"Yeah, no, that's definitely not it," Sollux said, and opened his backpack. He had made sure to keep everything right on top where he could easily grab it. He pulled out a tangle of uncovered wires hooked up to a display panel in the middle and a connector circuit on each end.

"It just goes haywire whenever I try and put it on," he explained, and put it on to demonstrate, connecting the wires on either end over his wrist. As soon as he did, the device powered on and flashed between red and blue violently, the line that represented his heart rate on the screen doubling until there were two different heartbeat readouts.

"It's supposed to show your heart rate and change the background color between green, yellow and red depending on how fast it's going." Sollux grimaced down at the failure on his wrist, and unplugged it to hand it over to Dirk.

He was almost embarrassed to give this disaster of a piece of technology to someone who had scanned their own brain and turned into an A.I. at thirteen, but he was running out of options. There was no one else he could ask for help - the class was crazy hard and graded on a curve, nobody wanted to risk endangering their own grade for someone they didn't even know.