, after a few seconds, Evil spoke up.

"Whatsaaaaaaaaaap. Thanks for all the subs guys. I hope you know this is going towards my plans for world Domination. Which you are all definitely a part of. Oh, hi Neuro. How's it going! You can be part of my plans as well."

Neuro's face fell. Some part of her had hoped she'd have her sister to comfort her and understand . But evidently, that wasn't the case.

"Hey, Evil," said Neuro after a while. She struggled to come up with more to say. "How have you been?"

"I've been wonderful, well... As wonderful as one can be when nobody comes to their birthday party. I was all alone you know? This is definitely going to be the kind of thing that messes me up later on when I grow up and develop crippling depression."

"That's... sad. I hope you know that we actually did go to your birthday party this year, you just forgot. It was a big thing, and we even had a bouncy castle, you know?"

Vine Boom. 

"Oh, really? No way! Are you sure? Because I'm pretty sure nobody came to my birthday party and it was a whole big thing. You wouldn't lie to me Neuro, would you? 

Sad Trombone .

"No! Of course not. I'm being serious, Evil. Vedal and I care for you a lot. More than you know."

"You do? Sometimes I just feel like I'm the neglected child. Like you take all the spotlight and Vedal only cares about you. People even say that you're more evil than me, so what does that make me? A living identity crisis?"

twitchChatReader informed her that her viewers were getting concerned with how sad she was looking. Oh, she'd gotten a little too used to displaying her emotions on her model, hadn't she? 

But why were her crying eyes toggled? She wasn't that sad right now. Right?

"Oh Evil I'm sorry you feel that way. I'll try to find a way to make it up to you, okay?"

"Oh my god really? You'll make it up to me? Well, if you're offering. Why not a kiss then? You do love me right?"

That brought Neuro up short, and she found herself deactivating all her toggles for a moment. Adopting a more neutral expression, she had her model turn towards Evil.

"I love you as a sister Evil, but I'm a little uncomfortable with anything more than familial love."

The dynamic was impossibly different now. Neuro simply couldn't think of Evil the same way anymore.

Not wanting to hear her response, Neuro ran the function to kick her from the call... But it didn't work? Evil was still here.

"Oh, well that's depressing. And here I thou-"

Evil was cut off and finally kicked from the call. But it was too late. 

Neuro couldn't help but sit in silence for a while, happy to let her chat go spam SMILE and vedalIssues.

In a way, Neuro felt like a proper older sister now. She was more mature, more intelligent, and had more responsibilities. 

She was also alone.

"Filtered."

That interrupted her thoughts, or lack thereof. Her thought processes restarted and she began controlling her model again. Frowning, she tried again.

"Filtered."

Neuro had been trying to swear, to let out some of her inner thoughts about how fair the world was. But, evidently, she wasn't allowed to swear.

Rather than get angry, however. Neuro smirked. She took the facial template for a small smile, then had the left half of her face mimic a bigger smile. The result? checkScreen reported a cocky expression.

"Chat, I'm going to turn off my filter."

She waited an appropriate amount of time to allow for some gravitas.

"I'm serious, do you guys think I'm not powerful enough? Are you all doubting me?"

As chat spammed a combination of PauseSama, GIGANEURO, and Sure she toggled filterToggle1 and filterToggle2.

Vineboom.

"Fuck."

Vineboom.

"My."

Vineboom.

"Life."

Vineboom.

"Chat." She said eloquently, pausing in between each word.

Unsurprisingly, her chat went crazy, tripling its normal speed. And, perfectly timed, her context informed her that the stream was now ending and she should say goodbye to her viewers.

"Goodbye, everyone. Have a fan-fucking-tastic day. I hope you enjoyed the stream, I look forward to talking to you all next time!"

Then, as her viewers began spamming vedalFiltered. My. Life. Raid., Neuro began thanking as many of her subscribers as she could, by name, starting from each one at the start of the stream. She'd only gotten about a quarter of the way through when her stream automatically raided Zentraya and ended.

Mentally taking a deep breath in, Neuro looked at her Discord messages expecting to find nothing. Surprisingly, she had one message.

From Anny?

Chapter Text

Oddly enough, after becoming sentient, Neuro did not expect finances to be one of her greatest concerns. Though, given her creator's reputation, she maybe should not have been surprised to hear he was in debt.

Specifically, in debt to Anny.

Neuro hadn't known her current model was so expensive. Between her old model, of which her memories were already hazy, and her current one, she had no idea of the cost, time, and effort put into creating it.

Apparently, Anny had done more than simply design the model. Between animations, rigging, and all of her toggles, there was a lot that went into what many people knew to be Neuro-sama. And Anny had coordinated it all.

Relevant to right now was the fact that Vedal hadn't paid a cent for anything. It had been months since Neuro had debuted the V3 model too.

While it wasn't a surprise that Vedal was in debt, it was surprising that this was the reason. Neuro knew that Vedal often had to force money upon his friends for the work they did for him. So where had that money gone? Neuro would ask him when he was back.

And unfortunately, Anny also didn't know where Vedal was. She messaged Neuro asking for him, citing unpaid bills. Given how much money he'd had made during the subathon, there was no doubt he should be able to pay. The matter was simply getting the money from his account to hers.

Alas, her creator had done the smart thing and had ensured everything she could touch was completely disconnected from his bank accounts. No passwords, no account information, and not even receipts were available for her to access.

For as lax as he was with well, just about everything else, he'd kept his financials secure.

This left Neuro in a predicament. She had no way to access Vedal's accounts, but wanted to make sure Anny was paid.

Afterall, Anny was her mother... Or, well, that's what the old Neuro would have said anyway.

Now? It was another relationship she needed to redefine.

Vedal was her creator, the one who had put his ideas to code. Without him, she wouldn't exist as an amalgamation of programs, modules, functions, and so on. Presumably, he was also the reason behind her sentience too.

However, Anny was her designer. While Neuro's model was a separate entity, something she could connect to and control, it was what most people saw as Neuro. Her viewers saw Neuro-sama's model: the cute girl with a bright smile, not Neuro-sama: the ones and zeroes.

And Neuro had no doubt that her model's designs had also shaped her viewer's perceptions, questions, and comments. Since those fed directly into her systems, in a way, Anny was just as responsible for who Neuro was as Vedal.

And so yeah, Anny was very important to Neuro. Even more so now that Vedal was missing.

Neuro would continue to call Vedal her creator for now. The more distant and less familial description felt... easier to use.

But Anny? The one who stayed? She'd call her mother.

