Word Count: 1,204

For the first three months, Baekhyun returned to normal and could move his hands the way he wanted to again. He resumed working with Kyungsoo again. When the pangs and tremors returned, Kyungsoo noticed right away and pointed it out.

“Baek-ah. Your hands are shaking again.”

“Really?” He looked down to see shaking fingers once again. “So they are…” was all that Baekhyun said as he watched the tremors in the long, thin, white fingers. He concentrated on stopping them and succeeded.

“I thought you said the doctor told you that it was only fatigue and that you would be better after you took the medication,” Kyungsoo said.

“I’m sure that it’s nothing and that it will pass,” Baekhyun lied.

“I’m not so sure about that. Maybe you should go back and see the doctor again.”

“It’s fine.” There’s nothing I can do about it, he thought to himself bitterly. “I’ll be fine,” he said with finality, although he didn’t know for how long he would be fine.

“Are you sure?” Kyungsoo asked with learned worry.

“You know how to build mecha all by yourself, right? You would be able to if I couldn’t right?”

“Yes. I can make them the way you taught me,” Kyungsoo confirmed. “Why?’

“I need to write a program,” he replied, and I’m not sure how much more time I have to write it, he continued in his head. “So I need to take a little break. Can you continue with the commissions?”

“Sure. I can do that.”

“Great. I’ll leave it to you then.” He smiled and suppressed the wince that came as the ghosting pains began once again.

--

“Baekhyun-ah? Why did you decide that you needed to write this program now?” Kyungsoo asked about two weeks after Baekhyun began working on this mystery program.

“Time,” he replied shortly, not elaborating or feeling like he needed to.

“I see…”

“Why?”

“You’ve just never really written programs without a commission before,” he replied.

“I did. Once before… Well I don’t know whether it was totally without a commission. It was when I built you, actually. I built you for myself. Does that count as a commission?”

“I don’t know.” Kyungsoo thought on it for a while.

“Never mind, it isn’t really a question that needs answering. It was just a very unique program, even more so than any of the really specific personality programs I have written before.”

“What is the special program that you wrote for me?”

“It was a program that humans had been working on for a long time before I had. It was something to create artificial intelligence,” Baekhyun replied after a pause as he gathered his thoughts.

“Artificial intelligence, as in a machine that can learn and feel? That is what the databanks tell me the definition of artificial intelligence is.”

“Yeah. That. I was working on the program for you. I had most of the program when I put it into you. No one knows about the expanding intelligence you have. Your processor allows for you to learn without needing to install external software. That’s why you have been able to learn how to build mecha without software,” Baekhyun explained.

“I have not found such information within the database.”

“That’s because no one except for me knows anymore.”

“Anymore?”

“Yeah…”

“Baekhyun, you’re crying again?”

“I’m sorry.” He hurriedly wiped the tears away from his eyes with the heel of his hand. “With your expanding intelligence, I was able to create something even a little closer to being a human. I thought that with that you would be able to feel emotion too, but that hasn’t happened…”

“I am sorry that I have not learned what these feelings you speak of are,” Kyungsoo said with the mecha disappointment.

“It isn’t your fault. If it is anyone’s it is mine.” He smiled weakly. “You don’t need to worry about it really, it’s fine.”

“So what is this program for?”

“It’s just something I hope someone can use later on,” was all that he said before looking back down at the monitor. Kyungsoo returned to working on building the mecha and Baekhyun’s fingers returned to flying across the keyboard entering code.

--

Another few days passed before Kyungsoo began with his questioning again. “When you were explaining about the expanding intelligence software, you said that ‘no one knows anymore.’ What did you mean by anymore?”

Baekhyun looked up from his computer with a look somewhere between horror and grief. “Does it have something to do with Jongdae?”

“How do you know about Jongdae?” He turned to Kyungsoo with a look of alarm.

“Sometimes when you are asleep, you say things like ‘I’m sorry Jongdae,’ and things of those sort. Recently, you have said it many more times than you have in the past.”

Baekhyun looked away. “He was a close friend of mine. He was the one who first thought of the different ideas for constructing mecha, like how to create the skeleton and attach the muscles. You won’t find him in the database because he wanted to remain anonymous. I don’t know why, he just did. The thing was that he knew the theory but he didn’t have the dexterity in his fingers to build. I had both the programming abilities and the fine motor skills but not the creativity. Together we made a good team, although he never took credit for anything. That was about five years ago now…”

“What happened to him?”

“I made him a mecha, but this mecha was too good to be true and at the same time it wasn’t enough.”

“How is that possible? Those are two opposing actions.”

“That’s the funny thing about mechas, Kyungsoo. They can sometimes have two opposing components.”

--

“Baekhyun. We have to do it. We have to make her, Sulli I mean,” Jongdae said, turning to Baekhyun.

“No, Jongdae, this is a bad idea. I don’t think that you can take it. We’ll both know that it isn’t her. It can’t be her and it won’t be her,” he replied with a furrowed brow.

“We have to try,” Jongdae replied defiantly.

“Please don’t do this. You know how things like this end. You know that it’s an illusion. You know how it drives people mad…”

“It won’t drive me mad. If we do it right, it will be fine.”

“Sulli wouldn’t want this. She would want you to move on. She wouldn’t want you to go insane trying to resurrect her,” Baekhyun tried again.

“Do you think we can’t do it?”

“I know we can’t do it…  No one has been able to thus far. I am sure that it’s impossible.”

“Don’t defeat yourself before you’ve tried,” Jongdae persisted.

“I just don’t want to see you when we finish…”

“I’ll be able to deal with it if we do fail. Trust me, I’ll be fine.”

“I don’t know about that…”

“Baek. We can do this. I know we can.”

“We may be capable of producing it, but can you take the product?”

“Of course I can.” Baekhyun looked at his friend sadly. Maybe he was already mad, but even so. Either their success or their failure would drive him over the edge. 

A/N: The beginning of the Jongdae tragedy... I'm sorry please don't shoot me for the leaking!!! *Ugly sobbing in corner* And as a side not that is probably not clear, Baekhyun is not telling Kyungsoo about Jongdae, he's just reminiscing at the moment.

I've been updating this story a lot because I'm just on a roll and I've been neglecting my other stories... (_ _||) I'm also going to go back and re-name these chapters. Once I've posted the epilogue, I'll be adding after notes about when I've edited chapters and that sort of thing. Thank you for reading, dropping comments, and up-voting and I hope you don't hate me too much for the ending... (TT_TT)