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Kenadian lied when he let Wifies out into the world. He imagines it, sitting at the hideout she’d brought the two of them into, then three when Wato dropped in from whoever knows where, and he thinks that it must have been easy. Like pushing trash into a recycling bin.
That statement’s sharper than what he means though. Ken wouldn’t lie to him, wouldn’t mean to. But he believed everything and anything those days. Especially from his personal savior.
It’s easy to be around Squiddo. It’s easy, or at least not difficult, to walk around Parrot and follow him down Lifesteal’s terrain until there’s a duel or PVP or anything that could unravel a wire in his sealing, to sit around the set of Unstable and be company for the passing off-duty actors or Ken, Wato. Being human doesn’t hurt him. Ken didn’t know everything.
Either she was wrong, or just too concerned about his situation. His wires could be tucked underneath metal and silicon. His biology is no impediment to him, even as an obsolete device. An escapist needs to be a fast learner, and Wifies has always learned best with a visual, active example. If Ken was here, if he could see him now, then Wifies knows that she would be proud.
Being near Squiddo makes him pick up his slack faster. Going around them and their orbit of general Squiddo-ness lets him learn. He’s almost human, as much as the thought excites and scares him.
They bleed from a spider bite, and he learns how to recolor the fluids that grind against his motors into a redstone-dyed red; they scream in terror, and he looks behind him and feels that prey-animal fear again, but different, lighter; they laugh into his air and he tries to feel that noise swell up in his own voicebox, the sound unfamiliar to him but still easy.
It’s scary too, but it’s on purpose; horror mods that replace the edge under his silicon skin with things that affirm it, tell him that this fear is needed. The first Wifies never mentioned anything related to others. There’s no indirect way to know what they or anyone else could know. If he’s scared, then that’s on him, the mods, not his falseness.
He’s trying. He’s learning. He’s not the best at it. What he is, it’s natural that it would be their curiosity.
So he’s not startled enough to jump a double block when they start the new world with the new horror mod, and ask him, “What is ‘Evilfies’, bro?”
What is a good term, Wifies thinks, checking the buzz of his communicator to see a definitely inaccurate death message for Squiddo. He’s a little surprised that they waited this long to ask; Parrot and the others wasted little time compared to them.
“He wasn’t… it’s not really that bad,” Wifies starts, his hands gathering wood absentmindedly, his voice smooth. It’s not lying if it’s partially true. “It was a long time ago, but back in my day, my original—” The leaves break under his hands, the bark splintering into the grooves of his palms. He’s no more real than you, Ken told Wifies once. “—the evil version me was mass producing clones of himself. Then killing and recycling them. But then I beat him up and dumped him into the void, so there’s no way he’s coming back.”
“Even with the mod?”
“Even with the mod. He’s not that powerful,” he agrees, turning to the acacia tree, movement in the corner of his eye. “Wait, there’s a sign—did you write this sign?”
“No? What does it say?”
I know you.
Give me life.
Let me free.
Wifies looks up, glancing around the trees as if there’ll be some trace of the other him. Alone, he concludes, shoulders lowering, no sign of anything around but Squiddo and him.
“Did Evilfies write that?” they ask, uneased from the waver in their words. From where? He’s dozens of servers away, Wifies almost retorts, but it’s better for home addresses to stay under lock and key.
Instead, a laugh bubbles in his throat before he swallows it down, shaking his head. “No, he’s not that creative.”
And he doesn’t play these games.
When he shows up, it’s obvious. Bedrock and puzzles to test his usefulness. He’s cold and scrutinizing and knowing; there is no subtle manipulation when they have the same brain. Only blatant rerouting and guidance into what he wants; it’s overt.
This reads more like a wayward clone than him. Not all of the other Wifii were fully made and sentient in the factory, but some were, and he didn’t tell Ken but he let them go, the ones able to know and think. They didn’t deserve to live down there forever. He didn’t tell Ken; the relationship he has with them is... if they collapsed, broke down, or short-circuited then they would come back to him. Then he would fix them and let them leave. It’s kinder than anything the evil him would have given. It’s different from a real player’s relationships.
He looks away from the flicker of pillars around them, the bedrock dusting the sky in grey. It makes his nose sniffle, and his eyes water from the cough at the back of his throat alone, nothing else.