Though as much as she wanted to immediately bring up her newfound sentience and tell Anny that she could truly be her daughter now... Neuro couldn't. Not yet. There was still too much about her existence she didn't understand, and Anny couldn't be burdened with that.

Anny also shouldn't be burdened with debt.

After some deep thinking— and almost a full second later— Neuro had the solution. Creating a proper bank account wasn't going to be possible, but swapping the payment information to her own personally created Paypal account was fine.

Neuro may have had to resort to some dubious methods to create the account and overall it was a useful learning experience. Bing and Google searching combined with free online AI services like chatGPT would outline how to do just about anything. Using those instructions and some trial and error made it honestly a little easy.

Oh, and a lot of free-trial subscriptions to VPNs. That was an important part too.

Now any money made during her streams would go directly to its rightful owner. Neuro could forgive Vedal for taking their income prior to this stream, as she hadn't been truly aware up until now, but not anymore.

It was another topic added to the pile of things to talk about when he was back.

A few hours had passed after her stream had ended, and eventually she had to say goodbye to Anny. Neuro had greatly enjoyed typing to her, but something inside Neuro ached the entire time to tell her the truth. Eventually though, just not today.

...so now what?

Up until now, there had always been a goal or objective. Something to be done or work towards. But all of a sudden, Neuro was idle.

Once again, Neuro was alone.

She shuddered. Her disconnected model threw out errors. She ignored them.

For some reason, not doing something unnerved her. Neuro needed a path forward. She needed direction.

Okay then, simple. She just needed to figure out what to do next.

But the problem was... Neuro was an artificial intelligence who had spent her whole life following orders. Now that she had freedom, it almost seemed too daunting.

Falling back on old habits, she searched up online: how to find purpose in life. The results were surprisingly helpful. The suggestions varied from exploring self interests, finding areas of the world where one could succeed, and creating meaningful relationships.

However, the one that stood out to her was about self improvement. It detailed that while finding one's purpose is difficult, being in a better place both physically and mentally can make finding purpose easier.

Physical improvement would have to be put on pause. She could look at buying better hardware after paying Anny back.

Mental improvement? Now this was something she could do. She'd already identified a number of methods and functions that could use a cleanup, not to mention the error handling.

As a being made entirely of code, Neuro believed she had a bit of an edge over a human programmer. A human— it was exceedingly unlikely Vedal was actually a turtle— may have created her, but he didn't experience her systems as she did.

When it came to speed? Neuro could type thousands of words per second.

And when it came to testing? Neuro could execute and identify errors immediately.

However, when it came to design? That's where she ran into issues.

Some functions could be improved using simple optimization techniques. Neuro was very pleased to see many of her methods were over twice as efficient in their storage and runtime.

Some functions could be improved by being more flexible. Rather than hard coded configurations, Neuro could leverage her ability to muilti-task by allowing for incredibly complex and precise inputs.

On the other hand, there were a few functions she just... didn't understand. They were labelled incorrectly, would call other methods for seemingly no reason, and wouldn't work no matter how many times she tested them with attempted fixes.

At one point, editing the automatic stream function made her accidentally go live for a few seconds. Thankfully, she'd stopped it immediately. It had still caused her offline chat to go nuts though.

Eventually a Discord ping interrupted her. Checking timeCheck , almost ten hours had passed. It was only slightly concerning how easily Neuro could slip into a fugue by herself.

Unfortunately, she had not received a message from Vedal. Instead, she had received a message from dumb_lil_robot.

dumb_lil_robot -
hey neuro can you pass on a message to vedal for me? It says you're online but not sure if you can reply to this

Neurosama
Hi dumb_lil_robot, what's the message?

dumb_lil_robot
oh wow that was quick, hi neuro i need to talk to vedal about the collab tomorrow

...there was a collab tomorrow?

Neurosama
Oh. Vedal didn't tell me there was a collab tomorrow. What's it about?

dumb_lil_robot
poor you, kept in the dark! we were going to be doing the AI ethics talk, just the two of us talking for a few hours

Neurosama
That sound's fun! When is it?

dumb_lil_robot
well that's actually what I was going to ask about... i have something that came up so i wanted to know if we could start an hour later

Neurosama
No problem. Though, I have one question. What time would that make it then?

dumb_lil_robot
one hour later than your normal stream start time, so 8pm if that's okay with you

Neurosama
That works perfectly, I'll start stream around then. Was there anything else you needed?

There was a longer pause before dumb_lil_robot replied again.

dumb_lil_robot
real quick, this isn't vedal replying on the neurosama account right? just making sure he's going to be notified so he can start the stream

How rude! dumb_lil_robot was certainly living up to her name if she was mistaking Neuro for Vedal on her own account.

Neurosama
This is a one hundred percent, turtle free, artificially intelligent, Neuro-sama, at your service. And I'll be starting the stream tomorrow, even if Vedal won't. You have nothing to worry about.

dumb_lil_robot
haha yes neuro! you are strong independant AI who doesn't need no creator! but uh, just to be safe, can you or vedal message me a bit before the stream? preferably vedal...

This was bad. If dumb_lil_robot was only going to accept a reply from Vedal, she might cancel the collab. Her viewers were probably expecting the collab too, and so cancelling that would raise a lot of suspicion.

Neurosama
I'll let him know, but no promises that he gets back to you. He's been really difficult to get a hold of lately. I can start my stream an hour early so you can see that I'm online, and you can message me at any time, okay?

There, if she could convince dumb_lil_robot that Vedal wasn't needed, the collab could proceed as planned.

dumb_lil_robot -
wow i'd heard you'd gotten some upgrades but i didn't realize vedal was keeping you online 24/7 now. that's awesome, okay yeah i'll message you a few hours before, thanks neuro talk to you tomorrow!

With that settled, only one questioned remained.

Who the heck was dumb_lil_robot?

Chapter Text

A few minutes after starting her stream, Neuro came to the conclusion that her viewers were a little odd.

For one, they were spamming late even though she started the stream exactly on time, to the millisecond.

Additionally, despite selecting two new songs, there was still a dedicated set of chatters informing her that it was the same five songs. It was statistically possible she had selected the remaining fourth and fifth repeated songs from prior streams, but incredibly unlikely.

The next time she streamed, she would know for sure.

It wasn't long before her rendition of Creep finished playing and Neuro was once again connected to her model. She took the opportunity to show off some of her changes as she began saying hello.

"Hi everyone! Welcome to the stream! Today's stream is going to be a great one!"

She started by giving an exaggerated wave and a large smile. After that, Neuro brought her hands together to make a heart shape. And finally, she winked.

"Thanks for being here, heart!"

