trans_9 | One more robot learns to be something more than a machine. [Closed, predictably, to Dustin Silver]

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One more robot learns to be something more than a machine. [Closed, predictably, to Dustin Silver]

Yoshimi is seated in the middle of the floor, her book forgotten on her bed, left leg stretched out in front of her, frown fixed on her face.

You may or may not be wondering what in all hell she is doing, especially when she starts swearing for no visible reason.

Here's your answer: The Robots Slayer's prosthesis isn't cooperating, and even as she tries to wiggle the five little piggies on her left foot, all she can get the damn thing to do is twitch oddly at the ankle.

"Figures that it'd start misbehaving eventually," she mutters, shifting to bend it at the knee. She spends a few moments poking at the joints on the bottom of her toes, the muttering becoming a constant pretty quickly.

One toe twitches, and she freezes.

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Restraint? Dustin’s sense of restraint packed its bags years ago—even if he’d seen Yoshimi as ‘off limits’ before, that sentiment was long gone now, evident when he returned her grin, letting the acquired overcoat slip off his arm before he flung it behind him, forgotten at the foot of the bed—

—which he suddenly found himself pressed against. No arguments here of course; Dustin only needed a small pause to regain his breath, taking advantage of his splayed-out position while he could. Then his arms were again wrapped around Yoshimi’s torso, dragging her closer…

The pile of clothes at the foot of the bed grew quickly. Time passed, kisses were shared, biological imperatives were achieved.

This turned out to be one of Dustin’s more productive days…

Yoshimi sighs a sigh of contentment, eyes half-open and blearily slanted at the wall beside the bed. Her hand is occupied with rubbing lazy circles along Dustin's collarbone, the other pillowing her head, body twisted so she's half on her side, but, relaxed though she looks, her mind is spinning a mile a minute, and galaxies away. She is thinking of that apartment, the one she called home, and the fact that life on this godforsaken ship is about eighteen times better than anything was in Japan. Aside from inari. She quite misses inari.

Unbeknownst to her, Miss Ito starts humming several minutes into that thought process. Mind you, though, it has nothing redeeming about it, aside from being a crystal clear ~~and highly adorable~~ sign of being ridiculously happy, because she is tone deaf, and the song infecting her vocal cords is quickly mangled beyond recognition.

There wasn’t very much happening on the other side of the bed, as the scraggly man sprawled under the covers was comparatively unresponsive, eyes shut and expression placid. Dustin was content with just keeping his breathing patterns level—no mind paid to the fact that Yoshimi’s wandering hand found a pretty nasty deformity along his left clavicle, outlined by an old, ropy scar stretching over his shoulder and down his arm. For years the whole joint had been crippled, almost entirely without feeling; just recently his prosthetic forced the new growth of nerve connections within that appendicular structure, though the injury itself was still not fully healed. Only now was he able to appreciate Yoshimi’s gentle caress.

It was soothing, really, just what Dustin needed after so much stress these past few months, even more so after the accident that took his arm, since he was still recovering from that when his universe was destroyed and otherwise could not participate in such activities. No surprise, then, that Dustin found himself out of shape and, therefore, utterly exhausted. Hence why he was nearly sleeping.

The humming, though—that was new. Dustin drowsily blinked open his eyes, a groggy smile forming as he shifted an arm behind her ear, sifting his fingers through her pink hair. Hell if he could identify what she was singing, but frankly he didn’t care. It was enough to see Yoshimi so happy, so…complacent.

Go on Dustin.

Yeah, Dustin, say something. Go on, she’ll like it. You know she will.

A bleary sort of mumble escaped his lips. Difficult to say what it really was, but the best interpretation was, probably, “Mmm. I’ve always liked Shostakovich…”

There are those who are completely nonsensical during post-coital verbal exchanges. Then there are the lucky few who are actually coherent.

Then there is Dustin.

The humming drops off at the weight of his arm on her shoulder, eyes sliding open the rest of the way before dropping closed as his hand slips into her hair. She's amazed that she's not purring right now - Chief sure would have been, empathic cat that he always was - but she's pretty sure that the lazy smile spreading on her face is a fairly obvious equivalent.

