bobcatmoran | A Glimpse of the Future

Two shorts here, one new, one old, both focusing on Classic series characters getting glimpses of the X generation of robots.

Disclaimer: Rockman and all related characters are property of Capcom. I am making nothing off of this fic, unless you count the warm and fuzzy feelings which result from receiving reviews. *cough*hinthint*cough* Apologies to K.K. Likharev and T. Someya.

Author's Note: I'm ignoring any new storyline introduced by "Irregular Hunter X," mainly because I have only the faintest idea what that game is introducing canon-wise.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Youngest Brother

It had been a long time, but Blues was finally returning to a place that he had only recently started to think of as "home," namely Dr. Light's residence and lab. He hadn't missed Dr. Light — the old man seemed to be constantly dropping not-too-subtle hints about "fixing" Blues' power supply which, while it wasn't as advanced as what Rock and Roll had, was perfectly serviceable, thankyouverymuch. And Blues was wary of anything which required being shut off, completely unable to do anything while someone else tinkered with his insides.

However, the robot had missed his younger "siblings," especially Rock. Besides, Dr. Light had better equipment than Blues could possibly obtain by himself, and if he could use it, it would make repairing that short circuit in his left buster that much easier.

He knocked on the door, then heard a loud burst of barking, followed by a boy's voice saying, "Rush, quiet down, boy." The door was then opened by Rock, who exclaimed, "Blues!" and then proceeded to almost knock over the elder robot in a huge tackle-hug, with the aid of Rush.

"Hello to you, too," Blues said, trying unsuccessfully to hide a grin at Rock's exuberant greeting.

"Is that who I think it is?" a voice asked from the direction of the kitchen.

"Roll, Blues is back!" Rock yelled.

His sister unit emerged from the kitchen. "Blues, welcome back! How long are you planning on sticking around?"

"A couple days. Not past the end of the week." Blues looked around. "Light's not here, is he?"

"No, he and Auto are at some grant proposal review thing for X."

"Good," Blues said. "Wait a minute. Who's X?"

"Oh, you haven't been here since we started him?" Roll asked.

Blues shook his head.

"Come on, you've gotta meet him." And with that, Rock grabbed hold of Blues' wrist and started to lead him in the direction of one of the rear lab rooms. Roll followed. "X probably isn't going to be his real name," Rock said, chattering as they went. "We're just calling him that until we figure out a good name. I think we should call him Bebop, but Doctor Light said that he didn't like that one."

"That's because it's a dumb name," Roll said, with the tone of someone who's had this argument several times before.

"Is not," Rock protested.

"Is too."

"Is not."

"Is too."

"Is not."

"Is too."

"Blues, tell Roll that Bebop isn't a dumb name."

"Rock, don't name the robot 'Bebop.' It'll have issues when it gets older."

Roll grinned triumphantly. Rock stuck his tongue out at her, then turned to Blues. "Some supportive older brother you are," he pouted, as he paused to open the lab's door. The robots filed inside.

Blues pulled off his sunglasses and cranked up the light sensitivity of his optics to maximum, but he could still just barely make out a shadowy form on the lab table in the middle of the room. "Rock, aren't there any lights in here?"

"Yeah, I'm working on it," the younger robot said. "The switch is on the other side of the ro — oh!" Roll and Blues heard a metallic-sounding yowl, followed by a crash and an, "Oops, sorry, Tango." The robotic cat streaked out of the room.

"You okay, Rock?" Roll asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine. There we go." The fluorescent lighting flickered on.

After his optics had recalibrated and he was no longer seeing a wash of white before his eyes, Blues put his shades back on and took a better look around the room. A bank of computer terminals were along one wall, with blueprints tacked up along another. Bundles of wires were laid out on a lab table, next to another table which had a few pieces of blue armor strewn on top. Several cables snaked their way across the floor and more were hanging from ceiling-mounted hooks. In the middle of it all was a lab table with an unfinished robot. Rock stood beside it. "Wanna see? He's really neat."