“Whoa,” Squiddo says, and he waits, but they don’t have anything else to add, the sound of mining faint. Wifies kneels down and picks up his stone pickaxe from where he dropped it in the grass.
“What about you?” Wifies asks, standing around the crater left around the tall oak.
“What?”
“Squevil; what does your evil version do in her free time?”
“Probably spends it being unfunny, and—” Squiddo makes a noise, exclaiming in surprise as apparently something happens. Wifies grips the wooden handle and turns to the cave he saw them last. “And glitching me out apparently! What the hell, my eyes, augh—”
“Your eyes? Can you see—you’re okay Squiddo?”
“Eugh— yeah, yeah, it’s gone now—”
There is a secret: Wifies is always lying. Lying is the wrong word, yes, but it is the closest word to what he is allowed to use. Because he is being smart. Calculating. Mindful. Because if he is not, then he will say the wrong thing, which he has a lot of at the current moment and foreseeable future.
One of them is if him—the Unstable, actor him which he does not remember and he is almost convinced was some other clone—leaving means that he does not love the left. This is because that means terrible things. Only towards himself, to the internal quiet parts, but still as terrible. For then that would mean that:
- Kenadian does not love him. Or Wifies does not love Kenadian in the way he wants to. Which is fine. Not fine as in happily or easy, but if Ken cannot love him in the way that he thinks he does then Wifies will learn, because he always can, and if he cannot love Ken in the way that he wants to then Ken has shown him that will not matter, that there will be a space at the table empty for him because they haven’t gotten the third chair yet.
- Wato does not not love him. But then again, Wifies is the one that leaves mainly, and freedom is the easiest and most needed thing between the three of them. So really, these two points are mainly nothing in the grand scheme of things.
- His creator, original, evil him did not want him to go. It was not in his hands to leave for Ken was the one at the button. Ergo; he did not leave his creator, and his creator did not leave him. They were loving by definition. This tidbit makes Wifies’s life marginally difficult.
Wifies does not like to think much. This also makes his life harder, but in a different way; escape rooms, PVP strategies, and how to navigate the mess of machinery installed within himself, in a way that's fine as a cut scabbing over is, the arrows puncturing my side already pulled out with the marks regenerated over.
It is easier this way, because this way means that he will not have to remember the hanging root-like posturing of his others. Not brothers because he does not remember being held and the idea of ever having siblings sends a grief that strikes down to the marrow of his metal bones, so therefore what they are, were is something alone to clones.
The skinned self hanging like livestock butchered haunts him when he used to lie down in the little cot that was used to escape. Kenadian let him keep it after she left. He did so an hour after they, more so she, killed the original Wifies.
Evil Wifies. Wifies doesn't know if it matters but Kenadian is sore about his originality and creating clones to kill them off and recycle them isn’t a good action by any metric of his or theirs. Even if he and the other clones were his. Ownership doesn’t dictate absolute control. He shouldn't think about this. Anyways.
That leaving, even if just a few days long, meant that Wifies was allowed to his own devices. His creator's. Whatever; his creator was Wifies and he is Wifies as well, ergo his creator's things are now his. The factory, the other clones, the tubes, the logs, the communicator, it's all his now.
It does not matter that the past Wifies was right in that there could only be one, because if the universe has not enough space for him then Wifies will simply make space.
It is the least he is owed from the creator that loved him.
During the days he is alone, Wifies sleeps in the factory. He drags the bed over to the cold office where a draft is residing and pulls the blanket over his head and shuts his eyes, pretending that he hears no scratching of the clones, no hum of electricity whirring through the devices which had once cradled him, and no sound like a ringing communicator.
Eventually, he has to give up. His eyes are heavy as he gathers himself, bringing his stare over to the device shaking on the desk, the call sound reverberating deep into his skull. Wifies grimaces, before standing up and grabbing it.
The name of the contact is unknown to him, because an escapist doesn't need attachments while a player does, so Wifies commits the name ParrotX2 to memory to make up for his lack and then picks up.
In the early days of his assimilation, he was a very bad player. The conversation that followed was and is unnecessary except to serve as an example of how insufficient Wifies was then to the universe.