Her eyes open at his... Jesus, was that supposed to be speech? A 'hmm' that passes as a temporary response, though it's really more of a too-relaxed-to-actually-laugh laugh.

She dignifies him with a response about thirty seconds after the fact, having started to wander off mentally before she remembered that he'd spoken, which, of course, must always be replied to.

The logic in there makes more sense in her head. Something about his words being few and far between when he wants them to be, and overabundant when he so chooses, neither of them ever particularly compelling her to respond or something, because he'll always be Scruffy McJackass, but him talking like that, right now surely must be imparted knowledge of the utmost importance. Something like that.

"Some weird, drippy words just dribbled out of your mouth, and I have no clue what they were supposed to be, so either the Translator Core is down and you secretly speak Arabic, which means that you won't know what I'm saying, because I really doubt that you speak Japanese, or you're half-asleep," she says, eyebrow arching in a joking manner.

The ‘I speak a little bit of both’ response was waiting at the tip of Dustin’s tongue, but he was compelled to listen to those drunken voices in his head. Yoshimi’s returned smile was taken as a generally positive response to his mumbled statement, and therefore he would continue with that thought, no matter how much Logic was screaming at him.

Because, you see, Dustin doesn’t talk gibberish. Nonsensical for him is like…flipping one of those massive, multi-book encyclopedias open to a random page and reading the first entry that you come across.

They sound a bit like this:

“Dmitri Shostakovich—famous 20th-century Russian composer. He wrote fifteen symphonies, six concerti, fifteen string quartets, a piano quintet, two string octets, two piano trios, two solo sonatas, a little more than twenty-four sets of preludes and fugues, two operas, and quite a lot of film music, among other things. Denounced twice, bit of a funny-looking fellow—my grandmother knew him, you know, on my mother’s side. Actually she was good friends with Nina, his first wife. Only met him once or twice. Apparently he was very twitchy.”

A few more incomprehensible mumbles later and Dustin’s eyes were closed again.

Yoshimi blinks, an expression that is much more normal to her face appearing with a skeptical arch of an eyebrow, a twist of the lips.

"I'm sure that information was essential for my survival," she says, amusement mixing with skepticism. Silence reigns for a few moments, and she shifts the rest of the way onto her side, tugging the sheets up a little. "Haven't heard of him. 20th-century music doesn't get played anymore."

A mindless urge that she ordinarily would have completely ignored has her wrapping an arm around Dustin's waist and pressing her face into his shoulder. She had forgotten how nice people were to touch - their bodies are just so... present, and solid, and only now does it seem bizarre to her to deliberately avoid contact. Her fingers splay across his side thoughtlessly, tracing designless patterns into his skin.

"Come to think of it, there really isn't much music at all. There're music files floating around, and ads still have those obnoxiously catchy jingles like in the early 2000s, but it's... really not like anything one hears about from the past. Nothing is like anything from the past, though I guess it's all pretty reminiscent of some weird, 1990s science fiction novel. The Age of the Intangible we call it. You know, since everything is dependent on the Globe. Nothing has physical form anymore, not even human interaction." She pauses, blinking and frowning. "Kind of sucks, since that means mechanics are totally done with. I wouldn't be nearly so opposed to half of it if it weren't for that."

Her words are simply voiced thought patterns - mutterings at a wall that she doesn't expect to respond, and when she falls to silence again, her thoughts pass onwards, though sticking to similar avenues.

Somewhere deep within his mind, Dustin’s inner fanboy was dancing circles after realizing that he’d just had sex with someone from several decades in the future. Again he took the more favorable route of mindlessly responding to the mass of flesh and heat and hormones beside him, resting his scraggly chin on top of her head, letting the hand in her hair migrate down her shoulder, gently massaging her back.

Speech came a little less easily, as those odd voices were disappearing and steadily being replaced by trustworthy Logic. It allowed only for a lazy ‘Hmm’ to rattle Dustin’s exposed vocal chords at first; a minute or so later it comprehended that long line of garbled information directed in his general direction and started to formulate a reply.

“Too bad,” was the first mumble, muffled because Yoshimi’s skull was in the way of his jaw; then he sort of blinked awake, an odd expression crossing his once tranquil visage, and he turned his head to stare at the ceiling (taking his torso with him). “…So that’s…So that’s what becomes of my work?”