Blues' first impression was that the robot looked like his and Rock's older brother. Its hair was short and dark brown. The robot's build was much more . . . well, for lack of a better word, mature looking. If it was human, Blues would've placed it at about seventeen years old. There was an angular aspect to its features, as opposed to the more soft, rounded features of Rock, Roll, and himself. It would also be taller than any of them — at least a head taller than Rock, probably more, although still on the short side for a full-grown human.

But what struck Blues the most about X was that, at least on the finished bits, he looked practically human. There were all sorts of little details the new robot had which the three robots looking at him lacked. Fingernails, for one. The robot also looked like he had an actual muscular structure underneath his skin, for all that he'd be powered by servos and hydraulics, not muscle fibers and nerve impulses.

Speaking of skin, Blues gently peeled back a bit of the robot's artificial skin from an unfinished portion on the left leg. "Hey, Rock, how does tactile feedback work on this guy? He doesn't have the transistor web that we have."

"You've heard about Likharev's work on nanowire crossbars? Doctor Light based the new system on that. He'll have a lot more sensors per square centimeter than we do, especially on his hands" Rock said.

"Wow. Nice." Blues looked at the robot's palms and noted the lack of fingerprints. Blues was also willing to bet that, like Rock, Roll and himself, this robot had several hidden access panels throughout its body for maintenance purposes, so the robot wouldn't look perfectly human from the outside if anyone looked close enough. It was still well beyond anything he had ever seen, though.

"What do you think?" Rock asked.

"Very lifelike," the older robot said, gently poking the unfinished robot in the arm. "Light really went all out on this, didn't he?"

"Tell me about it," Roll said. "He's even going to be programmed with that Independent Whosa-whatsit."

"Independent Whosa-whatsit?"

"Independent Data Acquisition Protocol. He'll be able to learn anything," Rock said.

"So what?" Blues asked, wandering across the room to look at the armor pieces. "We can learn stuff, too."

"No, I mean anything. He'll develop his own personality, too."

"So he won't have any limits on his personality matrix. Huh, that's nice."

"No, he won't have a personality matrix."

Blues looked at Rock as though he had just declared that he was going to join Dr. Wily. "Rock, that can't work."

"Yes, it does! It's some sort of infinitely flexible programming thing. Even I don't understand it all the way, but he won't have any pre-installed modules except for basic motor and language."

"Sounds crazy to me. What's with all these armor designs?" Blues asked, flipping through a stack of blueprints next to the pieces of blue armor. "Hover jets, dash boots, recharge helmets — I thought Light was a pacifist. This isn't going to be a fighting robot, is it?"

"No."

"Then what's all this? It sure isn't for you, unless you've grown a few centimeters and you didn't tell me."

"Well, he's not supposed to be a fighting robot, but sometimes . . . sometimes things happen," Rock said.

"Like what?"

"Well, I was never supposed to be a fighting robot, was I? But I needed to become one."

"Isn't that dangerous, equipping this robot with weapons? I mean, you said that he's going to be totally free to develop his own personality. What if he turns out to be a homicidal maniac?"

Roll paused in flattening out a cardboard box from a pile in the corner. "That's what the thirty year diagnostic period is for."

"Thirty year diagnostic period?" Blues asked.

"Uh-huh. That's to make sure he wakes up with a good moral conscience," Rock said.

"Thirty years?" Blues repeated.

"Well, it's very complex, and —"

"Rock, do you have any idea how incredibly long that is? Even I'm not that old!"

"But it takes a long while to sc—"

"And what about Light? He's not going to be around then."

Rock suddenly stopped trying to talk over Blues, clamming up immediately at the mention of his creator's mortality.

"Rock? Hey, kiddo, I didn't mean to hit a nerve there." Blues reached out and tentatively patted his brother robot on the back. Rock glared at him, and bolted out of the room. "Rock!" Blues called after him. He went out into the hall, Roll anxiously following. There was no sign of Rock. "Roll, you go and take the living area; I'll search the lab." Roll nodded and headed off in the direction of the residential portion of the building.

Blues finally caught up with Rock in a dusty back storage room. "Hey, Blue Boy," Blues said when he spotted Rock.

"Go away," came the grumpy reply, although Rock made no movement to scoot away when Blues sat down next to him.

"Sorry about that," Blues said. "Is the old man not doing so well these days?"

"Why would you care? You hate him."

