Chapter 3: le Clair Fausse

"WH-glubrbgbhrgb—!?"

I awoke to a splash of water thrown with a decent amount of force towards my head. Which, firstly! Rude! And secondly, I was afraid for a second that I'd short out or something and die in an instant. I'd probably be fine, but, come on — i didn't know if there was rice in this universe or if that died out with common courtesy.

"Berry. Chamber. Get up," said the image of my disgruntled waterboarder. Hearing her call me Berry sent shivers down my spine. Uh, or, actually, instead, it's the water. And I'm just getting a cold or something. Yeah. 

Alice continued, oblivious to my internal debate on whether or not I had a hypothalamus. "I thought it over and — are you listening? Good. — I want to take advantage of your unique condition as a home-brewed Keizen tech and, er... do something I've wanted to do for a while."

Woah, wait a minute. That sounds, uh. Not good. Before I could even open my mouth to ask, though, Alice coughed and grew a little red in the face. "That was worded poorly. Sorry. Um, I mean like, doing a strike or raid on one of their shell corporations? I don't really like being out here, it's a huge drag for anything I wanna build. But before, I didn't have any firepower and I was really visible due to clothing and shit? That all kinda changes with you though."

"Ahhh, so you want me to be like... an informant or something? I can probably do that, it'd make sense for me to be able to tap into their networks or something." I got up, hacking a little water out of my throat. "So, uh... that's it?"

Alice looked at me in a calculating sort of way for a few moments, then shook her head. "Nah. It's a little more serious than that, uh... I kind of want to take it further. And go all the way to the top, maybe. Eventually. The shell operations usually have at least a little info on where their parent corporations are and what they do, which means if we get the locations of the tech ones we could snowball and eventually take down Keizen's Tower."

"Oh," I said.

"Oh, she says," Alice grumbles to herself. "Also, you'd be muscle and stealth. For at least the first few. I know a good one to hit around the entrance to Chancer's slum areas, and I can probably hack their accounts and such. But I'd need help disguising my outfits and shit, this sort of clothing is too... rich-fashion looking for it to be anything but eye-catching."

I mean... I kind of have to take this chance, right? It's for a good cause (screwing over capitalist dickwads), and it, uh, is possibly a source of income or information on this world. And it's a way to see more of Alice, a part of me said. I'd be docking its pay in my next review. "Um, sure. What about the employees, though? Won't direct action against a company like that break the backs of its workers? I don't wanna kill anyone due to starvation."

"Huh?" Alice looked at me strangely, head tilted to one side. "What kind of backwards-ass... No, they have necessity stamps. They'll be fine. I mean, it'll suck, and they'll probably need to take up another line of work, but shell corporations are just begging for people who have no other choice to work for 'em. It'll end up shifting like, fifteen workers to a different company doing the same job."

"Really? We didn't—um, I didn't think that sort of welfare program would be in effect. Considering the whole... gigacorporation thing?"

"The result of people much braver and stronger than you or me," she said, dismissively. "In any case, I'm gonna assume you're in. Which means we're gonna find out how strong your hardlight emitters are now."

Alice and I drilled a bit of basic Keizen Combat-Espionage Android™ stuff for maybe two hours after that. Mainly, it was learning my combat protocol and how to manipulate my hardlight projectors to cover both of us. I had to turn them off a few times, and... eugh, it felt weird. The voice thing wasn't a constant, I learned how to replace it with my new feminine one pretty quick, but everything else was a trip.

I'd become an android, that was for sure. My head wasn't a human-looking one, it was some kind of... weird. Thing? The closest thing I could compare it to back on Earth was a thinner, less TV-like TV head. From the internet. As far as I could tell from looking in puddles, using Alice's hand mirror, and my own hand-probing, my head consisted of a high-resolution dual camera setup behind a light-plane behind bulletproof glass, along with a bit of CPU wirework. All this was encased in some kind of super-material, with angled protrusions above and below the "eye" resembling canines. There was a module at the back that seemed like it was the projector for the light, which probably meant radar or something? It had some standard rubber-encased antennae attached to it on the top, which I promptly disabled upon their discovery.

