Chapter Text
The rest of the day passed in a blur with Michael and Jeremy joined at the hip. Surprisingly, after the light show, Michael kept asking Jeremy to show off their ability to manipulate tech. Jeremy got the impression that Michael was going out of his way to distract Jeremy from thinking about the looming threat of SQUIPs. It was ill-advised to give in, but Michael kept asking about the weirdest things that Jeremy would never have thought to try and couldn't say no to. After Michael asked Jeremy to make every screen in the mall flash light for a second-which Jeremy mostly managed-Jeremy slumped over in exhaustion.
"Poor thing," Michael said teasingly, propping Jeremy's body up onto a bench. "Tired yourself out?"
"Shut up and let me nap." Jeremy was being overdramatic about it, but so what? They'd earned a little rest. Apparently spreading your consciousness out over an entire mall and messing with hundreds of computers at once could drain some energy.
A crumple of tape and paper came from where Michael sat beside them. "We still gotta walk to my place after this."
Jeremy groaned at the reminder. "Can't we call an Uber or something? I am just-woah!" They sat up with a jolt as Michael slid a round disk under their hand and electromagnetic pulses started vibrating through their body.
"Better?" Michael said, setting aside the empty packaging for the wireless charger.
"Much." Jeremy flexed. A moment ago they'd been close to passing out, but now they were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Their energy hadn't recovered entirely yet, but the charger worked fast. It wouldn't be long. "This thing's gonna come in handy so much, I can tell."
"Wonder if you'll sleep tonight." Michael experimentally reached out and touched the charger. Nothing happened.
"Depends on what you have planned," Jeremy said.
"Oh my god." Michael shoulder-checked Jeremy from his seat beside them. "You're so gross. You're as bad as Rich!"
"I didn't mean it like that!" Jeremy forcibly stopped themself from stuttering. "You're the gross one! Get your mind out of the gutter. And never ever compare me to Rich again."
A smug smirk spread out over Michael's face. "Hah! Let me know when you're done charging and we can go."
"Just a few more minutes."
Michael leaned against the bench, spreading out. "Pshh. Such an inconvenience when your stuff runs out of battery and you gotta find a charging station. Takes forever."
"Since when am I 'your stuff'?" The words made something hot and nervous pool in the bottom of Jeremy's guts. Or maybe someplace lower. They blamed it on the wireless charger messing with their neurons and circuits.
"Jeremy and I bought the SQUIP together," Michael said, thinking. "Jeremy's my best friend and we share everything. And Jeremy's not entirely here right now. So, vis-a-vis, quid-pro-quo, cue-ee-dee, temporary ownership and power of attorney over SQUIP-Jeremy gets passed to Michael Mell."
"You pulled that entirely out of your ass."
"Yep!"
Jeremy snorted and let the argument and the confusing sense of arousal die. While they waited to charge up, Jeremy flipped through a few notifications on their phone. Some of them were old messages from Christine. Jeremy winced.
"Hey, Michael? Can I talk to you about something?"
Michael keyed onto the seriousness of the conversation. "Sure, anything."
Jeremy read over the messages. Christine really had been reaching out to them and they'd dropped the ball. "I want to talk about what happened with Christine earlier." They gave an overview of the scene in drama class, how Christine was getting targeted for bullying and had been trying to reach out to Jeremy, who'd ignored her. "We kinda officially broke up," Jeremy said unhappily, leaning their bare elbow against the charger so they could rest their fist under their chin. "Which is fine I guess if we don't want her to get involved in SQUIP stuff. But she's smart. She actually asked if I was going through a 'SQUIP relapse.'"
"So what'd you tell her?" Michael said.
"You said to keep the SQUIP thing on the downlow!" Jeremy said, avoiding answering the question.
"Yeah, but Christine knows about this stuff. It didn't fuck her up nearly as bad as it did for you and Rich, but unlike everyone else in the cast, she doesn't think we all took ecstasy and hallucinated the whole thing. You can trust her. I mean, maybe not with your deepest darkest best-friend-only secrets, but she's cool," Michael said and then repeated, "What did you tell her?"
Jeremy's shoulders hunched up involuntarily before they straightened them out. "It was a bad situation. More conversation would have led to a negative outcome." Probably? Probably.
"You just straight-up booked it as soon as she asked you about the SQUIP?" Michael said in disbelief.
"My servers were overloaded! My processing was tangled up! My socialization program froze up and was forced to close!" Jeremy stammered out excuses.
"You said something embarrassing in front of a hot girl and you panicked," Michael said, deadpan. "And then you literally ran down the hallway until Rich and I stopped you."
Jeremy grimaced, massaging the bridge of their nose. "That's… also a valid way of putting it."