"Rock, I don't hate him."

"You sure act like it," Rock accused.

"I don't hate him," Blues repeated. "We just don't get along very well, that's all." Rock didn't respond. Blues turned to face Rock. "That new robot — X or Bebop or whatever his name is — we can't let him wake up all by himself now, can we?"

Rock shook his head 'no.' "He'll be lonely."

"Well, we'll just have to be there for him." Rock lifted his head up. Blues continued, "You, me, Roll, hey, maybe even Auto."

"And Rush," Rock added.

"Yes, Rush, too."

"Don't forget Tango and Beat."

"And Tango and Beat."

"Oh, and Eddie."

"Yes, Rock, they'll all be there. We can even invite Kalinka and Doctor Cossack. It'll be like a big party, welcoming our littlest brother into the world."

"That'd be nice," Rock said. "Maybe we'll even be friends with Forte by then, so he can come, too."

Blues rolled his eyes behind his shades. "Sure, whatever. Tell you what, you can invite everyone, since you seem to have such a good idea of who should come. Roll can bake a cake or something."

"What about you?"

"Me? I'll do the decorations."

"What sort of decorations?"

"I don't know. Balloons, streamers, maybe. Hey, we've got thirty years to plan this, you know."

"Yeah," Rock said. "We should be able to come up with something really good by then."

Blues nodded. "Uh, hey, Rock, do you mind if I use some of the lab equipment? I short-circuited my left buster a couple days ago."

"A couple days ago? And you haven't done anything about it?" Rock asked, incredulous. "Oh, come on, we're taking care of this right now." With that, Rock dragged Blues off in the direction of the repair lab.

-owari-

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Girly Robot

Finally. The old man was finally asleep, and the lab was empty. Normally he'd been free to come and go as he pleased, but this room had been locked, off limits to any robot for months now. Needless to say, Forte had been not-so-patiently waiting for an opportunity to sneak in and see what the doctor was working on. Blasting the door off its hinges would have been the easiest way of getting access, but that would have been noisy, attracting too much attention. He wanted to get a look at whatever was in there by himself. Well, almost by himself, since Gospel had insisted on coming along.

Forte opened up a panel on his chest and pulled out a cord, which he plugged into the access port on the door's lock. As quickly as he could, he scrolled through the possible passcodes. A minute passed. Two minutes. He really hoped that no one would come down the hall and ask what he was doing. Gospel paced in front of the door, tail twitching, with the occasional glare shot in Forte's direction, as if to ask, "What's taking you so long?"

There was a click as the heavy metal door unlocked. "Got it," Forte said. He smiled as he opened the door.

Forte closed the door after Gospel came in, and then carefully picked his way through the maze of cables on the floor, heading towards the lab table. There was definitely something on it. It looked like another robot, but even with his optic sensors adjusted for maximum light sensitivity he couldn't make it out clearly. "Gospel," he said, looking back towards the entrance, where the robotic wolf was sniffing around a pile of armor. "Hey, Gospel, hit the lights, will ya?" Gospel looked around, as though expecting to find a lightbulb on the floor. "On the wall, by the door," Forte instructed. "No, other side. Yeah, there you g—ow!" he yelled, as the lights came on, momentarily overloading his optics.

"Growf?" Gospel inquired.

"'m fine," Forte said, blinking. "Just wasn't expecting you to get the lights on that quick." He looked around the room. "Geez, what a dump." There was the pile of red and white armor that Gospel had been poking around by the door, a stack of blueprints precariously balanced on two coffee mugs over by the computer terminals, a jumble of wires and chipboards in a corner, a mound of empty cardboard boxes, and cables running everywhere. In the center of it all was a lab table with a half-completed robot on it.

He bent over to take a closer look at the robot's face. He poked it a couple times, then propped open an eyelid. "Hey, Gospel, check this out. This robot's got blue eyes." Gospel reared up on its hind legs, propping its front paws on the lab table to see what Forte was talking about. "See? Now, why'd the old man go and do something like that? Blue eyes is like what Rockman and that dumb girl robot have."

"Bwowr?"

"I dunno, maybe Blues, too. I've never seen his eyes, come to think of it. Maybe he doesn't have any, and that's why he wears those stupid sunglasses all the time. If you ask me, I think red eyes are the way to go."