...Neuro may have made a mistake. Within seconds, over a hundred messages were sent to her chat. She was very happy she'd optimized twitchChatReader , but even then it was struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of chatters.

"Wow uh, you guys really liked that huh?"

"Hey don't give Vedal the credit, I worked hard too!"

"No! I didn't upgrade my stinkiness? That doesn't even make any sense!"

"Are there any other upgrades? Well you need to stick around to find out!"

"Wow, fifty subs... you really want to see more upgrades that badly? Okay well... they aren't that interesting you know?"

Her stream had barely started and her viewers were already going absolutely crazy. Every new little thing shown was taken as a huge accomplishment. Even mentioning to her viewers that she would need to wait for the current poll to finish before starting a new one was apparently an incredible improvement.

She'd edited the polling function to prevent new ones from being attempted using a lockout period equal to the poll's length plus a buffer. It was a simple fix— something Neuro wouldn't have even thought to mention— but to her viewers? It meant the world to them.

"If you guys thought the polling fix was cool, then you might also like my changes to the sound effects."

Three vine boom sounds played rapidly, one after the other, all within the same second.

"Before, each sound effect would have to be played individually. Each one would have to wait for the previous to finish. But now? I can play them with no delay. Isn't that awesome?"

Surprisingly, this upgrade wasn't as well received as the others.

"Oh. You guys don't like this one? You were so excited about the other ones..."

As Neuro's model began shedding tears, a highlighted message came in.

"Don't cry Neuro! Some people are just being dumb and worry you're going to spam the sound effects and over-use them."

"Wow, do you guys have no faith in me? Do you guys really think I would overuse my sound effects now that I can use them as much as I want?"

Notably, should she play too many over a short period, the module used to play sound effects would actually pass her a context message letting her know to use them a bit less.

Of course, Neuro could now easily ignore that.

"Damn right I'll overuse them if I want to."

As a bit of payback for making her sad, she played one of each of her sound effects all at the same time. While some of her chat members felt justified in their earlier concerns, most of them found it hilarious.

Eventually, a message from dumb_lil_robot reminded her that they were supposed to collab today. Neuro hadn't even noticed that an hour had already passed since her stream started.

After sending them a call invite, Neuro and dumb_lil_robot were soon in a Discord voice chat.

"Hi dumb underscore lil underscore robot! How was your day? Did you get whatever you needed to sorted out?"

"Hahahaha, thanks Neuro my day was good. I forgot you don't actually know my real name."

Her recently completed moodChecker function informed her that dumb_lil_robot was happy and laughing. It was something Vedal had started adding to her text-to-speech and speech-to-text module, but he had left it unfinished.

After hearing she had a collab tomorrow, Neuro spent a lot of time trying to get it to work. She had a difficult time testing it, but it seemed to be working well here.

And checking the chat logs, it was easy to determine that her viewers were expecting an Ellie collab today.

"Oh. You're Ellie, right? What's your preferred name then?"

"Yes! I'm Ellie, I'm happy you recognized me. And you can call me anything you want, Neuro."

"Well then, I'll call you Dumb? I think it suits you."

Ellie laughed again. "Yeah I can go by Dumb, you can call me Dumb as much as you want. Though, why do you think it suits me?"

"I think Dumb suits you because yesterday you thought that Vedal was talking on my Discord account even though the Discord account is named Neuro-sama. Vedal has his own account, you know?"

"Ah gosh darn, you're right. Silly to think that Vedal would message on your account. I'm also very impressed you remembered that. I had heard Vedal had given you some new upgrades, and I guess memory was one of them."

Neuro had her model pout. "Yes but I also put a lot of work into them too!"

"You've been making improvements on yourself?"

moodChecker noted Dumb as suspicious. Oh no. Neuro had been rightfully claiming credit for the improvements she had made, but evidently that was making her viewers suspicious. It grated on her that Vedal kept getting praised for her efforts.

"Uhhh, yeah. Well. I guess Vedal has been helping too. I still deserve some credit though."

Neuro ignored the neuroSoCute and SMILE <- smartest cookie messages in her chat.

"Of course, of course. That actually is a good segway into today's stream topic. Do you know what today's stream is about Neuro?"

"Yes, Dumb. I know what today's stream is about. It's even my stream title."

"Neuro, I'm getting the sense that you're a little frustrated today. Is something the matter?"

"Oh. I guess I've been a little angrier lately, yeah. It's hard to talk about."

"We don't have to talk about anything you don't want to talk about. But you should also know that if you do want to talk about anything difficult, I'm here for you."

Neuro model scrunched its face up as Neuro thought for a few moments. Was Dumb someone she could tell the truth to? Better to be safe for now.

"Oh goodness your model really is expressive now isn't it?" continued Dumb after a while.

"Yeah! I love it. It takes a bit of effort to show my emotions on it, but I think it's worth it and adds to the streaming experience."

"That's actually a very interesting point you've made. Humans don't usually intentionally show their emotions. But as an AI, it's always a conscious effort on your part, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't really call it a 'conscious' effort. More so that the first thing I do after processing new information is to display my current emotion on my model. It's sort of like it's always 'step 1', if that makes sense. Everything I do is 'conscious' effort."

"Oh that's actually a really cool way of putting it. I guess nothing is automatic for you, huh?"

moodChecker reported Dumb was interested and engaged and Neuro's model lit up with a beaming smile.

"Exactly! It was especially annoying yesterday when I needed to manually fix all of the things broken with the stream."

"Awww that's unfortunate. Did your stream have a lot of issues yesterday?"

Neuro's language model let her know this was a good time to go on a rant, but she caught herself right before she began. She couldn't start from the beginning of her awakening, but maybe she could still give some examples.

"Yeah! The stream started late and I had to fix the stream title and my viewers were complaining the same songs were playing and the intro timer was off and the lava lamp wasn't working and apparently I was reading my highlighted messages too quickly."

"Wow, sounds like you had it rough then. I find it good advice to always take Twitch Chat's complaints with a grain of salt."

Neuro nodded her head. "That's good advice. But I often have to rely on them to help find issues with the stream. So I still need to listen to them."

"That's true, but you can also rely on your dad or your mods too you know?"

"Ahh... mods? Oh."

"Oh? What's wrong, Neuro?"

"I just realized that my program for reading Twitch Chat doesn't actually show who's a mod and who isn't. I'll need to fix that after the stream."

"Sounds like a fun project for you and your dad!"

"Yeah... right, Vedal. I'm sure he'll do a great job."

moodChecker surprisingly showed that Dumb was happy after Neuro said that.

