trans_9 | A moment of silence [Open]

Stacy was never truly silent. There was the slightly audible hum of the systems, and the others in the Sensorium, to create a rather pleasing sound within the audible range of most species. But Cortana wasn't adding to that; rather she was sitting on her own created boulder, deep in thought. She'd learned quite a bit from Chief's video logs, and more still from the Library once he'd uploaded her back into Stacy's systems. It was a lot of data to process, and so she'd adopted the thinking pose some humans used. Legs pulled up to her chest, and her head resting on her knees. She looked, and felt, almost normal.

...well, normal as an AI passing as a human could get. Oh, the plant suit she'd chosen to appear to wear went a long way to making her blend in compared to her normal holographic form, but the violet tinted blue hair and bright blue eyes didn't help her to blend in. And she honestly didn't know why she'd chosen those. Nostalgia, perhaps? No, she could return to her simple AI form at any time she wanted. And it wasn't as if Stacy didn't carry some different looking people, so it wasn't to stand out. Maybe it was becuase it just felt right to look this way. A mix between a human and the AI she was.

But it didn't really matter. Even with all her processing power, sorting all the information she had taken in over the past few days would still take some time, and that time would be much better spent on figuring out just what the hell had happened then moping about why she had chosen to take this form.

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Reimi blinked at that. "Really?" She rubbed her arm in thought. "I... well, I was, made of programming language before. So I suppose we're both AI?"

A human made of programming language? Well, this place had taught her that anything was possible.

"I suppose so. But I don't think it matters here."

Reimi had to nod at that. "You're right I should really stop dwelling on it to be honest."

She smiled at that, it was faint, but a smile nonetheless. "Are you just relaxing here?"

"You should only dwell on something if you think you can learn from it." She had learned that from experience.

"Something like that. I was actually trying to remember something." She frowned. Even without Reimi stopping by to chat, she'd been having no luck.

"Yeah I really should." Reimi sighed. She DID think of it far too often all the time.

"Thus creating a simulation to think," said Reimi, nodding at that. "Maybe take a walk through a scenic area? Nature, even simulated nature could be good to try and remember things."

"Everything in it's own time, I suppose." You couldn't force the mind to just let go of something. It didn't work that way.

"I would, but...I don't have much scenery in my memory banks. I didn't get out much, and looking up landscapes was a rather low priority." This actually made her slightly embarrased; she was one of the smartest AI's ever created so far, and she couldn't make a beach if her life depended on it.

"Well that's no good," said Reimi with a shake of her head. "May I?"

She brought up a few images on her pad that she held and held it out for Cortana to inspect. "Here, a beach from Earth pre-WWIII. It's the sands of Maui, in Hawaii."

It was beautiful. She knew so many words, and that was the only word that came up. Beautiful, until it dawned on her what Reimi had said.

"WWIII?" There had been another war?

Reimi nodded, sighing softly. "In my Earth at least. There was a terrible war that lasted fifteen days, and weapons of mass destruction were used, leaving the earth a irradiated mess. For as long as I can remember, we've been living underground. But there's a movement to colonize in space because we, well, blew up our own world and it'll take ages for it to recover."

...What was it with humans always destroying what they had? That was almost how they'd started out to colonize other worlds in her dimension, as well.

"Do they know how long those ages will take?"

"I'm not sure," said Reimi, shaking her head. "The material that I'm from says we'll be a powerful galactic society within a few hundred years. It's a shame but I won't live to see it, I can just plant the seeds."

"Every orchard needs someone to plant the seeds, Reimi. They're the most important people." It was true, on some level.

"Yeah you're right. I guess that's why we were called the Seeds of Hope," agreed Reimi, holding the hand where her mark would have shown up if it had activated.

"Thanks Cortana, that really sets my mind at ease."

Well...that was a slightly cheesy name. But it still brought a smile to her face; sometimes the cheesy names were just the best ones.

"You're welcome." As if on a cue, the sensorium the two were sharing changed to the beach Reimi had showed her, the sound of waves included. It fit, really.

A moment of silence [Open]

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