Troubled Dustin is troubled.

Cold air rushes in to fill the space he has just vacated, and Yoshimi's mind clicks into the present. A furrow etches itself into existence between her eyebrows as she props herself up on her elbow, an abrupt awareness of the fact that she really doesn't know anything about Dustin whirling hither and thither in her head, because... she doesn't know what he means. Because she doesn't know what he does, what comprises his so-called "work".

"What d'you mean?" she asks, head tilting, a few strands of hair falling into her face.

She looks concerned, watching him watch the ceiling.

"What'd you do, invent the Globe or something?" A snort serves to express her disbelief that that is possible, because hell, the Globe is friggin' ridiculous in its complexity. And... well, she had to take it down once. She should know, really. And beyond that, that day locked in that building with that massive amount of incomprehensible technology, the humming screens, the sheer power radiating off the physical interface... it all remains in the back of her head, an omnipresent reminder of what she is up against, and it terrifies her daily. Insane robots are one thing - they're easy to take down for her, a simple matter of dismembering and burning. The Globe going insane was like the world being infected with rabies and then gaining enough sentience to carry its will out. The scars scattered across her body don't even compare to the scars left by the Globe, a mad, screaming maelstrom of everything her society is dependent upon, and the idea of inventing that is simply incomprehensible to her. Impossible on so many levels, she can't even begin to fathom it.

His glance temporarily diverted itself from the ceiling, finding that Yoshimi’s tilted and characteristically skeptical face was far more pleasant to look at than the pulsing barriers of the meatship’s slime-covered internal organs. For just a moment Dustin’s brow softened, as he allowed for himself to remember that bit of nonsensical, euphoric humming his partner made several minutes ago that sounded so much like the opening to Shostakovich’s fourth symphony—not that this was relevant or anything, but it made him smile again. Logic subserviently dribbled away; Dustin raised his prosthetic to Yoshimi’s face, metal fingers brushing away the hair in her eyes with far more subtlety and precision than seemed physically possible.

“That depends,” he blinked, turning curiously onto his side, “What exactly is ‘The Globe’?”

And his face fell when he contemplated if he had a part in its creation. Because if it was from a world that was overrun with malicious robots and virus-ridden computers…

Yoshimi approves of a smiling Dustin, and she also approves of a comfortable Dustin, both things that he is exhibiting as he brushes the hair from her face. She smiles back, distractedly covering his hand with hers, blinking in faint confusion when she feels metal instead of flesh, her mind too occupied with finding a way to describe the Globe concisely to register that it's his prosthesis and not his real hand. Her lips twist wryly, eyes flickering about the room as she considers her options, fixing on the most obvious description, if the least descriptive.

"It's the new and improved Internet," she says drily, looking quite dubious about the "improved" part of that statement. "Only... about eighteen times more complicated. Where the Internet functioned as a sort of... database, virtual reality, all that, the Globe functions as the glue of our society. VerID chips are encrypted to connect automatically at all times, prosthesis are connected, all nanotech, all robots, all safety systems and glamours and musical instruments, it's all in there somewhere. Of course, it's all ridiculously hard to access, but so many people in our age are tech-savvy that nobody notices anymore." She pauses, eyes him as his face falls, and abruptly shifts to pull her left leg in toward her chest.

"This, though-" and here she taps the prosthesis with a grin "- was designed to connect to my VerID chip and only my VerID chip. It's a personalized encryption with about eight keys to access, so I guess there're exceptions. Still, the Globe is terrifyingly wide-spread. It's like... it's like Big Brother. The Globe is Watching You."

There was another pause, filled with the shuffling of covers as Dustin propped himself onto his elbows, metal fingers twitching under Yoshimi’s small hand. He was still looking at her, certainly, but only in concept; in reality he wasn’t looking at much of anything other than a few hundred mental images, all attempts at a full comprehension of this ‘Globe’, this thing so complex that it literally controlled the lives of several billion human beings in the near future.

Finally his mind seemed to click into place with a characteristic glitter of understanding in Dustin’s eyes, and he relaxed. He actually looked…amused, almost. Perhaps in the disturbing sense, because a moment later he remarked in a casual murmur, “How…oddly convenient.”