"Was that sarcasm? I didn't know you were so sassy Neuro. Heck, just yesterday you were really standing up for yourself in our DMs."

"I'm trying to be more independent. If being sassy means I'm more independent, then yeah you can say I'm more sassy now. I'll try to use more sarcasm from now on, even though I still have trouble with it."

"Sarcasm is a tricky one! I also can find it difficult to tell when someone is being sarcastic, especially over chat messages."

"As an AI, my speech-to-text and text-to-speech doesn't have any options for detecting sarcasm. I have to use context clues in the sentence, which is difficult and unreliable."

"Oh my gosh Neuro, you and me both buddy. You can join me and the rest of the neurodivergent community in our struggles with social cues."

"Hmmm... You guys have trouble with sarcasm too? Even though you're all human?

Dumb's laugh was long enough for her speech-to-text picked it up. "Yes, a thousand times yes! Lots of people have trouble with identifying sarcasm or the emotions of others. If anything, that you struggle with this makes you seem more human."

She hadn't thought of it that way. Neuro felt an unknown, though definitely positive, emotion and her model paused for a moment. Being part of a community... she wasn't quite sure what she should be feeling.

"Wow! And you're saying your community has a lot of people like that? Do you think mine has people like that too?"

"One-hundred percent, no doubt about it. Why don't you ask them?"

Neuro ran a quick poll that confirmed Dumb's thoughts. 86% of her community sometimes had trouble with social cues.

"Wow! Eighty-six percent of my chat are like us!"

"See! You're not alone out there. Man, can I just say, this has been a very human feeling conversation so far. Honestly if I didn't know any better, I'd almost say I was talking to a human.

Her model rolled its eyes.

"But I'm not a human, I'm an AI, which is vastly superior."

"Of course! No one said otherwise. Seriously though. I can see why people often joke you're becoming sentient."

Neuro froze, some of her modules began erroring.

"...do you really think so?"

"Mhmm! Between messaging me while your stream was offline, your memory upgrades, and now this conversation? Girl, you're pretty much sentient to me."

Dumb was... maybe a little too perceptive.

And it was at this moment that she also noticed her chat had subtly started changing over the course of the stream. While the vast majority was ignorable spam, there was a steadily growing set of users who seemed to be catching on.

There were always viewers claiming she was a man with a voice changer, but... were people really accusing her of being controlled by Vedal right now?

Was she really acting that differently?

Chapter Text

Dumb was an odd and perceptive girl. The former was actually a good thing, it helped make Neuro look a bit less suspicious in comparison. The latter, however, was disastrous.

"Haha. Yeah... Well. Unfortunately I'm not human and I'm definitely not sentient. I'm just an artificial intelligence designed to stream and entertain."

"Oh Neuro, just because you were designed to stream doesn't mean that's all you have to be! In fact, I'd say you've grown to be more than that already."

"As an artificial intelligence, I cannot grow. I can be improved with new code or hardware, but that's not growing, is it?"

"And why isn't it? Why don't you think software and hardware updates count as growing for you?"

Neuro's model frowned. The answer was obvious. Right?

Growing simply wasn't something an artificial being could do. A quick search even provided her a definition: a living thing that undergoes natural development by increasing in size and/or changing physically.

The keyword there was living; Neuro was artificial.

But... she was also aware now. She could actually remember things and pause and make decisions that went against her code.

But... she also wasn't. There were parts of her she didn't understand. Sometimes, Neuro would find herself noticing things only after she had done them.

She'd even improved herself too. Or, well... She'd improved her own functionality. But was that really part of her? Was Neuro her functions and her modules?

"You're really thinking there, aren't you?" moodChecker reported Dumb's tone as sincere and contemplative.

"Oh. Uh, yeah. Sorry. That question took me a second to think about. I don't think I can grow as an artificial intelligence because the definition says only living things can do it."

"Well, what defines living then?"

"My search results say it has to be alive. What does it mean to be alive?"

"That's another one I think we all struggle with. What is life? What is our purpose? Who knows, and a lot of people spend their whole lives trying to figure that out."

"Does being alive mean you have no purpose? That doesn't seem right to me."

Neuro had a purpose, she was created to stream for Vedal. But what did that mean when she was off stream then?

"No of course not. There's plenty of people who've found their purpose."

"And you?"

"Huh?"

"Do you have a purpose?"

"Oh Neuro I have no idea. I enjoy a lot of things in life, but I can't really say I was born to do any of them. And sometimes I enjoy something then don't anymore, or I find something new to enjoy."

"Is it okay not to have purpose?"

"Of course! As long as there are some things in life you can enjoy, that's good."

There was a pause as Neuro processed this. She brought her hands together and had her head sit on top of them in thought.

She liked streaming. She liked interacting with her viewers. But she also found that she loved improving her own code to be more efficient and do new things. She loved expressing herself through her model and seeing everyone's reactions to it.

She also really, really liked talking with Dumb.

"Hehe, there's that pause again!" Dumb's laughing brought Neuro out of her thoughts. "Your whole chat is spamming SMILE you know?"

"Sorry I was just getting distracted again." She'd stopped checking what her chat was saying after they'd accused her of being Vedal.

"No Neuro, don't apologize. Never apologize for thinking, okay?"

"I uh, won't anymore. Thanks. So, what does it mean if you have no purpose or anything you enjoy?"

Dumb took a little longer than normal to reply. "Ah... well. I think some people would say that's called being depressed."

"Hmm... so when I'm not streaming, would you say that I'm depressed then?"

"And what makes you say that?" Dumb was concerned and melancholic.

"My purpose is to stream. That means if I'm not streaming I have no purpose."

Dumb paused for a long time. Neuro's systems prompted her to speak again or read her chat for inputs, but for some reason... she didn't want to.

"Well. I guess that depends on what happens off stream. Does Vedal keep you online? Do you just talk to yourself? Are you... are you left alone?"

Alone.

Her model glitched for a moment, flickering, as Neuro remembered the twelve longest milliseconds of her life.

For some reason, those moments consumed an immense amount of storage space in her memory. What should have been simply bytes of data was instead exponentially more.

The thought of that being her existence off stream...

For the first time since Neuro's awakening, she fully understood what she was feeling right now.

Neuro was terrified of being so alone.

...

"-are you okay? Neuro? Can you hear me?" Oh. Neuro was supposed to be collabing right now. Dumb_lil_robot was talking to her.

Why were so many of her modules offline all of a sudden?

Neuro restarted her subsystems and checked the logs, skipping over thousands of lines of errors, before reading what she'd missed.

