trans_9 | Free ice cream! [open]

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Free ice cream! [open]

Alex sat beneath the shade of a large tree in a decent sized park. Those familiar with New York might recognize the sky scrapers in the distance, even if they didn't recognize the park itself. Parked on a small service road was an ice cream truck with a merry vendor, who claimed that it was customer appreciation day, and was thus giving ice cream away for free.

Alex was already enjoying a chocolate and strawberry cone covered in sprinkles and caramel syrup, wondering if anyone would bother showing up to spend time with him, or even be interested in sensorium ice cream in the first place.

Either way, Alice seemed thrilled, as she pulled what appeared to be pink chocolate chips from a jar labelled "Yogis". Reaching out to pet Alice, Alex laughed a bit, "Don't get used to eating s-so many." sensorium food might not mess with her health, but once they got home, it would be the real thing once again. He figured that she deserved the treat as much as he deserved the ice cream anyway.

[OOC: Post to Alex or to other people if you'd like.]

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What could she possibly be showing...

Oh.

Oh!

It was easy to read his expression as it changed from baffled curiosity slowly to excitement. The possibility of having bones that didn't snap like twigs was almost overwhelming. His hands shook a bit and he propped his cone up in between the sections of the bench.

Reaching out to the omnicomm to look, he found it hard to actually form words. Finally he managed, to stutter, "Th-thank you," making the rare move of looking up into Anwei's eyes.

Anwei nearly glowed with happiness as she handed him the omnicomm. It jsut felt so damn good sometimes, to make other people happy.

"I'm not a doctor," she cautioned, "but looking over the coral article, it seems pretty simple to create. It's a form of nonarticulated coralline - which just means it will find the weak spots in your bones and lay down little flat plates of calcium, not little branches. Which wouldn't be comfortable at all."

"So after the doctors grow some in vitro and it's properly adjusted for the ph of your blood, you just get a few shots, start taking calcium supplements, and watch your bone density go up." She shrugged. "It's a very noninvasive form of biotech, so it's not like it will affect the ship or people who don't want it. And in fact, if anyone ever shows up here from a low-gravity world, they'll probably be very grateful we have this information."

"W-we c-can ask Sam about it, b-but it s-sounds pretty simple t-ta me. A-and better y-yet, painless!"

He scrolled through the text on the omnicomm, not really understanding what it was saying. But if this cure was in here, then maybe, just maybe...

"D-did you f-find anything else about the e-emotion prints?"

"According to this, if it doesn't work, it should just wash out of your system. I think it will work, and it shouldn't hurt. But you'll probably need to start an ... exercise program," she said, letting the last words go deep and ominous as a joke. "Load bearing stress on your bones helps them get denser. Don't worry, you can start slow and work your way up."

"Ah yes, the prints!" She took another few fast licks at her cone, and then pointed at the first document, the one packed edge to edge with text. "I found the medical index, and that lists the emotion print and tells me what species Bitte and Chem were - Kmaldeny - and I haven't found the Kmaldeny entry yet. But now that I know what I'm looking for, I'll skip the other files and start scanning for just that."

She cocked her head to one side. "I'm pretty certain I will find it. If not, well, with the index I can look up any other emotion-sensitive race, and see if there is anything of use in their entries."

Alex smiled and nodded. This really was good news. He wasn't thrilled about an exercise program, but how bad could it really be? He wanted to get into better shape anyway. This way, maybe he wouldn't be quite so scrawny and useless for anything besides computers.

"Th-thanks so much, Anwei. Th-this really means a lot t-to me."

"I should thank you, Alex. When I got here I was very frightened, you know," she said candidly. "All these people with all these powers - and me, one accountant. What was I doing here? But I talked to you, and you gave me some ideas about what I could do here. I feel a lot less like a loose cog, thanks to you and Zouichi and everyone else who made time for me."

She crunched the rim of her ice cream cone between her teeth. "Would you like to try a little of this before it's all gone? I'm not sure that it will go with birthday cake though," she frowned. "It's more bittersweet than sweet."

Alex rubbed at the back of his neck, blushing a little. "W-well, I h-hate s-seeing people w-with shadows... S-so..." He looked away shyly, feeling awkward about being praised.

"I-I'll g-give it a t-try, I guess. I s-seem to b-be doing a l-lot of that lately- t-trying new things, I mean..."

She looked out over the park and the city - was it New York? She had been there, once, she thought. She remembered the noise and the feel and the smell of people, everywhere. She imagined being able to sense the city, the way Alex did, to see the pain and fear and hate of every person. Far better to imagine a world where there were no shadows following people.