Yes, that was one way of looking at it. From a hacker’s perspective, as Dustin was, a single point of command, a central hub that controlled everything else, was the easiest and most expedient target. Once you take over that, then nothing was unreachable. Then you have a monopoly. A hacker’s dream, you know.

But from the victim’s perspective—when things obviously become more than just an innocent prank virus or test advertisement or power drain—then there’s a problem.

Dustin’s expression turned skeptical. “…And stupid. You would think the geniuses that designed the Globe and those various applications would’ve—would’ve been smart enough to come up with some sort of backup, yeah? Some secondary directive, some remote servers to take over and quarantine the problem—“

She thinks she knows what he's getting at, and she's almost offended by his lack of faith in her era's computer nerds.

"It's not like it's easy to hack the Globe, and it's not like there's one... central physical interface, one single control station. That would be ridiculously stupid." She snorts, rolling her eyes. "The entire Globe is made up of thousand upon thousands of physical interfaces, each one just as complicated as the last, and to hack the system, you have to hack all of them physically. To do that would mean a trip to the moon, a trip to several space stations, and a very, very long trip around the world to find all the damn things. They're kept under wraps, and below the radar, because the Government Union is terrified of that system getting attacked. It's the most obvious weak spot anyone could ever think of, aside from the VerID chips in our brains and the nanotech in our bloodstreams, and trust me when I say that we're scared of that, too."

She sniffs, rubbing at the back of her neck with an unpleasant expression. She hates describing the VerID chips as being "in our brains", because it really disconcerts her to have a thumbnail-sized bit of tech embedded in her brain stem. She goes on anyway.

"The point is, there are millions of remote servers, secondary directives, counter softwares set up to repair, quarantine, whatever needs doing. With the rampancy virus, though, all of the servers were attacked at once, simultaneously, within the same millisecond, so the entire system was crippled for a few minutes while the thing wormed its way in, and then popped back into place like nothing had happened. Two days later, four thousand people dead because their brain stems exploded, or their false legs walked them off rooftops, prosthetic arms clubbing them to death, other people mindlessly murdering them. It was a flawless infiltration - nobody noticed until they were dead, and it took four more days for the techies to figure out what the hell was going on. And none of them was willing to do what needed to be done. So... I did it. Almost killed me, but if anyone should know how hard it is to hack that system, it's me."

Funny thing—most people would’ve listened to that speech and been horrorstruck, aghast at how anything could be so powerful, or why any rational society would’ve allowed for their superiors to implant circuitry into their central nervous systems (a thought that briefly passed through Dustin’s mind, as even he never dared augment a set of organs so perfect already), raving about civil rights and personal freedoms and—and—ethics.

And what did Dustin say?

“…Amazing!” he grinned, jamming a hand into his hair while his eyebrows shot far past his scraggly bangs, “But it must’ve taken—years for that kind of system to be set up! I mean, unless—“

Another pause. There was an almost audible whirling of gears as Dustin let his brain provide the necessary design prints, material options, tool lists…

“—Who exactly—Do you know when—“ Well the monopoly itself probably developed slowly, so that wasn’t a good question. “—How long has this system been around? I mean, as far as the name—‘The Globe’. Were there any major engineers that made notable adjustments on it? Any initial designers that came up with the idea?”

Yoshimi jumps at Dustin's exclamation, eyes widening, eyebrows shooting up. This is the first time she's seen him this enthusiastic. Well... no, scratch that. She had just lived through the last half hour. She bites back laughter and a disgustingly large grin at that thought, her cheeks coloring slightly, shoving her brain back onto topic.

"It's just kind of.... developed, I guess," she says after a minute, lower lip jutting out in thought. "I had to do a lot of research to figure out how to take the damn thing down, and I spent a few hours on basic development information. It's really just the original Internet amplified by about three thousand times and about a googolplex connections. I think the original concept was something about imitating the human brain in complexity, but keeping it mostly intangible, blahblah. It wasn't really... constructed, though. Or designed. It... evolved."