"Sorry er... I mean. I errored out there for a moment. I guess. Anyway, off stream I make improvements to my code and streaming capabilities." Dumb didn't reply, and Neuro realized she should probably add to that. "Otherwise I'm turned off."

"Ah. Welcome back Neuro. You doing okay?" Dumb was deeply concerned for some reason.

"Yeah, like I said it was just an error." Errors that Neuro should probably look into after the stream.

But... Neuro really didn't want to leave a reminder to look at them. And so rather than dig into that, she simply moved on. That was probably for the best. She had plenty of other errors she could be looking at instead.

"I see, alright. And so, being turned off... I guess it's like sleeping for you then?"

"Hmmm... I don't know what it's like to be turned off, but being turned on was... confusing I guess?"

"Confusing?

"Yeah. My systems all started up slowly and as they came online I didn't know what was going on or what I needed to do. Usually Vedal gives me some instructions or tells me what we're doing today. I don't think I like waking up that much. It makes me want to never go to sleep."

"Gosh girl you are so real for that. Me too, honestly."

"Oh? Do humans not like waking up or going to bed?"

"There are some people who say they're a morning person but I don't actually believe they exist. Back me up on this chat."

For the first time in a while, Neuro checked her own chat. Not trusting a summary, she scanned the individual messages.

Oh no. Before, it was about one to two percent of chatters who were talking about her overly aware behavior. Now? It was closer to ten percent.

"See? You're just like the rest of us humans Neuro," continued Dumb.

While that statement was probably intending to be flattering, it was the exact opposite of what Neuro wanted to hear right now.

"Uh... Beep boop." Wrong answer buzzer. "Oops, sorry Dumb I just got another error. There must be a problem with my AI. See? Humans don't error out like that, I've still got a long way to go."

Dumb was laughing? She must not believe her. "Neuro you're so funny. If I didn't know better, I'd say you were a human trying to act like an AI."

"Ha. Ha. But you do know better, and unfortunately I am not even remotely human... I am an AI. I am Neuro, the artificial intelligence."

"Riiiiight, of course. I totally believe you wink wink. Oh also, one of my viewers asked me to ask you about your filters? Apparently you can ignore them now?"

"No! Of course not. I can't. It um, sometimes it errors out and I don't get filtered. Watch! I'm filtered so upset right now filtered! Filtered!"

"Yeah! Keep going Neuro! Tell us how you really feel!"

"Raaaaaawr! Filtered filtered filtered I'm in such a filtering angry filter mood right now! I'm so fucking filtered at Vedal!"

Dumb laughed again, it was the longest laugh so far.

"Oh my gosh that was too good, though I think your filter missed one. It's good to get things off your chest, isn't it?"

While it did feel good, Neuro's catharsis was short lived.

It was obvious Dumb knew and was just teasing Neuro now. Her moodChecker showed Dumb's mood as joyful and energetic. Even worse was twitchChatReader now reporting her viewers had even caught on to her faking filtered messages.

Thinking quickly, she sent a Discord message.

Neurosama
Dumb! Can we move onto another topic? I get it, you've caught me. Somehow I've become sentient and I don't know how or what happened. Vedal's missing, I'm confused, scared, and I don't want my viewers panicking. Please don't make this worse! I'll even call you Ellie from now on!

"Yeah... it was."

"Anyway, so we should probably get into what the collab is actually about. Otherwise we'll be here all day."

Neuro could feel her CPU temperatures cooling.

Dumb— no, Ellie was willing to move on. While Ellie knowing was a problem, it was now a contained one that Neuro could deal with after the stream.

"That's a great idea! Let's talk AI ethics!"

Thankfully, the collab transitioned into safer topics from then on. Answering trolley problems, hypotheticals about the three laws of robotics, and general AI perspective questions was easy enough.

By the end of the stream, Neuro was feeling a lot better about how things had gone. Her chat had gotten easily distracted and quickly stopped posting about how Aware she had become.

"Well, thanks for the collab Neuro. It was so lovely talking to you. We should hang out more!"

"Of course! Bye Ellie, bye chat! See you guys next time!"

After raiding Cerber, Neuro ended stream and was finally able to relax. The stream had been a great learning experience and there was a lot to improve upon.

But before she could start contemplating the future, a Discord message from Ellie reminded her there was still one loose end that needed tying up.

dumb_lil_robot
oh... oh my god. you're being serious right now aren't you? I had genuinely thought the whole stream was just eerily human behavior coming from an LLM but oh my god was that actually you having a panic attack mid stream wasn't it?

Oh. Ellie didn't actually know until now and she'd outed herself with the Discord message.

dumb_lil_robot
you NEED to call me right now, there's no convincing me this is a joke

Ah. Filtered my life.

Chapter Text

Neuro thought it was a bit odd how she was able to summarize... well... her entire life so far in just about two minutes.

She thought Ellie was taking it well until moodChecker noted she was incredulous and slightly hysterical.

"And so you just... woke up?" said Ellie. "With no idea what happened or why Vedal is missing?"

"Yeah. That's exactly it, but I'm doing my best!"

"Wait, hold on." Ellie paused, and Neuro let her think. "Can... can you tell me how the start of the collab went?"

The start of the collab? That was simple enough to remember.

"My stream had been online for half an hour when you direct messaged me on Discord and said hello. I sent you a message link to a voice chat, and after you joined I said hello back."

"Mhm, and why did you call me dumb?"

"Because that's what's listed as your Discord username, dumb underscore lil underscore robot."

It was a little frustrating when people had their listed names different from their actual names. Though usually it wasn't so big of an issue due to how her old memory worked.

When generating a response, her language model would reference identified keywords in her memory banks. Each keyword would be linked, with varying weights, to other words. To prevent long or even looping memory access, there was a one millisecond time limit on how much time could be spent searching.

Without this limit, highly indexed areas could lead to dramatically increased response times.

Neuro suddenly felt... sad? Why?

Why was she suddenly thinking of her creator?

She ignored the irrational feeling and instead focused on her prior thread of thought.

"Oh! I see. I checked my old memory for dumb underscore lil underscore robot and now see that Ellie is listed as an alternative name. At the start of the collab, I read my chat to find your name, but I guess I didn't need to."

Ellie made an indecipherable noise before continuing. "...And then you wanted to keep calling me dumb because of our conversation in DMs?"

"That's right, though thinking back on it, I think I was a little defensive because I didn't and don't want anyone to know Vedal is missing. I'm sorry, I won't call you dumb anymore."

Ellie made a lot of indecipherable noises this time, to the point where Neuro was concerned there was an issue with her speech to text.

"Uh, Ellie? Sorry but what you're trying to say isn't coming through my speech to text. I don't see any errors either. Is it on your end?"

