A Matter of Collaboration

[on_errantry]

The Oyster Bar had been an iconic piece of both Grand Central Terminal and Manhattan - Rhiow had lost count of the number of times she'd slipped into the kitchen to beg quietly for a piece of tuna, or some of the shellfish the bar was named for.

Now, however, the usually crowded restaurant was silent. Rhiow sat one one of the tables just inside the door. Bizarrely, they were still set and covered like they would have been if the bar was expecting a day of business - white tablecloths, unlit candles in the center, napkin-wrapped silver. Rhiow's tail lashed side to side, sometimes landing in a wine glass.

She waited for the people she had paged to arrive - if Iniss was going to convince certain members of the crew that he was abiding by the Council's ruling, he would need to be able to show some progress on the false body prospect. And that meant that actual progress would need to be made.

[Closed to Luis, Billy, Angie, Nanoha and Querl]

Comments

[morphitudinous]

Billy, ever-concerned about punctuality, arrived early despite Rhiow's assurance that there was no need. It was always good to allow extra time for getting lost, especially when traveling to an unfamiliar area of the City. Luckily for him, there were no wrong turns, and there he was.

His destination was a bar inside, right? Ah, the Oyster Bar. That should be the place.

"Hello," Billy greeted quietly, taking a place at the table and setting out his things: a datapad for notes, the omnicom for calculations, and various measuring tools. It can't be said that he doesn't prepare.

[on_errantry]

"Hunt's luck," Rhiow said. "I don't think we've met in anything other than an official capacity. You're Ffhir'ly right?" She grimaced at her own horrible pronunciation, going straight into a composure-grooming session to get her dignity back.

[morphitudinous]

"Just Billy, ma'am," he answered with a smile. "Don't worry about it: ideas are more important than the names. Working in the sciences, we tend to give a lot of molecules unpronounceable names."

Besides, she's in for a laugh: wait until he tries to pronounce her name!

[re-engineer.livejournal.com]

As promised, Angie was only a few minutes behind Billy. She even came herself, rather than leaving it to one of her duplicates. It wasn't like she wasn't doing other stuff at the same time, anyway.

"At least with molecules, they give you shorthand to what you want." She smiled at Billy, then nodded to the...cat. Right. Really not the weirdest sentient she'd ever run into. "Or, well. I suppose I might be one of the few people who considers a long string of letters and numbers to be shorthand. A pleasure to meet you, Councilor."

[level12headache]

"0100010101100001110101." Querl said almost impossibly fast as he walked calmly into the room. "That is the Coluan word for 'carbon.'"

[on_errantry]

"Almost all here, then," Rhiow said. She had moved from washing her front paws to her chest, and looked about to roll over onto her side. There was nothing a black cat loved more than a white tablecloth, apparently. "We're still waiting for Sera and H'nna'hnoha."

She paused for a second, her ear tilting out to the side. Her accent was fairly well known on the ship, when had she started apologizing for it?

[notlewis]

Luis arrived shortly after, a stack of notes under his arms and his glasses halfway falling off his face as though he had rushed here after getting sidetracked in the lab.

That is exactly what had just happened.

"Afternoon, everybody. Or evening, or whatever," Luis said, having a seat at the table. He tried not to glare at Querl unnecessarily.

[on_errantry]

"Well we're still one short, but I can brief her on anything of substance she misses," Rhiow said. "Thank you all for coming, I'm sure you have variously busy schedules. I've asked you here to discuss an interdisciplinary problem."

"Any of you who have been paying attention to the network know that there's been another incident with the Yeerks on board the ship. This time, one of them was kidnapped - probably because another crewmember recognized the nature of the species and thought they were doing a service to poor T'hom." Rhiow licked her nose - she felt for Tom, honestly.

"At some point the Engineering department was supposed to be working on artificial bodies for the Yeerks, but I believe the project stalled when Allen was re-podded. And there's another concern. The Yeerks interface in a very specific way with organic brains - if at all possible, the brain for this construct needs to be as close to organic as possible."

[starlightace]

And the final person just now touched down outside of the bar, quickly ducking in and offering an apologetic bow. "Ah--! I'm sorry I'm late, everybody! I lost track of time."

"Did I miss much?"

[on_errantry]

"Only preliminaries," Rhiow said cheerfully. "We're discussing the problem of false bodies for the Yeerks. I believe it's the most efficient to create something artificial for the actual body itself. It's the brain and the brain interface that will likely prove to be the problem."

Rhiow knew all about how Nanoha felt about clones. She wanted to avoid that solution if at all possible.

[morphitudinous]

"I admit that this isn't my strongest subject," Billy sighed. "I'm best at selecting materials and construction of robotic systems, but I believe Angie and Querl have more highly detailed knowledge of the brain. If your proposal is the solution we go with, the main body shouldn't be a problem."

Of course there would be a problem. In science there were always problems.

[re-engineer.livejournal.com]

"Well. It's hardly impossible to create organic interfaces with artificial structures." Given Angie's own armor, she would have been stupid to say otherwise. And she really wasn't. "However, creating such interfaces can be very time consuming."

[on_errantry]

"I'm afraid we'll need to step up the schedule on this one," Rhiow said. "It's not fair to the hosts if we drag our feet. This project needs to move and keep moving."

Her tail lashed from one side to the other. "I understand it will probably take a great deal of testing, but the most expedient solution is best, for now. There's always time to upgrade."

[starlightace]

Using clones was indeed a rather large no-no for the mage - but this sounded like it could be something different altogether. "Well, does it have to be human-shaped? Even if it was just a container that they could use to move in for now, it'd be better than the current situation."

[re-engineer.livejournal.com]

Angie brought up a holographic interface, using it to sort through information. "One has only ever had human hosts. Not certain about the other one. But for the sake of simplicity, humanoid is probably easiest for most of us to create."

She waved aside one piece, bringing up another. "I know that, in general, the ship's contingent doesn't trust Stacy." She held up her hand. "And I include myself in that number. We have good reason after all.

"However. There's a lot of technology that we have access to but know idea what the hell it does." She flipped a few more pages. "What I'm asking is...has anybody thought to ask the ship if there's anything that she can do?"