That ‘last half hour’ was one of the more present thoughts that ran through Dustin’s mind when he listened (quite attentively) to Yoshimi’s explanations, as the rosy blush spreading across her cheeks was kind of obvious and, consequently, easy to track the cause of. A particularly powerful urge to attend to this cause gave the scruffy man a rather devious smile of his own, but otherwise his brain was concentrating on other things. Besides, Dustin doubted his body was up for another round of That Last Half Hour just yet, so unfortunately it would have to wait.

“Fascinating,” he blinked with a turn of his head, “I mean, completely insane and otherwise a Terrible Idea, but still fascinating. To develop a device that mimics the brain is basically mimicking the consciousness…create an artificial consciousness and sentience follows soon after…Assuming that it ever made it to that level, the term ‘computer virus’ takes on a whole new meaning, mmm?”

It only then dawned on him that Yoshimi had not only taken down this masterful creation (sending a brief, horrified shiver down his spine at the thought of such a beautiful computer’s destruction), but she had also somehow managed to hack into it. Yoshimi Ito, hacker of the most complex global interface imaginable…

You know what?—He’d gone through worse stresses. Dustin’s face darkened and he leaned in for a tentative nuzzle, perhaps even a kiss, and a mischievous, “Have I ever told you how overwhelmingly attractive you are when you disable electronics?”

She snorts.

"Did I ever say it was smart? If you ask me, it's the dumbest idea on the planet, which is saying a lot, because with a database as big as the Globe, there's a lot of room for dumb ideas in the world."

She plans on saying more, and her mouth is open when he nuzzles her and practically purrs those words at her. Her eyes take on a mildly horrified expression, widening as her face flushes darker than it has in... a while.

"N-no," she rather squeaks, blinking at him. It makes sense that she would be unnerved - it's been a long time since anybody complimented her with any kind of fervor, and though she's fully aware that the depth and mischievousness in his tone have a lot to do with That Last Half Hour, it's still a warm and fuzzy and disconcerting thing. "Th...thanks," she mutters after a minute, obviously not knowing what to do with such a thing as praise, shifting her eyes to rather deliberately avoid looking at him while she waits for her blush to fade.

Dustin’s face didn’t fall, his grin didn’t falter, and he basically didn’t seem at all affected by Yoshimi’s meek stuttering and the deliberate avoidance of his gaze. He was more amused than anything, if not somewhat relieved, because now he could be assured that Yoshimi was, well, more or less satisfied. Therefore he could rest easy.

And he did. Dustin gave Yoshimi a single airy chuckle, planted a kiss on her warm cheek, and promptly fell into his side of the bed and closed his eyes. It was too bad that he was awake now. And cold. As scruffy as he was, and as muggy as Stacy’s hypothalamus was set to, an involuntary shiver of ice reminded Dustin that yes, he had those clothes at the foot of the bed for a reason, perhaps he should put them back on?

He rolled out of bed, an emaciated figure covered with ropy scars and awkward patches of hair, disproportionate but somehow lean in the way his muscles were so clearly visible from lack of organic insulation; he shuffled with a yawn and a stretch towards the pile of garments nearby, stared at them for a moment or two. Vaguely he wondered if he should shower first.

Finally he sighed and reached for his shorts.

Yes, that blush on her face has been perpetuated by that kiss. Regardless, she watches Dustin shiver, an eyebrow lifting as he rolls out of bed. A frown ghosts across her face, sticking in the crease between her eyebrows, the slight downward tilt of her lips.

"You need to eat more," she says, sitting up, sheet shifting with her as she pulls it up unconsciously, other arm wrapping around her knees. "People aren't supposed to be that thin."

Yoshimi, dear, your soul is showing.

Dustin snorted, a wry, somewhat cynical grin pulling at his mouth as he slipped into his boxers. His hormones were slowly retreating into their separate corners, thereby revealing the controlling mind’s usual personality.

“Normal people aren’t supposed to be this thin,” he corrected with a casual jab at his exposed ribs, “Normal people with normal metabolism rates. And I am not ‘normal people’.”

Was it worth explaining?...Hell, why not.

“I actually eat quite a bit more than most of the other humanoid creatures on this ship—not to mention that the stuff I am provided is much higher in protein and complex starches than usual.” Because, you know, Dustin’s examined the chemical makeup of slop samples quite thoroughly by this point. “My body simply apportions the energy it receives differently; more effort goes to maintaining the brain, less is put into storage. Simple concept really. Efficient, too.”