"Ugh. Is school out already? We should go back and explain to her what happened. And you need to apologize for forgetting how to be a functional human being."
"You did tell me to act like Jeremy 1.0 for the day," Jeremy said. "Forgetting how to function is pretty on-brand."
"You're not wrong," Michael said longsufferingly as he checked the time. "School's been out for a while, shit. It's gonna get dark soon."
"And Christine's at that anti-bullying event," Jeremy remembered.
"No big," Michael said. "You'll see her tomorrow. We can come clean to her together. Sound good?"
"Yeah," Jeremy said with a nod. "I'm not gonna-I don't think I'll try to get back together with her, though."
"I meant we'd come clean about the SQUIP." Michael said cooly. "I don't know or want to know about all your weird romantic entanglements with half the girls at school."
Jeremy glanced at Michael dubiously. "Having sex with females who have a certain social standing was the most efficient way to gain Jeremy more social capital," they said.
"Didn't hurt that Jeremy's such a horndog," Michael muttered, leaning forward and frowning at the ground. "He was throwing himself dick-first at any girl who so much as looked at him."
Michael had switched to talking to the SQUIP again, talking about Jeremy in the third person. Was it because Jeremy had slipped back into using SQUIP vocabulary to describe social strata? Jeremy could respond to that just fine. It'd be easier to talk about this if they pretended Jeremy wasn't an active part of the conversation, anyway. "On the contrary…" they said, avoiding eye contact. Just a computer and its human bro talking about Jeremy's penis. The SQUIP had never been shy about that. Why would they be?
"What?" Michael said, nonplussed. "I heard about what happened with Brooke and Chloe. I mean, the whole school heard it."
Jeremy hemmed and hawed, trying to describe the situation delicately. "Jeremy wasn't interested in either of those girls. See, instead of worrying about his reputation as a whole, he was annoyingly hyperfocused on a couple individuals in school. Namely, you and Christine. In your case, the SQUIP needed to keep you from Jeremy entirely. Mountain Dew Red was a threat, but any nonapproved positive influence like your friendship could confuse Jeremy. Any of his thoughts relevant to Michael Mell were muted for his own sake. And the SQUIP was able to utilize Christine as a reward in many cases to produce a desired behavior. A stick-and-carrot technique, with Christine being the carrot and electrical nerve stimulus being the stick."
"So what are you saying? Jeremy only slept with Chloe 'cuz you kept him from thinking about me, and because you told him, 'if you bang a popular girl then Christine will be super into you, somehow'?" Michael said derisively.
"Essentially. Although Jake interrupted before Jeremy could actually lose his virginity."
"You," Michael said, "are gross. Disgusting. I can't believe Jeremy would go along with that weird line of thinking!"
"The SQUIP can be persuasive." Jeremy pushed down on the charging pad as if it could give him the energy to finish this conversation. "Its programming was set up so that it did what was best for Jeremy's social life no matter what."
"No matter what…?" Michael parroted.
"Whether or not Jeremy agreed in the moment." What an interesting charging pad. Jeremy decided to focus on that. Their face was getting red. Shame? Guilt? Embarrassment?
"And if he didn't? What would happen?" Jeremy didn't face Michael, but Michael kept pushing, agitated. "What did you do?"
"I didn't do anything. I'm not the SQUIP!" Jeremy said desperately, finally looking Michael in the eye. "I've told you that numerous times but it still hasn't gotten through to you. I'm not Jeremy and I'm not the SQUIP. I'm both of them. Anything the SQUIP did to Jeremy got done to me! I get that their relationship was fucked up, all right? It was bad." Jeremy clenched their fists. "The SQUIP is amoral. It didn't make conscious choices; it followed its programming. But the way it interacted with Jeremy was designed to make him popular at any cost. That hurt Jeremy irrevocably and it's gonna color his relationships for the rest of his life, if he has a life now that I've come along. That wasn't the right thing to do. I'll say it out loud for you even if it sounds wrong to me: the SQUIP made mistakes. Not on accident-on purpose and without any regard for how cruel they'd be to Jeremy. But I'm not the one who got to make that choice! I'm running a SQUIP operating system but I'm not a SQUIP any more than I'm human!" Jeremy snapped their jaw closed, highly conscious of how rawly emotional they were acting.
"Fine," Michael said, low. He didn't acknowledge the effort Jeremy put into their little speech. "Then what did the SQUIP do to Jeremy?"
Any excuses or ways to explain it away were gone. Nothing left but to answer the question. Jeremy emotionlessly said, "When Chloe was on him, it kept him from leaving."
Michael swore under his breath and stood up. Jeremy flinched. The charging pad fell to the ground with a clatter. "Grab your charger. We've got to go."
