"Ooh, I don't know... Clinical psychology 101, I think?"

"How many people are in your class?"

"...I don't know."

"Thank you, Lilith, this conversation has been very enlightening. Can I get that coffee and muffin to go?"

"Yeah, for sure. Just a couple more minutes."

"Thank you, Lilith."

The fact that someone is just an automaton is no reason not to be nice to them, after all.

And in a couple of minutes he has his order.

Peter thanks her again and walks over to a loveseat next to a window over yonder. He opens Social Bunny and posts,

Entering my #VillainEra

He takes a sip of his coffee, decides it's much too hot, and starts blowing on it while he thinks.

Deciding that the people surrounding you are all mindless automata who don't matter is a villain thing, right? That's the kind of thing that can drive you off the deep end.

But on the other hand, he definitely thinks there isn't a thing that it was like to be him while he was skipping over making food last night. The thing that was piloting his body was doing the Peter Tarleton Aesthetic™ but it was not, actually, Peter. The memories he has of the time don't include any subjective experiences, just perceptions and action-responses. He was definitely not aware of his own awareness then.

He's glad he's not freaking out, though. He's just resigned, he guesses. And since he's a good little scientist he's going to go ask some more people stuff, just to make sure, but he knows what experimental results he's going to get. 

No one else is a person.

Peter's first class today is at eleven, so he can spend his morning in a depressing haze of chatting people up and trying to find someone, anyone with the ability to hold a proper conversation. He's not even asking for much, here, he feels. He just wants someone who won't forget the topic from two minutes ago, someone who will notice how strange it is that their memories have gaps and are made of patchwork of subjective experience, someone who will understand what he means when he says there are timeskips between places. He wants anyone, at all.

He's not getting that. Another silly hope he clings to is that people eventually find each other and there is a haven of real people somewhere in, he doesn't know, San Myshuno or something (and actually San Myshuno would be a good place to look, what with the population density), but he's not staking much on that hope. He'll cast his net wider, look for more people farther away, over time, but for now, he has to try to not skip over class.

Well, here's his classroom building. It contains rooms, one of which is where his first class of the day will be held, and he can walk into that room and sit on a chair and watch as other students file in and do the same.

Okay, so, people are in fact physically attending classes. And hopefully there will actually be a teacher of some kind?

There is! The teacher walks into the classroom and up to the whiteboard and he starts talking about the topic of the class.

He doesn't know what he expected. Nothing, probably. This isn't even boring, for it to be boring there'd need to be something it was trying to do that it was failing at doing. Instead there is a robot telling everyone facts and people are writing those facts down in eerie unison and he is not even getting any knowledge downloaded into his brain for free. And in retrospect the amount of knowledge he did get downloaded into his brain yesterday was also pretty implausible for a 1.5h-long class. Of course university terms are only a week long, not only are people's lifespans microscopic but also they can just learn things magically and subjectively-instantaneously.

(To the extent they have "subjective experiences", anyway, blah blah he's been over this et c.)

He sticks to his guns until the end of class, and even tries to consume some of the information being told to him in a monotonous drone, but actually the signal-to-noise ratio is really high and he cannot in fact do that. He guesses he'll need to catch up on this class later. Eventually it ends, though, and he has an hour until his next class.

Okay.

So.

Just how terrified is he, exactly, of becoming stuck as an automaton forever accidentally? Very, obviously, but is he terrified enough that he won't succumb to the sheer convenience of it? Skipping over an entire class and having acquired Learning Concentrate 100% Pure No Apple Juice at the end of it is really fucking convenient, actually. And he doesn't really have a reason to think that it's possible to get stuck like that, exactly, it's just a vaguely aaaa-adjacent anxiety. But if he's not afraid of falling asleep, should he be afraid of this?

...should he be afraid of falling asleep?

It should be safe for him to skip over discrete, specific things, right?

He has to go to the Thinned Festiveil later today. What if he wants to have lunch, then go to his afternoon classes, and then wake up again? Can he do that? Is he going to try?

He'd be lying if he said that the thought "well, it's not like living alone is much better than dying anyway" hadn't crossed his mind before he took the plunge.

It is now 4:30PM.

Okay that really is real fucking convenient, he's gotta say.

Like. Come on. Skipping over the boring parts of life and not even missing out on the important bits? In fact having some of the important bits located in the skip itself? He knows a lot more about network protocols now! That knowledge was just downloaded directly into his brain! Like, come on, how cool is that?

He also seems to have gotten a text while he was in class.

hey punk

u coming?

yeah

was in class

omw now

Okay! Ravenwood! He probably needs to get a car there, right?

Right.