The Childrens Rebellion

pig in a blanket

"Tubbo," he said.

The Shulker looked up at him from where he'd been scrolling on a datapad. It was three in the morning, Standard time—neither of them was sleeping, but Purpled was snoring softly in the bunk over and Lani was up helping Niki in the science lab. Drista was probably shooting a phaser at targets in the gym. She'd been doing that lately—hadn't technically been allowed to, but everyone was too tired to stop her.

The investigator was due to arrive in six hours.

Tubbo had a sort of nasty frown on his face, but it wasn't directed at Tommy. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked like he hadn't slept since Tommy had seen him in the Wasteland.

"Can you hack the L'manburg?" he asked.

Tubbo tilted his head. "Why?" he asked dully, carefully, the thin strand of tentative friendship—a spiderwebs' silk, really—that hung between them thin and ready to snap at every bitten word.

"They won't allow me to see Techno," he mumbled, picking at his fingernail beds. If Purpled had been awake, he would've hit his hand and told him to knock him off—but the only one awake and in the room was Tubbo, a cot over on his right, and particularly unwilling to move. "I wanna see him before they take him."

"I've seen him," Tubbo said, conversationally. "He doesn't act like Technoblade. Like your brother."

Tommy sighed. "I know," he muttered. "But I wanna see what Chroma did to him before those racist fucks take him away."

Tubbo stared at him, brown eyes glinting in the near-darkness. He shifted from where he'd been half-lying down on the sheets to leaning against the pillows. "Fair enough, man," the Shulker said. "But you're not going to like what you see."

"I don't like a lot of things about my life."

Tubbo inclined his head. "Unfortunately, yeah." He opened up a new tab on his datapad—Tommy could see it by the change of brightness on his screen; from a blue-white to a dark grey. "I can't really shut Clementine down, but I can fake an alert in the engineering room."

» Really? «

Tommy laughed nervously, glancing up at the ceiling. "O-oh. Hi, Clementine." He was suddenly glad Purpled was wearing noise-canceling headphones.

» Hello, Thomas Innes. Scheming again? «

"You know me too well."

» You know, technically, I should be reporting this to Captain Philza. «

"Well, good thing you're not," he said, motioning for Tubbo to continue. The Shulker hesitated, but then his fingers started flashing across the screen, typing in codes. "Right?"

» It would be against my programming to lie to my captain. «

"I mean, if you just accidentally forget, it's not really lying."

» ...I cannot forget things, Ensign Tommy. «

"Not with that attitude you can't."

» A lie of omission is still a lie nonetheless. «

Tommy sighed, putting his head in his hands. "I just want to see Technoblade," he said weakly. "They're gonna take him away—I have all the faith in Niki and George and the rest of them, but head injuries are not so easily cured. I just want to see him, Clementine. One last time."

» ...will it benefit your mental well-being? «

There was a hidden resonance there, that meant something, even to an AI who had no real emotions of her own. Tommy took a deep breath. "Yes."