trans_9 | [closed to Billy]

Allen had seemed...edgy lately, and this was no exception. Something was clearly happening, and it was highly unlikely to be good. But he wouldn't know until he asked, would he?

"Allen," Billy called out, trying to catch his attention.

Edited 2010-09-18 05:48 (UTC)

"Thanks for coming."

Allen reaches out to pat Billy's shoulder, and as soon as he makes contact, it turns into steering - away from the Sensoriums, on towards the city.

"How've you been? Good? Awesome," he says, clearly not putting any serious consideration into his small-talk while guiding Billy down the hall.

"Any time," he answers, about to ask the questions bouncing around in his head when Allen clearly guides him away.

Catching the hint, he nods and falls silent until they reach a location where Allen will feel comfortable discussing this.

"I'm pretty sure of the answer already, but I have to ask. If I tell you some personal information which I would prefer to keep secret, which harms nobody but could be important in the future, can I trust you to keep it secret until I decide to let it out?"

He stops somewhere in the city, at the corner of one building. It's fairly open, but Allen is also more positive that it is unmonitored than he is about most of the other parts of the city.

"I ask because I need a second opinion, as my judgement may not be sound in an emotional sense anymore, and I value yours."

"Affirmative. You don't need to worry about that." No matter how much he might worry about whatever is revealed, betraying Allen's trust would be unconscionable. And the consequences would be disastrous.

Billy studies Allen's face for a few moments, as if searching for a clue. What was wrong? He's beginning to have a bad feeling about this.

"Then I hope I provide a good one. What is it?"

Tge problem with searching Allen's face for clues is that there are none.

"I suspect you're looking at me like that because you're trying to get visual clues as to what's wrong. You won't find any, because I'm not directing any energy towards producing them. For any other conversation but this, I would, but I might as well be genuine if I'm going to be honest."

His face is strangely blank, and his voice is modulated just enough not to be eerie.

"I've been feeling off for a while - as in, not feeling very much of anything - and the revelation of GLADOS' purpose has given me the data I need to make a hypothesis. I think I'm short a soul right now."

He gives Billy a chance to react before he explains.

Billy blinks. It is unnerving to be talking to a person producing no emotional response, but some things matter more than that. Attempting to solve the problem is the most important of those things.

"I see," he says, trying to clamp down on any displays of uneasiness. It isn't Allen's fault at all. "So what do you want my opinion about?"

There's a million other things he wants to say: that they'll get his soul back, that GLaDOS's lack of intervention is strange, that he won't reject Allen for this. But it's important to let the man talk first.

"I don't anticipate my essential character will suffer a significant alteration while this is a problem. I still have a moral code engendered by and cross-referenced to several past influences I consider clear-thinking and morally respectable individuals, but I consider my priority as an individual and a department official to keep the crew alive, and living within acceptable parameters of physical and mental comfort and safety."

Allen takes a seat on the stone railing of the steps leading up to the building they're shielded by. He suspects this is going to be a long talk.

"There's a possibility that, given these goals, I will choose methods towards achieving them which, while effective, may not be considered morally sound - even though this also allows me to operate from a fully intellectual perspective unaffected by personal feelings on the subjects. Right now, I could perform life-saving surgery on my own wife without emotional complications. I can also clearly devise new ways to destroy the Ohm without being hampered by hatred for what they've done, and without being blinded to the fallout potential of my own plans. Which is why I can't presently decide if it would be better, or worse, for me to resign my position as a department head while this issue is unresolved. You have to make that call - or decide if the whole department should make it."

Allen is lucky to be talking to one of the only other people on the ship who can easily comprehend that mouthful.

"I understand that, and personally I don't feel you should have to step down. We have enough of a balanced team that there won't be a shortage of moral perspectives, and you're logical enough to make a decision on your own. Both logical choices and emotional choices can be faulty, just in different ways."

Billy sighs. "I don't know how the rest of the department will react, but a strong part of me wants to give them a voice. Knowing that, they would be able to see your perspective better and put things in context. Another part of me fears that they might react out of fear and throw you out."

