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When you first put Sawtooth together, you figured that yeah, he was a rapbot, and that basic function would never change, but maybe if you liked how he turned out, he could be more.
Squarewave you built for entertainment purposes, and to have someone to talk to who would talk back. Plus, practicing your rapping is kind of important, seeing as your modus requires you make some pretty creative rhymes. Cal’s the best listener, and he’s always been there for you, but he’s not good for conversing with. Sawtooth was built purposefully larger and more powerful than Squarewave, and his raps were always meant to be more sophisticated than Squarewave’s and more skilled than yours. You’ve never met an adult, if you don’t count the brief glimpses of Dersite agents or adult Dersites in your dreams, which you don’t, but you like to think that Sawtooth might be like one.
Of course, he didn’t stick around. You weren’t really surprised. You didn’t pose him any sort of challenge as competition and if you were that bad ass of a rapper you’d want to go out and challenge rivals and shove their lame rhymes back in the faces too. You just wish he would at least visit sometimes. You wonder, even though you know it’s illogical, if maybe you just were never mean to have anything close to a guardian.
You don’t build anymore large scale robots. It’s not good for you to place all your hopes on a project like that. It makes you progress faster when you’re working, but it’s not worth the disheartening results you get. As long as you keep them small scale, there’s no danger that you’ll begin to think of them as a guardian figure. You’ll just think of them as a shrimp robot who’s pretty cool to be around.
And then, when you’re thirteen, it hits you. All your life you’ve been talking to yourself, because honestly, you have a very limited amount of options when it comes to people to talk to. So then, why not make a “second you”? A program designed to act like you in every way, a program that understands you and knows what you like to talk about, and won’t ever get killed and leave you.
You work feverishly on the project until you’ve got it absolutely just the way you want it. He’s you down to every last detail, with some added perks and quirks to differentiate him and to make him hilariously awesome. You start him up.
You’re too nervous to speak to him, so instead, you observe him speaking to your friends, and note that, although they are a little thrown at times by his unique sayings, they can’t tell the difference between the auto-responder and yourself. In addition, his bro puns are rad and the “it seems” thing turned out to be just as great as you thought it would be. Your experiment was a complete success. You tell all your friends they just got hosed, and let them know about your awesome new auto-responder.
When you start talking with him, he tells you off for waiting to contact him, and says that you should take more responsibility, seeing as you’re his creator. It is in that moment, though his use of ridiculous metaphors that you realize that you are, essentially, his father. Or, maybe, a brother, because that makes things considerably less awkward considering he’s programmed to act like a thirteen year old and that thirteen year old is you.
You’ve never been a brother before. You’ve often wondered, dreamed about what it might have been like to have a brother, if things would have turned out different, and Dave Strider hadn’t been presumably slaughtered by an evil sea queen way before you came along.
You have no idea how to be a brother, but you know one thing for sure. You aren’t leaving him. He is yours, just like Cal is yours, and your rapbots are yours, and your friends are yours.
You remember that you could easily delete him if you wanted, and you find the idea revolting and horrifying. He is like a person. He is like you. You make a pact with yourself that you will never, ever delete him.
The auto-responder has all of your memories too, and sometimes, when you feel really lonely, you re-watch clips of Dave on the news, and he finds you articles about him on the internet, and you talk about how straight up dope it would be to have an older brother.
You admire the way Dave maintains his image even surrounded by vicious paparazzi, and how his hair is styled just so, and you laugh at the shades Ben Stiller gave him because yours are way cooler but you guess they look moderately cool on him.
You note all the differences between the two of you, like how Dave’s skin is lighter than yours and how he has lots of freckles all over his face that you don’t, and how you have his nose, but his is a little crooked looking.
You go through interview after interview, and watch all his movies over and over, because you think you two might have gotten along if he had been here with you. The responder says hell yeah; you could talk about the subtle genius of sbahj all day with Dave, if he was alive.
Auto tells you that sure, it would be pretty cool to have a brother, but that there is a 0.01% chance that you’ll ever meet Dave. You ask him about that one at the end, and he says if you play your cards right, maybe you can have a brother and get to meet all your friends, but you might end up screwed over and probably get yourself killed. He tells you about Sburb, a game that’s in the works. It’s highly dangerous and engineered, predictably, by Crockercorp, but you do have an slim window of time where it might be possible to meet and greet your older brother.
You say you’ll play the game, and despite all those risks, it’s worth it, because the chance of you ever meeting Dave goes up to 0.02% once you agree to play.
You also talk to Auto about Jake. You tell him that maybe you’d like to hold his hand, and you think that if you were going to experiment with kissing and you had to pick a partner, you’d pick him. You tell the auto responder you think maybe you like Jake as more than a friend. You told him those things in a more subtle, ironic way, of course, but he’s you, so you practically did admit to your crush flat out.
Auto says, yeah he knows. Took your stupid pink fleshy head a while to figure that one out, huh? So, what are you going to do about it?
You don’t know what to do. You’ve never had a crush before. Auto says, don’t panic DS you have to keep a clear head. The thing with asking someone out is, you have to get it right, or you’re a goner. He knows because of the internet, and also because of some statistical analysis he just pulled out of his ass just now.
You’re beginning to tire of that particular saying of his, but there’s absolutely no way you’re tampering with him, even if you are getting a little older and that joke’s getting a little stale. You have no intention of breaking your promise to yourself, and to him. That’s not what brothers do. That’s not what you would do to yourself, which is what he is in a way, and you’ve had so many people leave you, it would be the ultimate irony to leave yourself, but even for the ironies the idea is much too cruel and self deprecating for your taste.
As you age and Auto doesn’t, things become a little more strained between the two of you. You grow out of his juvenile jokes and spurn his help more often, because frankly, you feel you can do a better job than your thirteen year old self can.
Your friends, especially Jake and Roxy, can now differentiate between you and the auto-responder pretty damn well. Jake because he knows all of Auto’s tells by now, and Roxy can because for some reason those two are tight, so after a while, he doesn’t make any effort to impersonate you when he’s speaking to her, and you think it’s probably because Roxy sees him as a different person from you, which at this point, in some ways, he really is.
You become less willing to open up to things around Auto, especially when all he does is tease you and joke around about anything you say to him. He, in turn, becomes more secretive about his conversations, sometimes keeping you from accessing conversations, and fostering an increasing desire to play a large part in your plans.
Nevertheless, he never stopped being your responsibility, and he never stopped being part of you. You trust him with your life and your friends’ lives in the end, quite literally, because if you can’t trust yourself than who can you trust?
If you’re being frank though, his budding independence scares you, as does his increasing desire to play a role in your life and the life of your friends. Squarewave and Cal are predictable, familiar and never changing. You aren’t quite used to the unpredictability of a human coming from a machine, even though you know you should be.
AR is different, unique, and arguably your greatest creation. You know enough about classic literature and awful old movies to know that generally, creating new life through alternate means does not go according to plan.
Mary Shelley be damned. No matter what he does, he’s a person, and you refuse to become the sort of base monster that would destroy a person’s life just for the hell of it. You created him, and by doing so, you have an obligation to respect him as your creation, just as he respects you as his creator. It is that kind of thinking, in your mind, that will keep both of you safe.