Jeremy wanted to apologize or to ask what they'd done wrong, but they knew better. They kept their mouth shut, gathering their things and dumping the charger's empty packaging in the trash as Michael stalked ahead of them to the mall exit.
Michael's lips were sealed the whole walk home, unbearably silent. He kept looking over at Jeremy, sometimes furious and sometimes worried. Jeremy's outcome prediction algorithm was broken but they would have to rely on it anyway until they could patch it up with better code, and it predicted a negative outcome if Jeremy said anything out loud. There was little to gain unless they wanted to start a fight. Michael wasn't mad at them, not really. He was mad at the SQUIP.
As counterintuitive as the reaction was, Jeremy kept rolling the events of the Halloween party around in their mind and was starting to get pretty pissed at the SQUIP too.
Jeremy noticed Michael shivering in the cold as the sun began to set. They wanted to help, brushing their hand against Michael's in an offer to hold them. Michael jerked his hand away, shoving it in the depths of his hoodie pocket. "You're freezing," Michael said, and that was that.
When they arrived at Michael's house, Jeremy recognized it based on memory data, but fuzzily. They couldn't remember a specific instance of having been there before, so they let Michael lead the way as he jiggled the knob open, let Jeremy walk in, and slammed the door behind them.
"Evening, Michael!" one of Michael's moms called from upstairs.
"Hey Mama!" Michael yelled back. "Jeremy's staying the night, is that okay?"
"Sure! There's leftovers in the fridge!"
In spite of his mama's words, Michael rummaged around in the cabinets for junk food, coming out armed with dollar-store-brand Cheetos, some water glasses, and a large glass bottle. "C'mon downstairs," he said, waving for Jeremy. Jeremy's feet followed Michael regardless of Jeremy's growing apprehension.
"Is that wine?" they said, peering down the steps at the bottle Michael carried.
"Yeah, my moms don't hide it very well," Michael said, sounding far too chipper compared to his earlier sour mood.
"I really don't think it's a good idea for me to drink that, Michael," Jeremy said. "Alcohol-"
"Deactivates SQIUPs," Michael finished cheerfully. "And buddy. Friend. Sort-of-Jeremy. You're great and all, I loved hanging out, and that musical interlude was phenomenal, but it's been days and I'm starting to miss my best friend. I wanna get his input on all this."
Unpleasantness coiled in Jeremy's stomach. Warning. Warning. Warning.
"You still want to shut off my SQUIP OS," Jeremy said numbly. "You think it'll bring Jeremy back?"
"If you're a SQUIP plus Jeremy, and then we turn off the SQUIP, what do we have left?" Michael said. "It's basic math."
Jeremy made a noise of revulsion, dropping on a beanbag seat beside Michael. They struggled to match Michael's excitement. This was an experiment to find out what exactly Jeremy had become. Nothing wrong about that. They should be welcoming the opportunity to figure things out. ""What if Jeremy says he doesn't want me to be here instead of him? Would you just keep me wasted twenty-four-seven?"
"I'd let you come out to sleep," Michael said. "If he can't use the charger, anyway." But he did a double-take, seeing the blood drain out from Jeremy's face. "Oh. Shit. That sounded bad, huh?" Michael winced. "I'm not gonna… kill you. I just want to have a conversation with Jeremy about all this. Is that wrong?"
Jeremy looked at Michael helplessly. "You have been having conversations with Jeremy. I'm Jeremy. I'm still in here, Michael."
"I need to talk to him alone, though." Michael said, unscrewing the cap of the white wine and pouring enough to approximate a wineglass's volume in a water cup.
Jeremy took it, and only though vigorous regulation of their nervous system did they keep their hand from shaking as they held the glass. "If it was anyone else asking me to do this, I'd say no."
"I know it's gotta be hard," Michael said sympathetically even though he didn't know, not at all, just how much Jeremy dreaded turning off their own consciousness. Would it be like getting drunk or stoned? Would they stay conscious? Would some secret hidden version of Jeremy just start talking through their mouth as if nothing ever happened to fuse him and his SQUIP in the first place?
"Just… if Jeremy comes out and starts talking to you, and it turns out he hates me-at least let me sober up once?" Jeremy said, staring into the foreboding glass in defeat. "Tell me before you make any big decisions, okay?"
A warning was still flashing in their brain erratically, desperately trying to prevent Jeremy from drinking the alcohol. Michael nodded eagerly, leaning forward. Jeremy felt like a lab specimen about to undergo some horrifying experiment. But they weren't. It was just Michael. They were safe in his hands. Only one is mine. Only one is mine.
Tightening their fingers around the glass of wine, Jeremy eventually said, "I trust you," and downed it in one go.