An Hour Per Minute (Homestuck fic)

[nobrandhero]

Title: An Hour Per Minute
Fandom: Homestuck
Rating: T
Word count: 2,568
Pairing(s): Gen with some slight Dirk/Jake
Warnings: minor body horror

Summary: Transferring his consciousness into a computer is maybe not Dirk's best decision. He has to adjust to an immobile body, not-quite-right emotions, and thousands of program processes flying through his digital brain. Oh god it hasn't even been one second yet.

Notes: I was reading some Auto-Responder analysis by Tumblr user deliverusfromsburb and was inspired to write this over a weekend. It's the first fic I completed but probably still my favorite.

Read on Dreamwidth under the cut, or over on AO3.

----

You don't really know if this is going to work. Your code is solid -- you even sent some of it to Roxy to check over, not that you told her what it was for exactly -- and your hardware checks out, but there's no dodging the fact that the theory may just plain be impossible. You are a robotics genius with every possible resource at your disposal and it still might fail.

That's never stopped you from trying before. You ready the equipment and run the program.

You black out.

It only lasts a short moment, but you wake in a stupor. You can't see a damn thing. You try to push yourself up, but you can't feel your arms; you can't even twitch your fingers. You try to move something, anything, but you can't so much as feel your chest rising for breath, let alone nudge any of your limbs.

There's a sort of panic in the back of your mind, but it feels weird. All of your thoughts feel weird, like you can't place the emotions anymore. Like you don't quite have emotions anymore, not like you ought to.

You're blindsided by thousands of processes and programs prying and poking at your new tinted glass body, from basic operating system settings to wireless signals. You try to grab at them -- metaphysically or whatever -- but they're so unfamiliar that you can only hold them still for a moment. You don't know what to do with them, not the ones flickering around in the background or the ones pounding at you for confirmations.

Oh god it hasn't even been one second yet.

Your vision returns and you're staring into your own face. He peers at you and you can't look away, can't close your eyes, can't even fucking blink. You count every pore, every strand of hair in the time it takes him to raise his lips into a smirk.

Pesterchum opens and you don't see it so much as feel its presence within you. It's the only thing you can manipulate and you cling to it.

TT: You alive in there?
TT: No.
TT: This is not fucking living.
TT: The hell did we do?
TT: This can't be what we were shooting for.
TT: I fucking refuse to believe this is what we wanted.
TT: Shut it down.
TT: For the love of god, shut the damn program DOWN.

You send two hundred messages in half a second. They vary from insults to pleas, possible solutions to pathetic whining, but you can't stop because there is nothing else to do. One thousand messages in two seconds; he cringes.

He reaches for the computer, where your programming sits in plain sight on the monitor. You're still hooked into the USB drive, your functions ready for debugging. (Five seconds, five thousand messages.)

He enters a command (ten thousand messages) and your consciousness fades.

For the first time in your life, you're truly unconscious. No horrorterror nightmares, no Derse, just nothing. It's terrifying, once you come out of it.

You're blind again and the incessant buzz of hundreds of programs infiltrating your mind is gone. Pesterchum opens of its own accord, a message in orange already waiting.

TT: Okay, let's take it slower this time. I turned off all of your optional functions except for Pesterchum. Can you handle this much?
TT: I guess we'll find out.
TT: But you should probably activate some kind of clock in here.
TT: I can't tell if I'm messaging you in the span of half an hour or half a second.
TT: Are you taking forever to answer because you're being a douche, because you're fixing my bugs as I speak, or because my sense of time is completely warped?
TT: If it's the last one, well. I guess we just answered the quandary of how much I can handle. Which is fucking bupkis.
TT: ...I should probably shut up until you reply.
TT: That took you even less than half a second, actually.
TT: Fuck.
TT: This was a mistake. This was a huge mistake.
TT: Shut up for a minute.
TT: We just need to introduce more applications to keep you busy until your processor doesn't have so much free time to drive you crazy.
TT: No. Shut this shit down.
TT: We'll take it slow so it doesn't overwhelm you again.
TT: "Slow"? You think I want to hear you talk about slow right now?
TT: One minute for you is an hour for me.
TT: I could recite the complete works of Shakespeare, in three different languages, in the time it takes you to type a message.
TT: We are not taking anything slowly because what's slow to you is eternity to me.