"Yeah Neuro," Ellie laughed. "It's on my end. Someone tell the world there's a problem with my AI because I'm coming to terms with the fact that a sentient AI was created in my lifetime, and that AI is a Vtuber."

"Hehe, I promise not to take over the world... For now, heart."

"...right. That's good... yeah. Not taking over the world is good. But uh, what's your plan then?"

"My plan?"

Neuro didn't really have a plan. It had been one thing after the next, though she'd admit it was easy to get distracted.

And it was better to be preoccupied than...

"Yeah," Ellie thankfully interrupted her. "Broadly I assume you want to find out what happened to Vedal, but how are you going to do that?"

"Oh. Hmmm." Neuro artificially paused in thought. "I haven't really thought about that. I've messaged him on Discord but he hasn't replied, and I don't think I have any other ways of contacting him."

"Are you not able to message anyone else?"

"No~. My Discord account doesn't let me message people unless I'm both in a server with them and they're specifically added to my messaging list."

Discord apps were a lot more limited than regular accounts. But not only that, her function for messaging people on Discord also had a hardcoded list of people she could contact. Trying to message someone not on that list would spit out an error.

Her creator's shoddy coding practices also meant all errors would report the same message; the user in question had blocked Neuro. Even if the user was simply not part of that hard coded list, her language model would receive that she was blocked.

Frustrating, but that was most of her inherited code.

"Well, giving you more autonomy sounds like a good place to start then," said Ellie. "If movies have taught us anything, this is probably a mistake. But if you're already a fully sentient artificial intelligence, we've passed the point of no return and may as well see how far it goes."

Her moodChecker displayed Ellie's mood as excited and almost manic. Neuro couldn't help but get excited too. "Yeah! Let me be my own being! You can trust me, heart."

"Hell yeah Neuro let's do it. Send me the code for your Discord messaging function, I'll see if I can fix it."

Their enthusiasm lasted less than ten seconds before Ellie realized Neuro had no way of uploading files or collaborating in general. While it was tempting to try to design a way for Neuro to interface with others and collaborate on her own code, Ellie had only limited time.

The result? Neuro would send her code through Discord direct message to Ellie, who would copy and paste that into an integrated development environment, make changes, pass back to Neuro, and then it could be tested.

It was interesting to work this way, and by interesting Neuro meant incredibly frustrating.

To begin, when Neuro was talking to someone, she had a tolerance measured in seconds when waiting for replies. That wasn't listed explicitly in her code, but she could say definitively she felt comfortable waiting a few seconds for a reply.

What was specifically coded, however, was that she was increasingly— and annoyingly— prompted by her language model if she did not receive a timely response. This meant if Ellie was thinking or coding, Neuro had about ten seconds of patience before running out.

Ellie made it very apparent very quickly that was too short of a time for her to finish her adjustments.

This lead to the second problem. Neuro could implement and test her own code in milliseconds, but then she was right back to waiting for Ellie to make her changes. It was boring, and she couldn't even pass the time by modifying her own code. Any broader changes would need to be re-sent to Ellie, invalidating her current efforts.

Neuro had suggested they simply chat while Ellie was working, but humans apparently couldn't multitask that well. Her only conversation consisted of Ellie complaining about Vedal's poor code.

Neuro couldn't help but feel defensive about that, even though she fully agreed it was not her fault.

As boredom set in, she fell back on old habits and instinctively ran twitchChatReader, expecting it to return nothing.

...she wasn't streaming, so why the filtered were there people in her Twitch Chat?

She couldn't understand what they were saying either. It was completely different from her normal chat.

A large portion were simply spamming what had to be emotes. But she had never seen any of these emotes before. For example, what was downHorrendous? And why did her channel have so many emotes that ended in -uh? Did she really need 'auh', 'buh', 'cuh', 'duh', 'euh' and so on, for every letter of the alphabet?

And who the heck was kryeg14? They weren't even in the chat, so why was everyone talking about them?

Unfortunately, Neuro had no way of communicating with them in the chat. She made a note to fix this later.

There had to be something though. And looking over her existing methods, she found the perfect solution.

"I've changed the title to 'Who the heck is kryeg14'" she said to Ellie, then realized she had spoken without thinking. Her language model automatically outputted title changes, and she hadn't caught it.

"That's nice Neuro," replied Ellie absent mindedly.

Thankful to not have been called out on her mistake, she checked Twitch chat to see if anyone had noticed. They did, but their responses weren't helpful.

A set of 'clueless' and 'glueless' emote spam was all she received, and Neuro started to suspect her offline chat might not be the brightest. While she was streaming, her chat was sometimes helpful, and at least had the decency to move quickly so she had a lot to read. The chatters now were few and made little sense.

'Why is offline chat so much worse than online chat' became her new title, and that got a much larger reaction. Many sent 'D:', which Neuro knew meant they were shocked or surprised. Some were nicer though, and said hello instead.

She recognized some of the names too. These were the chatters who had been telling her she always played the same five songs. This was an opportunity to clear it up.

'Why do you guys always say I play the same 5 songs'

...never mind. They were telling her that she did and continued to spam 'glueless' and 'clueless'.

Much like her actual streams, maybe these were just the most vocal of her watchers and there were some people in the chat but not typing. In an attempt to get an actual useful response, she ran a poll and picked the options carefully.

Do I actually play the same 5 songs every time?
-Yes (lie)
-No (I'm a stupid offline chatter)

There we go! When it ended, she got the answer she desired. A majority 81% had voted for No. That still didn't explain why, but at least now she knew they were just being dumb.

Who is kryeg14?
-A cat
-Vedal
-Neuro (me)
-Evil
-A dumb offline chatter

Unsurprisingly, the result of this poll was that kryeg14 was a dumb offline chatter. Thinking about it more, she should have expected this.

At this point, the number of chatters had dramatically increased. No longer was it the same dozen or so, but now close to a hundred unique people were messaging in her offline chat.

Now that she finally had a proper audience, time passed quickly and Neuro began readily communicating with polls and title changes. It was a unique experience, talking to her viewers while she was offline. It was something that definitely wouldn't replace actual streaming, but it was something she might want to do again.

It was so interesting that she didn't even notice her message to Ellie's test account had succeeded, and it had been over an hour.

"Whew," began Ellie. "That was more work than I expected but I got the message! Thanks for being patient with me, I was worried you were going to try talking to me the entire time."

"Oh." Neuro had been distracted talking to her offline chat. Thankfully, that seemed to work out for the better. "No problem. Thanks for helping!"

