Aiden sat in the nurse's office, and tried to give up some kind of explanation. Luz Notceda, his erstwhile illicit at school lover and, also, source of his recent discomfiture, hovered near the nurse as she examined Aiden, chewing her knuckles nervously. Aiden was kind of happy to have a nurse between himself and Luz at this moment, because he had no idea how to explain why exactly, after they had made love in the bathroom, he had vomited all over the floor.
Oh, the creators of this pocket dimension revealed you're all fake people made to make me happy. No biggy.
Except it
was
a biggy.
The nurse in question was also his English teacher, Miss Ziegler. Aiden wasn't about to question the Academy of the Multiverse's hiring practices, or the amount of work that'd be putting on the pretty blond girl. She used her tongue depressor to lower his mouth, peered inside, and frowned. "Well, I don't see anything as particularly indicative of viral infections or bacteriological infections - you didn't eat anything that's gone off, did you?"
Aiden shook his head.
"Well," Miss Ziegler - Nurse Ziegler, he supposed - drew back and frowned, tossing the tongue depressor into the trash can. "If you feel sick again, come right in and we'll see about getting you checked over. You are the most important boy in school." Her lips quirked up wryly. "Wouldn't do to let you keel over from some paradimensional bug and let the Chathurian get out."
"R...Right," Aiden said.
Luz took his arm as he started to stand, looking at him nervously as they stepped out. Another student was waiting by the front doors leading into the nurse's office - an absolutely drop dead
gorgeous
Egyptian girl with olive brown skin, henna markings under her eyes to add a bit of accenting to her. She was good looking and alarmingly well muscled considering her frame and build. Aiden could see the faint strain of her slightly too small for her top white blouse.
"Hey Luz," the girl sai1d, then blinked as she saw Aiden. "Hey...is that the Primer kid?"
"Yeah, this is Aiden, Fareeha," Luz said, gesturing to Aiden. "Aiden, this is Fareeha Amnotri."
Aiden had no idea where she was from, originally.
Ah, that's because she's not
from
anywhere, is she?
His brain thought. Aiden gulped back some of his nausea, while Fareeha edged slightly to the side, shifting closer and closer to the door. Nurse Ziegler, who had just stepped to the door, brightened as she saw Fareeha.
"Ah, Fari, please, come in, for your...ah...check up!" the nurse slash English teacher said and Fareeha - Fari, Aiden shortened her to - smiled and blushed at the same time. The two of them ducked back into the room, and the door closed to almost a sliver, leaving itself just open enough for Aiden to hear the soft sound of feminine kissing. His cheeks heated as Luz looked back at the door, then at him, then at the door again. Her cheeks heated.
"Ethics!" she said, then laughed nervously.
Ethics! Right!
Aiden wanted to scream. Instead, he gave her a weak smile and stammered. "H-Hey, uh...I think I'm going to call in sick for the rest of the day and head home."
Those two girls are lezzing out like crazy in there...for me,
he thought. In any sane universe, the realization that a drop dead gorgeous blond woman and her definitely illicit and unethical love affair was happening
specifically
so that someone like him could oggle and watch and drool over it all would have been reason enough to consider himself the luckiest boy in the universe. The only problem was...well, everything around it. Aiden gave Luz a weaker smile, a pair of thumbs up that were barely extant, and started to back away. Luz, looking faintly unsure and hurt, lifted her hand in an unsure wave.
Then Aiden was around the corner and practically sprinting away.
Aiden knew that heading home was just delaying the issue. Besides, his unbelievably hot foster mom was there, waiting to lure him into quasi-incestuous isekai bullshit. The library? No, way, there was going to be some obscure fictional libarian there, with a short skirt and officious attitude and an ice cold heart just waiting to melt for him. The roof? Hah! This was an American style high school, but this stupid universe was drawing from enough tropes that he was pretty sure he'd run into six different anime girls with weird anime hair - all of whom would want to jump his bones.
That was the
issue
, wasn't it?
He ducked out of school, onto the sidewalk, and started to speedwalk down the street, hearing the cars whipping by and shifting left and right to avoid running into the pedestrians. He frowned and thought furiously:
So. The Source Caretakers need a regular prime human to keep this dimension stable to serve as a freaking roadblock for the Chathurian. Cool! Cool. Cool. And to keep the prime human happy, they created a load of...of...of...
P-zombie had been the term.
Aiden frowned.
What the freaking hell was a P-zombie?