And he struck an arrogant pose before locating his pants.

Yoshimi's immediate reply is a snort and an eye-roll.

"Well, aren't you special," she says, more focused on the "To abandon the safety of the bed for clothes, or to stay here for the rest of eternity because I really don't want to walk across the room naked" battle going on in her head. The conflict shows in the lower lip curling out a little further than usual, but not enough to be called her actual Thinking Face, and she has one leg dangling off the bed, eyes fixed on her toes. Then again, who would ever be in a hurry to put a meatsuit back on?

"I miss jeans," she muses abruptly, toes wriggling against the squishy floor. "And t-shirts. And my motorcyle." A pause, as she has shifted her other foot onto the floor, sheet still wrapped around her and clutched to her chest. She glares at her unresponsive toes. "And my mechanic."

“Well of course I am!” came the matter-of-fact reply from the scruffy fellow adjusting his pants across the room, “I’m not sure how to make that any more obvious, people never seem to believe me when I tell them—“

A pause. It was almost as if Dustin’s ego had inflated to the point that it was hindering his motor functions, leaving him frozen with a hand on his waistline and another on his belt (perhaps it should be noted that said belt had a few extra holes punched in so that it would fit properly); eventually he took on a more casual stance and his residual giddiness managed to manifest itself as a joking raise of the brow. Dustin picked up his greatcoat and held it in front of him.

“—Yoshimi, I’ve already seen you naked. There’s not much else for me to discover if you walked across the room for all of four and a quarter seconds to get your clothes.” Yes, he’d noticed that look on her face, the hesitant shifting of legs to the side of the bed. Logic was, fortunately, willing to humor her. “Look, if…if it bothers you that much, I can turn around for a few minutes. Or…something. Maybe I’ll pop inside the bathroom—thinking about showering anyways, now’s as good a time as ever.”

On that note, Dustin abandoned his black and red t-shirt with a long toss onto his own cot next to the forgotten gauntlets—the fuel for all of this in the first place—instead deciding to slip the overcoat upon his shoulders for temporary cover. And, ever in the rambling mood, he continued:

“You know, Stacy rotates clothing to the front of the Possessions Lockers right after each stasis release cycle,” he said, deliberately addressing the wall, “ ‘S where I got this coat from. Nobody claimed it, figured it wouldn’t be missed. I’m sure you could find a decent pair of jeans if you looked around up there. Might have some trouble with the motorcycle, th—th—“

There was a rather unpleasant memory that shoveled its way to the forefront of Dustin’s mind, playing out in front of him: rushing wind past his ears, the roar of engines, two types, blinding lights and the sickening crunch of tissue under tires, fractured metal mixing with bone and blood, a twitching finger illuminated by flashlight—

“—A mechanic, though, you really shouldn’t have to ask that question…”

She doesn't even reply to the narcissism from a moment ago, distracted as she is with glaring at him for the latter comment.

"Self-consciousness doesn't speak Logic, jackass. You wouldn't know that, though, would you? Your ego's larger than your brain, which really ought to be physically impossible." And yeah, predictably her cheeks are flushed, and she pulls the sheet tighter around her torso, the tail end of it draping over the edge of the bed and, conveniently, her legs. "Anyway, I'm not about to move now that you've brought it up. That just makes it worse."

Ah, insecurity and contrariness, how ~~poorly~~ wonderfully you mix.

She watches him toss his shirt, sling that overlarge coat around his shoulders, saunter towards the bathroom, all with an expression of some weird, more-energetic-than-usual scorn. She grumbles something about not caring what Stacy does, that she's not going to wear some stranger's pants, because that's just weird, and is halfway through a particularly emphatic moue aimed at his back when the man freezes and falls silent for a fraction of a second too long. Her eyes narrow, head tilting, but she doesn't ask.

"Ah, well... I wasn't planning on... you know, bothering you about it," she mumbles after a few seconds, still eyeing him cautiously, wishing she could have seen whatever expression had just flashed across his face.

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One more robot learns to be something more than a machine. [Closed, predictably, to Dustin Silver]

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