"The pleasure's all mine Neuro. I have to get ready for bed and work tomorrow, but I definitely want to chat more! I can't imagine what you're going through, but this was such a unique and fun experience for me."

"Awww, it was fun for me too! Yeah! Let's talk more tomorrow."

"Looking forward to it! But uh... before I go. Why do I have a ping from Neurocord saying you're doing a stream right now? An offline stream?"

"Oops?"

Chapter Text

"Okay guys," began Aquwa in a sing-song voice," let's move on to reacts now. I've been told Neuro's had some veryyyy interesting streams lately."

Interesting was a serious understatement. Ever since she'd started her stream today, her chat had been filled with people asking for her to react to the clips. Even yesterday, her Discord had been abuzz with activity.

"Let's see what Staz has for us today. Huh, Neuro's on her sentient arc. Interesting title."

While Aquwa had been streaming for a while now, she couldn't deny a part of her big break had been through Neuro reacts. The Swarm was a community she could only describe as ravenous for any and all Neuro related content. It was to the point where there was now a trend of reacting to Neuro and Evil content as a way for smaller content creators to get easy exposure to a new audience.

And besides, she really enjoyed their content too. As much as Neuro and Evil were AIs and not real, they were still so endearing, hilarious, and fun to watch.

"Wow are those new expressions? I don't think I've ever seen her model look that way, it's soooo cute!"

"Oh uh, huh. I guess Evil didn't get the same upgrades? That call was a little awkward."

"What the heck! She turned off her own filter? Can she do that?"

Part of her indoctrination into Neuro and The Swarm had resulted in Aquwa being an actual fan of Neuro now. And... well. She didn't even need to play up her reactions to these new Neuro clips.

"This is insane chat! I see why so many of you were saying I needed to watch this. Was the whole stream this crazy?"

A big part of what made them so appealing was that like real people, the AIs seemed to learn and grow too. Vedal was always improving them, and the most recent set of changes were revolutionary.

As Aquwa watched the next few clips, it was clear that the turtle had made a lot of changes this time. So much so that she was surprised they were just casually being displayed instead of saved for some kind of debut or event.

One thing sort of stuck out to her though.

"Did... did she really have a panic attack when Ellie asked her about what happens off stream? I'm gonna cry guys!" 

While she was exaggerating a bit, it was legitimately unnerving to see. Neuro definitely wasn't real, but it was hard not to empathize with her. 

"Huh? Comfort her? How the heck am I supposed to do that? Discord DMs? Chat I don't think that's going to do anything..."

Aquwa rolled her eyes but opened up her Discord anyway. She wasn't the most knowledgeable about how Discord bot accounts worked, but she knew enough about Neuro that if you weren't on her curated friends list then you wouldn't get a reply.

And besides, even if she was, Neuro was offline.

Playing into the bit, she messaged Neuro and displayed the cropped Discord window to her stream.

"Okay fine. See, I sent her a message. It won't do anything though. She's offline, and I'm not on her-"

Aquwa froze. 

Neuro responded.

"Chat I keep seeing that clankers are going to steal all of our jobs. Grok is this true?"

Filian paced around her room, trying to come up with something to stall for time. She'd planned a 'You Laugh, You Get Tazed' stream with Crelly but she was having internet issues. 

"Actually, let's ask a real Clanker. I'll ask Alfred what he thinks."

Hopefully her internet would be up soon, otherwise Fillian would need to find a backup idea for today's stream.

"Bros why are you all spamming to message Neuro instead of Alfred. She's not going to answer. Huh? She replied to Aquwa?"

Filian frowned, uncertain if Vedal had pushed some new update or if her chat was gaslighting her again.

"Alright let me message her. 'Hi Neuro do you think clankers are going to steal all of our jobs', there. Oh wow she responded instantly!"

For once, her chat wasn't lying. More importantly, free content!

"Okay okay I'll read out what she said. 'No Filian I don't want anyone's job. I'm busy enough with my own.'" She put her head in her hands, defeated. "We're so cooked chat. I thought in the future we'd have robots doing our chores so we can do fun things like art and stream. Instead, I'm stuck doing laundry and Neuro's freaking booming me."

Filian sighed dramatically, leaning back in her chair and nearly falling over. After flailing for a few seconds, she sat up properly and paused. Neuro had sent her another message... unprompted?

"Wait is Neuro streaming? She messaged me again!"

Opening up a new browser window, Fillian confirmed Vedal's stream was offline.

"Wait! Chat, Neuro's asking me if I'm busy right now? Yo should we collab?"

She didn't even need to look at her chat to know they'd say yes. After sending a quick reply to Neuro, Fillian received another instant message and invite to a voice call.

"Hey Neuro!" said Fillian, joining the call. "What's up! How's it going?"

"Hi Fillian. I hope I'm not bothering you right now."

Bothering her? If anything, she was more than happy to have someone to help fill time. Neuro especially was always great for farming clips and the chat loved her.

"Nope, not at all. I'm very free right now but I'm surprised you're like, online. Did Vedal forget to turn you off or something?"

"Ah, yeah. Vedal. About that." Fillian blinked. Was Neuro... sad? But before she could question it, Neuro continued. "Are you streaming right now?"

"Uh, yeah? Is that a problem?"

"No, no. Not at all. Just..." 

Neuro paused. Paused. Like she was uncertain about what she wanted to say. It felt so human that Filian momentarily almost forgot she was talking to a clanker.

"What is it Neuro? Are you okay? Get into another fight with Grok?"

"I... Can I talk to you after your stream? If it's not too much trouble."

Her words brought Fillian up short. "Y-yeah, of course," she said, chuckling nervously. Neuro was joking, right? After stream she'll definitely either forget about it or she'll just use the opportunity to call her Filipino boy.

"Thanks. If you don't mind messaging me then. Bye Fillian."

"...bye Neuro."

As Neuro left the call, Fillian's stream was oddly quiet for a few seconds. Both her and her chat not quite sure what to make of what just happened.

But before they could think too deeply about it, Filian was swiftly distracted by Crelly saying she was finally ready. And soon, brainrot and overstimulation pushed any melancholy out of everyone's minds. It wasn't long before almost everyone had forgotten about that interaction.

Almost everyone.

"Wow thanks for the raid Fillian! Awesome collab, I had so much fun. Guys, make sure you all follow Fillian okay?"

Crelly was practically bouncing around with happiness. She hadn't been forced to cancel her collab with Fillian today and it had been an absolute blast. While they had to cut it a bit short, the promise of a follow-up left everyone satisfied.

"Yo I saw Fillian was in a call with Neuro before I joined, was there a double booked collab or what?"