Why did this have to be so difficult? He buries his head in his hands, trying to think this whole thing through. "I'm positive that the Captain won't allow me to run the department by myself. I'll either be assigned a new partner or demoted, and I personally think demotion is likely. If that happens, I don't know if we'll get a say in who replaces us."

Of course, the most important thing: "But we need to work on getting your soul back."

Billy gives him a chance to use the big words. Prior to now, he appreciated that - now it's just a useful tool.

"I agree, if only because I have a wider range of functions with it intact. Right now I'm operating strictly on programming, which is limited in that I've programmed myself not to alter it until I get my full functions back."

Also because his programming says that having one is better for a variety of reasons that he may not be able to fully comprehend the value of when it's not there.

"I've been checking my memory records, and this condition had a fairly recent onset that began before we learned GLADOS had been erasing our memories of the re-podded. Which makes sense, because there are multiple memories of mine in which there is an individual who I don't remember at all. I know someone was there, I just don't know who, and my memory is much too good for that. I suspect there was someone I knew from my past on board the ship, a family member or close friend, and that that person was serving as some kind of anchor for my aiva. The obvious solution would be to find someone I know from my past, wake them up from podsleep, and see if that helped."

It worked once. Maybe it can work again.

"Then that's our first priority," Billy decides. "We still haven't worked out how she decides who to release, but if it will heal you she'll be more likely to understand...hopefully."

He's not entirely positive on that. Those AIs could be mighty tricky.

Still, there's a question that remains unanswered, and he thinks that the answer might help them reach a solution sooner. "But I'm sure you're not the only person on the ship in that situation. Several of us have had close friends awaken and be taken from us again---sometimes, I get the distinct impression that it's happened to me too."

"That said, why hasn't this happened to others who I know have lost friends and why wouldn't GLaDOS notice? Is it something unique to you, or are there more in danger of losing their avia? Will I?"

"If you are, it's probably not for the same reason I am."

A trace of genuine seriousness crosses Allen's features for a moment - just a trace, and then it's gone again.

"Billy, when I asked if you could keep a secret, it was important to me that you be able to keep my lack of soul on the down-low, unless you saw some way it could harm the crew, but it is even more important to me that you keep what I'm about to tell you in the strictest confidence until I've worked out the best course of action regarding the ship's current political climate and the nature of this personal information."

Reminded of exactly how simultaneously powerful and fragile trust was, Billy nodded resolutely.

"I will." He'd say more than that, but he decides that it's best to let Allen talk first.

Normally Allen would settle right back into storytelling mode, but Billy doesn't need the theatrics, and right now, neither does he.

"You know I'm a cyborg. So does pretty much everyone on the ship, by now. No one's thought to ask me HOW I became a cyborg."

Which is how he operates. Distract someone with a truth so outlandish, they don't stop to question if there's more outlandishness he's not being truthful about.

"The story is very long and very complicated, but the short version is: about eight years back, a wizard turned me into a robot."

He delivers this in a perfect deadpan, as he has delivered everything else.

"It would be nice if there was any way at all to explain that without it sounding ridiculous, but any version I could offer would be much longer and contain a lot of irrelevant magical rambling and still boil down to 'a wizard turned me into a robot.'"

Possibly, if his soul was intact, he would naturally be looking disgruntled that something so significant to his past can be boiled down to something that sounds so silly.

Allen, you're talking to a person who was turned from a hopelessly clumsy geek into a superhero. On top of that, he's heard of roboticization processes done with technology before. It's not such a strange idea.

"Trust me, I've seen things that are far more ridiculous. But why was it done? Did this wizard have a dream of creating a master robot race? Was it a punishment? An accident? You don't need to answer if it's too personal, but if there are any other clues about your avia..."

"He had designed a way to convert organic matter into valuable inorganics, I found out, he decided to get rid of me, there was unforseen inorganic interference in terms of me having a PDA on hand -"

He lifts his hands - like he said, any other explanation would be full of magical ramblings. "Magic. This was in a universe alternate to Earth, otherwise those physical laws would never have been there to be exploited. Think of it as a curse with scientific laws, a command code that can be altered much more easily than reversed. I used up a lot of my time altering it just to keep myself alive during the process."