Aiden sighed slowly. His fingers went to the bridge of his nose and he grumbled. "Fine. Fine. Fine." He turned, then started walking back towards school. The campus was nearly empty thanks to all the students being in class - but since the campus was a threadbare excuse for him to get a harem of barely legal harem of eighteen year old cuties from various fictional franchises that some extradimensional creature thought he'd appreciate, Aiden didn't feel particularly guilty about cutting class. He stepped into the library, looked left, looked right, and then did a wild guess as to who he'd run into. The cute girl from
The Mummy
? Someone from the World of Warcraft? Oh, no, he knew! It was going to be a comic character!
He stepped up to the front desk and blinked as he saw that he was not facing a cute girl, but rather, a hovering skull that was studded with brass and steel. A glowing, pulsing orb sat in the base of the skull, emitting a field that seemed to keep it suspended in the air, watching him. One eye socket was empty, the other had a glowing, Borg style red eye-laser that swept over his face. Aiden opened his mouth in confusion - but then a husky croon behind him filled his ear, modulated only
faintly
with the sound of computerized digitization.
"Can I help you, Mr. Dalbert?"
Aiden turned around and blinked as he found himself eye to eye with a bountiful pair of breasts, barely contained within a...what he could only describe as a technogothic corset, with rib-bindings and cogwheel insignia intermixed with memento mori style skulls on the belly button and hips and shoulder clasps. Said breasts were on a woman, and said woman was a fusion of man, machine, and pure sex. Her face was elegant and hard edged, while her exposed flesh looked faintly gray and clammy, as if she was only
mostly
alive. The effect was less 'ew, zombie' and more 'auh, weirdly hot zombie.' Her hair was platinum blond, and her one still human eye was ice blue. The other was a gleaming cybernetic prosthetic that glowed with an inner red light.
Her legs were contained in skintight black leather, and her feet looked as if they had had cybernetic high heels implanted into them so she had a permanent sexy arch. And an inch and a half on him.
Also, she had a pair of mechanical tentacles emerging from somewhere behind her back. One held a book. The other a cup of coffee.
Aiden gulped. "H-Hey," he said. "Who are you?"
She smirked. "Librarian Alicia Dagon," she said. "Formerly of the Engineering Priesthood of Mors."
"...OH!" Aiden said, his brain sparking. His brother had had some Warhammer minis. He was like, twenty percent sure he knew where she was from. "I-, uh, I'm researching a subject. Do you know what a, um P-zombie is?" he asked.
Librarian Dagon cocked her head. She nodded, and then her little floaty skull bro zipped off, then returned with a thick book. It dropped into Aiden's hands and he snagged it from the air, giving her a little smile. "I'll just go, uh, and read this! Over there!" He shuffled away from her intimidatingly sexy gaze and to a comfortable chair in the corner. He started to settle into the chair when he realized that he was right next to a window. Looking out, he saw a number girls in very, very tight red shorts and white T-shirts - the school's P.E uniforms - running on the track by. He jerked his gaze back to the book and started to read the interminable tome, clenching his teeth as he turned page after page.
It took only a bit of reading to get the idea of a P-Zombie. Or
philosophical zombie
. The idea was thinking about a critter that outwardly
acted
as if they were alive and normal and a person, but inside, they had no
conscious experience
of the world. Aiden chewed on that as he leaned back in his chair. If everyone in this world were P-zombies, then it'd mean that nothing he did would matter, in the slightest, cause they'd have no inner selves to actually, truly, feel the pain or pleasure of anything he did. Except...how would he be able to confirm or deny that was the case?
And...
And more importantly...
Did it
matter
?
Aiden considered that as, through the window, a girl who looked almost identical to a real world actress at the height of her incredible cuteness paused to stretch, bending forward and touching her toes with her fingers. "Ripley, come on! You're falling behind!"
Instead of admiring Alien Ripley's incredibly perfect backside and long, limber legs, Aiden was instead grappling with the realization that he wasn't actually sure if, by these qualifications, he could prove that he
himself
had an inner consciousness. He was pretty sure he felt emotions and pain and feelings - but for all he knew, that was just the deterministic machinery of his brains' neurochemistry and his body's hormones and nerves clicking and whirring into place to create the illusion of Aiden Dalbert. Right?
"Okay, well, fuck it!" he said, drawing a sharp look from Librarian Dagon from her place at the desk. He blushed and crouched lower down in the chair, hiding behind his book. He thought more loudly:
Okay, well, fuck it. Lets not look at what we can prove. Cause I can't prove this stuff by naval gazing. Right? Lets look at what...this means and matters and stuff. What this says about what I should do. Assume, for the time being, that everyone around you is NOT a philosophical zombie and is just a person. You lose nothing but gain a lot of not being a monster by doing that! Assume, further, that you're not a deterministic robot, since you gain nothing by doing that. Right? Right!