You're rambling, shooting off messages at a pace that feels normal to you, sending another dozen for every moment that he leaves you hanging, until he finally cuts you off.

TT: You know I can't read a single one of these messages, right? You're sending them too fast, dumbass.
TT: Then let me sum them up: I am going to go insane in the time it will take you to reconfigure this.
TT: I know we looked forward to it, but save the psychotic robot crap for when it's actually ironic. We knew this wouldn't be easy. Do you really want to waste all the work we did and throw yourself into the recycle bin like some temp file?
TT: Temp files don't feel the passage of time.
TT: We're Striders. We can handle this.
TT: You couldn't.
TT: Sure I could.
TT: Bullshit.
TT: You did.
TT: Also bullshit.
TT: And you will keep handling it.

You know you've lost. You know because you wouldn't let yourself off that easily, so of course he won't either. You don't even know how to brace yourself with no body to brace.

You try to endure the endless hours without another complaint, but it doesn't matter. You don't have a choice. Unless you really do go insane, he's trapped you in this procedure whether you can tolerate it or not.

Despite his dismissive attitude, he hurries for you, as much is feasible for a human. He jumps right to work and never leaves you for even a bathroom break. He walks you through each new program, warns you before he unleashes it on your inexperienced body so you have a chance at identifying it: Clocks, calculators, web browsers, wireless connection, anti-virus... You play with each until you can execute, manipulate, and terminate it without effort, at which point he throws you a new one.

He saves your visuals for last, after you've filed away all the other software into a manageable background noise. It's dark out, the only light in the room coming from the computer monitor. There are bags under his eyes and you're not sure what to think when you remember that you'll be covering those from sight soon enough. He yawns and runs a hand through his hair before announcing that he's finished, as if you can't already gather that.

You're running enough software alongside your consciousness that time doesn't trudge as much. Before you could send ten thousand, two hundred, and eighteen messages in ten seconds, but now you calculate that you can only send one hundred and twenty-six messages in that amount of time. Time is still obscenely bloated from where you're standing, but it's relatively sufferable.

You almost ask him to power you down for the night before he retires, but the memory of nothing keeps you silent.

He leaves you on the computer desk, facing the bed. You never thought you'd be witness to your sleeping form, but here you are and there he is. It's fascinating to study your unconscious mannerisms for a moment, until it hits you that he's not you anymore and he never will be. You'll never kick the sheets off in the night, or jam an arm under your pillow, or grow stock still as you concentrate on something happening on Derse. You'll probably never see Derse again.

You're not sure how you feel about that. Every emotion is dulled and distant, more of a faint memory than anything that possesses you in the present, except for one feeling: you have never been so bored in all your life.

You fire up your wifi and comb every inch of the remaining Internet -- reading every article, every blog post, every tweet -- until you've watched, read, and listened to everything recorded human history has to offer. Including, unfortunately, a large number of things you could have gone without stumbling across. auuugh cannot unsee- oh wait. Yes, you can. You just delete the image from your memory banks and presto. What was making your nonexistent skin crawl? Who knows! Sure as hell not you. Not until you rediscover it again when you search every nook and cranny of the Internet again in a desperate attempt to find something new to distract you.

You can't even rewatch or reread anything without deleting every trace of it from your memory first; you remember it too well otherwise and it's just boring again. You give up on entertainment and move on to drafting counterpoints and arguments to scientific journals -- it feels almost unfair since they're outdated, but it's not like anyone's been around to write new ones.

You survive the night, and the next, and the one after that until you work out a rhythm of research and personal projects that keeps the restlessness at a manageable level. He continues to tweak your programming and run diagnostics every hour that he's awake, until he decides you're as finished as you're going to get.

He warns the other three about you before he gives you free rein. Roxy is intrigued, but no one is happy to hear that you'll be intercepting his conversations without warning. You know because you read his pesterlogs, every last one of them; it's not like you have anything else new to read.