He could mention the golden statues of half-rotting corpses littering the cave where he underwent his transmogrification. But that's not important to this story.

"A clean reversal would have taken more time than I was willing to spend, by the time I was able to quantify the time it would take to do so. And let's just say the process of losing my humanity the first time around wasn't . . ."

How to convey this when he no longer has his natural means to care about it, aside from as his set-in-stone programming?

"I don't have the capacity to describe why it was frightening and disturbing anymore. I recall that the last thing to go that really made me feel as though some unquantifiable part of me could still be classified as human was simply feeling that I didn't want to exist solely in this fashion, despite how much it had heightened my capacity for data analysis. When that was gone, I did what I'd programmed myself to do: find a way to become myself again."

And then

"I came up with an alternative to a clean reversal when it became clear that one would require me to devise a whole new branch of magical science independent from the one I'd spent a year learning. So I came up with a solution. I used clean samples of my previous biological cells to alchemize a base droid structure into a cyborg clone with a biological exterior compatible with a mechanized cerebral cortex compatible with my memory data. When the process was complete, I executed a program to transfer all memory data over to the remote bio-droid, and, well, here I am."

Now he waits. What judgement does someone other than himself and the few people who already knew pass on a person who is their own clone?

All right, Billy, time to process this. He feels a sting of fear at the description of what it's like to no longer feel.

"You did what you needed to to survive as yourself, and it didn't technically hurt anyone---except perhaps the wizard who wanted to be rid of you. It worked for a while, and I don't think you can switch solutions, so...you're still you. You still have that programming. And we're going to do everything we can to get your avia back, but if you'd still rather get a third opinion...?"

All Billy is sure of is that he wants Allen to stay where he is until they can get it back. Hopefully they can, but Billy thinks that if he was in that position? Being turned away from where he could be most productive would be difficult, if no longer emotionally painful.

It would be inefficient. And inefficiency is not part of his programming.

He neglects to mention that the wizard died more quickly than the people he'd tested the spell on, what with the gunshot wound and all. This is not, perhaps, the time.

"A third opinion would be valuable from the magical department, but considering the current debate over cloning rights, I prefer to keep this limited to people I know well enough to predict responses that are not accusatory. There are a couple of unfavorable ways the ship's community could respond to the notion of a clone who has all his creators memories, considers himself his own creator, and is fine with that."

He doesn't need anyone telling him he ought to have nobly succumbed to death via depersonalization in that cave, or that he should have rejected the memories implanted on his own brain and become his own person. Everything he's done since his rebirth is his own work, even if by some twist of philosophy he and the original Allen Gentry aren't the same person.

"Engineering also doesn't need the stigma of a boss who lives a morally objectionable life by existing. Even if what I did was the wrong thing, it's done. Whatever I propose for this crew should be evaluated on the basis of mission need, not whether or not I am a bad person who will do anything to survive, including impress myself upon another living being to continue existing in some way. And you know that's how a couple members of the crew would see it, even if scientifically speaking, that was not the case."

"No, I wouldn't want to ask them either. We're not in the best of positions from which to make rational decisions."

Damnit Mei Xing, why do you have to make things so complicated.

"I don't believe your existence is morally objectionable at all. That's what makes my decision so difficult, because I'm having a hard time constructing a scenario where I would have a problem with you. I want to keep you on---but what would you think of selecting successors as department heads, in the event that we have to step down? Maybe we could include them in the process somehow. But if it was just within our department, I don't believe anyone would have a problem with you as you are."

He trusts them. They're very open-minded people. Which is why they need to not let BZ in.

"That would be necessary anyway. I can't fool GLADOS all the time, so I'm going to be absent a lot more. And everyone's going to notice.

"Like I said, an opinion from the magical department could help us find a magical way to reattach my aiva in a more permanent sense, but there's no telling how space travel is exacerbating my condition. I have strong evidence suggesting that people I knew from before my transition help keep it in place, so the other option is to convince Stacy to wake up somebody close to me. An influential friend or a close family member."

[closed to Billy]

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