That was why I'd seen everything glowing a bit yellow when my holographic disguise had went down yesterday. The rest of my body was vaguely humanoid, appearing to be housed in some kind of composite material armor colored an extremely dark blue over almost-black joints and rubber and such. Alice said I looked a "deadnight blue", which made me feel a little queasy for some reason.

Objectively speaking, it was cool as hell. I mean, a little edgy. A little over-the-top. But hey, it was an isekai into a combat robot — that came with the territory.

To me, it felt wrong. Wrong as in... not right, which is a small but important difference. I didn't like the lack of curves and the almost-sloped armor. I didn't like the lack of a human head, the obvious mechanical nature of my body. But... it wasn't just that, I think. I was okay with the idea of being a robot, it was just the execution that sucked.

It was probably related to my form clearly taking an assembly-line, depersonalized approach. Like the difference between a handwritten get-well-soon card and a Hallmark card bought at a shop for like, five dollars. I wasn't me in that form. I was a robot built for destruction.

But, I admitted, it let me project that girly form onto myself, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been. I was able to figure out how to project it at a smaller scale, and a full turnaround clued me in on what I'd looked like when I met up with Alice.

As she said, I looked like a cartoon. Pink hair, with bands running the back of my head. Thin eyebrows. A generally lithe body with curves and muscles in the right areas, and it came default with a stereotypical-ass sailor's top — though at least instead of the possibly-revealing skirt, I had some cargo pants that accentuated my legs. It looked good on me, which was a weird thing to consider because I'd literally never thought about fashion before.

With the information I'd been tutored through, I figured out some brief disguises for the both of us. It turned out that her cat ears and tail weren't too rare, but they'd attract attention. What did she suggest? Put dog ears on her, of course. It'd throw them off, I guessed. And she suggested I replace my hair with blue hair, just to really hammer in the differences. We'd be going in simple t-shirt and sweatpants looks, too, to fit in with most of the people going to work there.

For true combat strategies, I'd kind of be relying on Alice. I knew in theory how to access my combat protocols, but I sensed something... weird about them. It didn't check out for the ideas to simply get implanted into my mind — it felt too intrusive for something to be poking around in my head like that. I'd offered it to Alice because I trusted her. I didn't think the default software of this thing would be so kind.

...and I kind of didn't wanna kill anyone anyways. So it'd be a heist — disguises, a job interview, the works. Since we had little to no weapons beyond comprehensive information on the place (from a few shitty trackers Alice had planted on some worker's pockets), we'd be going in unarmed: a death sentence if we were found out.

Thankfully, though, I had a few ideas. I knew that the hardlight holograms I projected were too real to be only holograms. If they were only holograms, light would pass through them and interfere with the image — that meant that any light must be fully absorbed. With my high-resolution camera, I could probably scan a hallway and somehow convert that to a 3D render of it in virtual space, then take advantage of my hardlight emitters to sort of... stealth cloak us.

I'd need a second to scan everything in, and then make the render, and it'd sort of fall apart if anyone did anything with the lights, but... anything that wasn't like, sonar based would be fine. It probably wouldn't hold up under intense scanning or scrutiny, but in a pinch? Perfect hiding.

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After the two hours had passed, Alice grumbled about going to find some food and started tugging me towards civilization. May as well absorb the atmosphere and acclimate to the social situations now, she explained.

And that was how we got to sit in a monochrome, sad-looking diner on the edge of the slums. Slums, in this case, meaning suburbs. It wasn't all houses, no — that would be inefficient. So there had been small, maybe two-story apartments built in an absurd, interlocking fashion throughout the outer city; then commercial areas grouped up and made the best of the limited space. Some were in multi-story buildings, some single-layer buildings squished in-between larger apartments, more still located on the roofs.