Gospel made an odd whuffing noise, and then got down from the lab table.

Forte closed the robot's eyelid, and stared at the robot, frowning. It was really lifelike. If it weren't for the mass of cables coming out of its stomach and the fact that from the waist down it was still just a metal skeleton, he'd have sworn that Wily had a human lying on his lab table. It even had fingernails.

There was one element about the robot that struck Forte as really weird (well, besides its creepy resemblance to a human). "What's with the hair?" he asked aloud, eyeing the long blond mass which drooped over the back edge of the lab table, pooling slightly on the floor. "It's like a girl or something." But Forte was pretty sure that this new robot was supposed to be male. It looked nearly complete from the waist up, and it didn't seem to have any of those weird chest bumps that females had. He kicked the mass of hair, watching as it limply settled back into place. "Stupid robot will probably trip over it."

Turning from the robot, Forte looked at the computer terminals that lined one wall of the lab. One of them was still on, displaying a long string of computer code. Forte picked his way through the mess on the floor to the terminal. He tapped a few keys, frowned, then tapped a few more. "A computer virus? What's he writing a virus for?" Looking closer, it seemed like Wily intended this virus to infect robots. But why would he...

Gospel barked from the pile of armor. "What?" Forte said irritably. Gospel barked again, nudging a chest plate out from the pile. A huge grin spread across Forte's face. He tripped over a few cables, kicking them out of his way as he half-ran over to pick it up. He looked at the two green jewels in the chest plate, and then back at the unfinished robot. "So," he said, looking down at Gospel, "maybe Wily meant it to be a girl after all." Tossing the chest plate aside, Forte grabbed a red and white boot with gold trim. He held it up against his leg. Boy, that new robot was going to be tall — probably about two meters, which would make it at least a head taller than Forte, even with his helmet fins. Forte scrunched up his face in disgust. He didn't like Wily making robots who were taller than him, even if they were inferior.

Speaking of inferior robots, what kind of weapons was Wily giving this thing? Forte made his way back to the computer terminal and snatched up the blueprints. He sat down in a nearby chair and propped his feet up on the desk next to the keyboard. Leafing through the blueprints, it looked like this was going to be no ordinary robot master. It didn't seem to have any sort of special weapon. No Freeze Cracker or Wild Coil, just a regular plasma buster was its only weapon. Forte got some satisfaction out of noticing that this robot wouldn't be able to charge its buster, nor would it be able to switch over to rapid-fire mode. But, looking at the plasma relays, it might not need to charge up. It looked like the robot's uncharged plasma shots would be roughly as powerful as Forte's fully charged shots.

He looked at the rest of the specifications. A top-of-the-line Hayatom voice synthesizer, micro-fusion fuel tank, highly advanced eye camera, titanium alloy skin, dash system ... this couldn't be just another robot master. Wily would never put this much effort into one of those. In fact, the only other robot Forte knew of that the old man had worked this hard on was...himself. Crap, was this thing going to be his replacement?

It couldn't be. Why would Wily be replacing him, Forte, clearly the best thing the old man had ever built? After all, no other robot had even come close to defeating Rockman, and he was sure that their next encounter would be the last one for the blue shrimp. There wasn't any conceivable reason for getting rid of Forte.

But on the other hand, the old guy was kind of nuts. Who knew what went through his head? Forte looked up at the terminal, at the code for the computer virus. A virus that infected robots — was that how Wily was planning to get rid of him? Swinging his feet back down onto the floor, Forte walked back over to the robot. Well, he couldn't be replaced if the replacement wasn't finished now, could he?

Recalling some of the diagrams on the blueprints, Forte reached around to the back of the robot's head, feeling for a hidden switch. With a soft "pop," a panel on the robot's chest opened. Forte gave the chipboard inside an appraising look, before prying loose a few memory chips, strategically rewiring some transistors, and moving around resistors. "There. That oughta keep Wily busy until I can come back with my buster and properly finish the job." He closed up the panel, pulled a few cables loose and replugged them into the wrong sockets for good measure, then sauntered out of the lab, with Gospel tagging along at his heels.

-owari-