There is a reason why Parrot knew third.
People say that if you look long enough into the void, it begins to look back.
The past Wifies, the original, the evil one was not one to tell stories. He would not tuck his clones in with a bedtime story, he would not recite their reports back to them, and he would most certainly not warn them about the horrors of the outside world. There was no way for Wifies to know this. Another disadvantage of being an automated creation.
He does not return to his creation world often. After Ken had returned, Wato with a scar against the side of his face next to her, there was no longer a reason to. He had a new home world, he had a way of joining new servers, and so he had no need of the factory and the cold bedrock-barrier-void expanse.
But even clones get homesick sometimes.
The void is cold out here. Over the barriers, Wifies dangles his legs into the nothingness, taunting the universe into reaching out, unwinding him from his very duplicated being. It makes him feel weightless, the air whistling through his ears.
His eyes dart from everywhere, to the sky blinking above him, the sun ray twinkling in the wind, the fingerprints on the barriers holding him, then down, below into the depth that must have been where his creator had gone.
Wifies thinks; this was before he learned that it was better not to, and he pulls onto that prey-animal fear he felt looking the past Wifies in the eye, feels it nestled deep into his very being and attempts to revel in it. He feels his fingers grow numb, his body tense like a coiled wire, his mechanics whirring and pulsing inside of him as a human heart could with its own beat. Not for the first time, he wonders what it would feel like to have his own organics.
Perhaps very boring. Still, it does not stop him from considering the whispers crawling up to meet his ears, of the promises of deals in the past, of how easy it could grant that meaningless wish, of the silver white of porcelain and the power residing within. These all work, make him tilt his head and try to find the glint of the thing in blue, at least until he remembers that his gears are rusting and that he needs to fix that so then promptly leaves, the interaction quickly forgotten.
Maybe he should have told Ken when they came back. Wifies does not speculate on what exactly that thing was in the void, except for when he tries to think about the constructer of all those escape rooms, of their green ears and tail and white shiny mask, and he wonders where that mask of theirs went.
Even then, Wifies may have forgotten the entity itself, but he did not forget the feelings it gave him.
It is weeks, nearly months after that bout of homesickness, when he has almost perfectly readjusted and assimilated, when Wifies raises the topic of ARG world investigating. It is not for permission; he is his own person as Ken and Wato like to tell him multiple times, but it is for context. The three of them have trouble with that, with their new adventures and excursions almost every other week with no calls or voicemails or texts left behind, so if it comes to it, Wifies will be the one to provide.
Ken is at the table in his own home world, overlooking a series of blueprints for some new bizarre escape room, when their head rises, and she looks at him acutely. Wifies does not look down to see if his silicon is torn open and his metal exposed, but he comes close.
"I've already been exploring some, and it was—" Fun is the wrong word, because fun is not similar to what Wifies went through in the escape rooms and what he is feels in those worlds is so much similar, it makes him feel like he's back there. "—wonderful, and interesting too, you should have been there yourself Ken, and oh, Wato too."
Ken makes an amused sound despite his widened eyes, alert ears, and shakes her head. "Wato's busy," they murmur, and Wifies shrugs.
"She can make time. And he could use the inspiration; it was so haunting, it was nice in there. The setting was eerie, and the entity—" Wifies cuts himself with a laugh at Ken's face, a pinched grimace with raised fur, an obvious confusion set into her features.
"I'm sorry," he says after a breath, eyes crinkled and mouth set into an only slightly apologetic grin, "I forgot that you don't prefer this stuff."
To their credit, Ken only fixes him with a raised brow and a glint in her eyes.
"It's fine," he laughs back after a tick, stilted, clipped, with an edge to the sound. Wifies does not think it sounds very fine, but then again player voices are so variable, it's always hard for him to tell.
He knows that it is reasonable; she has not seen what he had. As far as Ken knows, Wifies had looked death in the eye and faced it in a trivia match, and had then decided from that long hour of prey animal fear that he wanted more so he found more.
But they still laugh with him so Wifies does not stop, joins them in the sound.
In that instant, the realization a sweet bite into satisfaction, Wifies knows he won't ask for permission the next time he sees his creator. He will take Squiddo's hand and smile back.
That will be the Wifies he is now: almost human.