We were in a shell corporation's chain restaurant right now. There weren't really any home-owned ones, no mom and pop shops anymore. People still had them, of course; they were simply stifled by the unending onslaught of capitalism and driven to extinction by the reliance on food-stamps and being bought out by gigacorps. The few that still existed were expensive, but evidently very worth it. If you were one of those chefs, you had a high chance of landing a job as a personal chef or some shit for a CEO... which basically meant a lifetime of luxury for you and your family.

At the cost of your soul, of course. Neither of us said it, but it was clear.

Quiet, unoffensive, bland music played over speakers. Alice had gotten some coffee and waffles, and encouraged me to eat — I apparently had a biofuel generator in me, somewhere — so I'd gotten some pancakes. Better to go with the median, right? I'd gotten some water with it, and the food looked... edible.

I mean, there was maple syrup still. Synthesized, apparently, which made me confused as to why this place was a dystopia. Effectively free maple syrup if you had the energy? Why was this not a world based upon syrup-ism or something? Ah, well. It was okay. The pancakes cooled quickly and weren't fluffy enough to really soak the syrup up well, so they ended up being a little tough. The water had no taste — like, literally none — so it wasn't clear or as refreshing as normal water was. Certainly no 3:00 AM water. Alice seemed to have no issues eating it, though she picked everything apart a little longer than most people I'd seen and ended up being a bit of a slow one.

No judgment there, though. I'd eaten slowly as a kid, and then I'd had pretty good food! This food in particular probably sucked a little, so even with Alice's apparently sharper teeth (god, her smiles were wicked) it would naturally be a longer affair.

Nursing her coffee, she asked me a question. "So. Why'd you call yourself Colin when we first met?"

"Uh!" That was complicated! I mean, could I tell her — no wait, it's obvious. "I could tell you, but you wouldn't believe me."

Alice raised an eyebrow. "Yeah?"

"I mean, if you reeeally want to know, it's because I was a guy who got shot with a firework or something and simultaneously pulled to this universe. From a much better one. I think I direct-impacted several airships on the way, uh, and my name was— is, Colin."

"Hm," she said, sipping her drink a bit more. "It didn't matter a ton anyways."

Called it. I rolled my eyes. "I told you, buddy. Not exactly believable, is it?"

"Mm. No. Are we buddies?"

"Guh?"

"Are we?"

I paused, thinking it over. And then my brain ran into the idea of being truly friends with this woman, and it crashed again a little. "...Uh?" 

Alice narrowed her eyes. "If I make my question any simpler, I'm just gonna be saying 'are'. And that's not really a sentence. Are we companions? Buds? Friends? Pick your choice of terminology. What's your angle?"

"Um, I... sure, if you want to be." Wasn't this supposed to be a planning session? Nobody was really here, and I'd certainly never thought about being anything more than compatriots with Alice. Besides, being friends meant being vulnerable. I'd hidden stuff for so long from so many people that it'd become second nature. Most of my friends just knew me as the "kind guy who would listen to and try to help with your troubles", to be honest.

But I did want it. A lot. I'd always wanted a real friend and hey, this was basically a new start, right? Alice seemed to mull it over for a bit, then nodded. "Yeah, that sounds fun. It's been a while for me, I figure it's probably been a decent amount of time for you  given your disposition. Besides, it'll be a good teambuilding exercise."

"Ha. Yeah."

As Alice finished up her coffee and I drained the last of my water, we sat in silence for a bit. The gray paneling of the ceiling and dim light from the LEDs above us felt more like a noir film than a dystopia. Or it would have, if I wasn't sitting across from a doggirl who was actually a catgirl, as an anime girl with blue-red hair who was actually a robot.

Dear lord above. Now that we were friends, this silence wasn't just two coworkers being quiet out of respect. It was the dreaded "neither-of-us-knows-whether-we-should-start-a-conversation-so-we-will-both-stay-quiet-til-the-end-of-time" quiet. The kind that lasted hours, at uncomfortable social functions and awkward dates and the first few weeks of freshman college classes where everyone thought it was illegal to talk out of line.

Then, there was a ping on my HUD and a message notification from someone named "catgirlBrave". The very same username as my good friend and roommate, Valor...

What the fuck?