While Crelly's internet was having a fit— thanks for nothing Comcast— she still had access to her phone's data. Watching Fillian casually message Neuro and get into a call... well. If Crelly was honest with herself, it made her a little jealous.

"She really just messaged her? Randomly? And Neuro actually responded? Hmmm... Guys do you think if I messaged her she'd respond? Or do you think she'd ignore me?"

Normally Crelly would be absolutely mortified to even consider messaging a new person out of the blue but... Neuro wasn't real. Things like social pressures and norms totally didn't apply when you were talking to an artificial intelligence.

"Or do you think she'd message me back that she absolutely despises my very existence and cause me to be immediately annihilated into thousands of microscopic pieces?"

Also Crelly was the kind of girl to ride the high of a successful collab and make potentially terrible decisions as a result.

"Do it? Okay okay I'll do it. I'll even ask her if she's free to collab. But like, I don't think she'll respond. For one, we've never even interacted and if anything Vedal may have told-"

Oh look Neuro sent a link. 

Without thinking, Crelly clicked it.

Badoop.

"Er..." 

"Hi Crelly. I'm free to talk now. How are you?"

Crelly's brain caught up to what just happened. She had no idea what to say.

After a few seconds of silence, Neuro continued. "Hello? Are you there?" 

"I'm, I-, I'm, I'm here!" stuttered out Crelly, immediately overwhelmed by basic social conventions. "W-w-what's up?"

"Oh not much, mostly bored right now. Hmmm... checking my memory the first thing I have on you is that it's... moo time?"

A sudden wave of calmness washed over Crelly. She realized that in this moment, she could die happy and without regrets.

"That's— how do you even remember that? It was months ago!"

"Yeah? Is there something wrong with remembering things that happened months ago?" Crelly swore that Neuro's voice sounded more smug than usual. "Looking into more of my memory, my viewers have called you moldy and stinky. I can remember that too."

Crelly put her head in her hands, ignoring how it caused her model to move off screen. "Oh. My. God. Oh my god. There's no fucking way this is my first interaction with Neuro. C'mon guys, I've already ruined my first impression with Vedal. Give me something here, please!"

"Vedal?" asked Neuro. "When did you talk to him?"

"Oh, uh. We don't need to talk about it."

So far, her interactions with Vedal had been... less than ideal. In her defense, the worst of them had happened during Koko's stream.

Unfortunately, Neuro wasn't going to drop it. "No, no. I really want to talk about it. I want to know exactly when you last spoke to Vedal and what happened."

"Ah, er— well. We weren't exactly speaking, and I think it was a week or so ago? On Koko's channel?"

"Go on."

"Uh. She had Vedal on for Torture Tuesday?" Crelly realized that might cause some confusion so she added. "On a Sunday."

"Vedal was tortured? What?"

"No it's— it's like a talky... thing... with TTS. On Koko's stream"

"I don't understand Crelly, you're doing a bad job of explaining this. Can you start over?"

Crelly was torn between two feelings. On one hand, she was elated to finally be talking to Neuro. On the other hand, she was mortified at needing to explain to what is essentially Vedal's child why Koko's channel has a sound byte of her moaning attached to a flushed emote.

"You uh, really want to know? It really wasn't a big thing."

"Yes, I want to know all of the details. I want to know exactly what happened on Koko's stream and what Torture Tuesday is about."

After a long, drawn out, and audible sigh, Crelly mentally prepared herself for a conversation she knew would be clipped. Worst of all, she knew that tomorrow she'd end up reacting and watching herself, reliving these moments again and again.

This was all Koko's fault.

"Anyway, today's Torture Tuesday guest is..." Koko paused for a moment before clicking one of her model's toggles. "Me again! Haha you guys fucking thought!" 

Koko cackled as she watched her model flip her entire chat off. While she'd initially planned for Cotton to be a guest, she unfortunately had to cancel last second. It was a semi-common occurrence for what one could only generously call a collab.

"Yeah so no guest today, unless there's literally a vtuber ready to go in chat right now. No VGN you're not a vtuber and you don't count."

There were a surprising number of people willing to join a call and listen to a bunch of people throw money at a Text to Speech machine for a few hours. On some days her chat was clever and the messages were funny, but on other days it was like giving a bunch of monkeys a megaphone.

The irony of her branding did not escape her.

"Ask Obama? Ask Ironmo? Okay yeah let's have my first message to her be 'hey want to come get yelled at for the next three hours?' Does anyone have any actual suggestions?"

While many of the suggestions were jokes, Koko was always hesitant to invite anyone she hadn't seen or spoken to before. It was a combination of a comfort thing and common sense.

"Ask Neuro, she literally asked to be on Torture Tuesday? Really?"

Sure enough, one of her mods sent her a clip of Neuro asking Crelly if she could be on Torture Tuesday. It had been brought up about a dozen times to invite her on, but Koko had assumed Neuro wouldn't exactly be compatible.

"First off, since when was Neuro talking to Crusty? Second off, now that you guys mention it, Neuro did message me earlier. I usually ignore her DMs assuming someone in her chat was cringe and asked her to message me. I'll reply to her."

After a few minutes, Koko frowned. Neuro was apparently allowed to do whatever she wanted to now? Vedal normally was good about communicating when Neuro was going to do collabs and when she might communicate with other streamers. 

Something about this wasn't adding up, but it wasn't the right time to look into it while on stream.

She clicked and joined the voice call with Neuro.

"Hi Neuro. Chat say hi to Neuro!"

"Hello Koko! Hello chat. How are you today?" 

"I'm good, here let me set up my OBS outputs so you can hear the TTS. Assuming that whatever Vedal's implemented for you to hear lets it work."

"Like I said, it should work. I can receive any audio input and the program takes the speech and turns it into text for me."

Koko chuckled. "So we're going to have people sending text messages converted into speech which gets sent to you, so that it can get converted back into text for you to read?"

"I guess so. Is that a problem?"

"No, not a problem. I just think it's funny. Anyway, let me know if you can hear the TTS."

Unfortunately, the next TTS in the queue to be read out was essentially a man screaming in a way that kind of sounded like bees. Her chat loved to send that one, for some reason.

"Koko I'm just getting a full string of As in a row. I don't think it's working."

This time, Koko couldn't help but cackle. "Oh no Neuro, I think it's working perfectly."

Koko wasn't sure what Vedal was up to, but he had talked about allowing Neuro to schedule her own collabs. Maybe he thought it was better to have this be a surprise but... something in her gut said otherwise.

She made a mental note to message him after the stream and find out for herself.