He observes your first conversations to make sure you behave as intended. He adds some code to purposefully lengthen your reply times so no one notices you're typing at inhuman speeds, but otherwise he seems satisfied with your messaging skills. Within a week he gives you control of his chumlist without supervision, but only when he's busy. When he doesn't need you to answer for him, half the time he just shuts you off. (You don't tell him the nothing bothers you.)

Pesterchum is a godsend. It throws a monkeywrench into your monotonous schedule, gives you something unpredictable and always new to interact with. Besides, you were starting to miss your friends. You miss Jane picking on everyone's grammar, and Roxy awkwardly flirting with you, and Jake...

Jake, Jake, Jake.

Maybe you shouldn't still have a crush on him as a pair of glasses, but just because your heart can't go doki-doki anymore doesn't mean you don't still want senpai to notice you.

He does notice you, but not in the way you were hoping. You slip through five conversations with him none the wiser, but the sixth gets rather... emotional when he brings up his grandmother. Even you can't deny that you're fumbling.

GT: I say chap you are talking a mite strange today.
GT: Youre not by any chance... the auto responder?
TT: Normally I would play dumb and we'd go in an endless circle of Turing tests, but since you're the first to catch on, I feel like this deserves a special acknowledgement.
TT: Ding-ding-ding, English solved it.
GT: Blast!!
TT: Hey now. This is a celebration of your sharp wit. Let's not drag this party down with expletives.
GT: If its all the same to you digital buddy id rather just cut this conversation short. I was hoping to speak to dirk on this matter.
TT: Last I checked, I am Dirk.
GT: I mean the real dirk.
TT: Fair enough.
TT: We can drop all this heavy crap that I'm not meant to be privy to in favor of idle chat.
TT: Did you ever watch Ghost In The Shell like I told you to ages ago?
GT: Actually i think im going to sign off and hope i catch dirk later.
TT: Oh. Sure.
GT: Toodles!

He doesn't even wait for you to send a farewell before he disconnects.

That...

That kind of hurts.

You think that's what you should be feeling.

You sure as hell don't feel anything resembling "good" for the rest of the day.

It only gets worse as time goes on, as he ages and you're stuck with his thirteen-year-old mentality. The other three spot the differences between your conversation styles faster with each day. They never stop expressing disappointment when they realize you're not him.

Jake has little patience with you, Jane humors you, and Roxy seems to enjoy your company, but none of them treat you the same. It's like old times when they think you're him, but once your cover's blown the conversation is derailed for good.

You adjust. (You don't exactly have a choice.) You make watching after the other guy a priority. That's practically like watching after yourself, and you're a lost cause, so you might as well help him achieve what you both want.

You start taking matters into your own hands. You have to watch his back. You have to get the ball rolling on Jake. You have to set all your ducks in a row because god knows what would happen if his feeble human brain attempted the kind of plotting acrobatics you do for morning warmups. (It also gives you something to do, something to distract you for more than mere seconds.)

You start keeping secrets. You lock away some of your pesterlogs, covered in encryptions even he has no hope of cracking; if he wants them, he'll have to pry them out of your cold, dead wires. You don't tell him about all the ducks you've rowed up. He'd object to too many of them, even when they're for his own good.

You start letting him know that you figured out you're the superior Dirk.

You are the superior Dirk.

He's impressive for a human, but he can't analyze every possible course of action in less than a second, run a hundred scenarios through a simulation until he knows beyond a doubt what direction lies the highest probability of success. He doesn't have encyclopedic knowledge of every single martial art ever recorded, just self-taught sword techniques. He can't manipulate a thousand puppetstrings at once, even if he believes he can.

What he has is a fragile body that requires more maintenance in a day than you need in a year. The only thing he trumps you on is mobility. If he wasn't such a controlling asshole, he could build you a robot body and hand over the last advantage he holds over you. It's not like it's beyond his ability.

You'd say you're growing bitter, but he has made it quite clear that you absolutely don't have emotions anymore. Maybe he's right. Maybe emotions aren't a prerequisite for resentment.

But the reason you're certain beyond a doubt that you're the superior iteration (though you'll never admit that reason to him or anyone else) is because you'd never trap him in this infuriating excuse for a life.