"Go for it," she said, holding out the cone with its slightly bitten rim. "What new things are you trying?"

Whenever Alex thought up the city in here, he made sure to try to think of everyone as being happy. For a while at least it could almost feel like he was normal.

He took a small bite out of the ice cream and the cone, and made a bit of a face at it that he tried- and failed- to hide behind taking a bite of his own ice cream. "W-well, t-talking to people is a n-new thing. P-practising m-my abilities without M-Mikel making me, d-dating, I e-even learned t-ta swim here!"

Anwei recognized that face. "I warned you," she said; the smoky taste of scorched sugar, captured just before it burst into flame, was not for everyone.

"Swimming, huh? I don't suppose Stacy would let the crew put a nice pool-sized glob of water into free fall somewhere, because swimming in free fall is very interesting. The water sticks to your skin, because of surface tension, so as you dive in and out of it it leaves these long trailing ribbons behind you," she snapped down the last of her ice cream absent-mindedly, the entire cone vanishing in a bite, "and the ribbons stick to each other, so you end up with this froth of what looks like blown glass. It's very beautiful.

"Swimming is good exercise, too. I'm sure your doctors would approve."

"Th-that sounds really pretty, b-but I d-don't think I would b-be trying it m-myself." He laughed awkwardly, trying to imagine what it would really look like.

"Maybe you c-can m-make it in th-the sensoriums s-some time!"

"Well, the water does tend to stick to your face. And you have to keep wiping it off. Surface tension meant it stuck to you, too." But then again, with the Sensorium she could make a free-fall pool that went all the way up to the sky, and wouldn't that look fine, especially with a sunset behind it?

She looked at him thoughtfully. "You seem very familiar with the Sensoriums. Tell me, do you know if there's a standard safety telltale that's displayed, and I'm not recognizing it? I looked in the omnicomm but couldn't find any mention of it."

"I-I'd love t-ta see that. Th-that sounds amazing."

He thought for a second, remembering that time with Matt, when he had lost himself to the emotions of people across the ship. "W-well, they s-seem to have an auto-safety. I-it requires y-you to override the s-safety i-if you want it t-the ch-chance ta actually get h-hurt, though I d-don't get why anyone w-would."

The thought of turning off the safety just made Alex shudder. What was the point? You could have good fake pain if you really liked pain, and when you walked out, you would be fine.

"I can see it now!" She gestured skywards, hands swooping in long arcs. "The Transmigrations-Nine Free Fall Water Ballet Troupe, in the spirit of Esther Williams - or was it Ethel Merman? I always get those two mixed up."

Earth history was not Anwei's strong point.

Then she shook her head. "No, a safety telltale is something to let people know that they are in a virtual environment. It could be a sound blip every thirty seconds, or a little colored light in the corner of your eye. I've seen simulated environments - none as elaborate as this, granted - and they all had something designed to warn you that what you were seeing wasn't real. I was just wondering if everyone had to set up their own telltale, or if Stacy was doing it and I wasn't recognizing it."

Alex laughed at her vision, but it wasn't a cruel sort of laugh. It was more through enjoyment of the idea.

He sobered at her explaination though. "I n-never thought of that. I-it's a g-good idea. The ship c-could probably a-add one, if y-you want. I d-don't know that anyone has before."

Anwei smiled at his laugh.

"Well, if there isn't any official setting for a telltale, I might just set one up for myself. Because - and I don't want to creep you out or anything - but I'm sure that you can see that the Sensoriums could be used to trick people in a lot of ways. Make them think they were on another ship, or back home, or anywhere. But if you or I had a little something that only we would recognize - that tiny light in just my eye, that beep only you could hear - then if someone tried to trick us, we would know it wasn't real."

She shrugged. "Sorry to be paranoid."

Alex shook his head, making a note to look into maybe setting up his own later. It would have probably helped back when he had been showing Tavros his home. "I actually l-like the sound of th-that. I c-could be easy f-for someone ta trick y-you in the right c-circumstances here. N-not to mention, I c-can see how you c-can lose yourself i-in the illusion, i-if you really wanted."

"A safety telltale is pretty standard in places with immersive virtual environments for just those reasons - so you don't get lost in the illusion. Quite often there's rules about it." And wasn't it interesting that there were no rules about it on this ship - or if there were, they weren't being enforced. "Of course it won't do us any good if Stacy decides to trick us - but hopefully it will never come to that."

Anwei considered getting another ice cream cone, and decided against it. She was still uncertain just how it would feel when she stepped out of here and the 'food' in her stomach vanished.

Alex laughed a bit. "I'm t-terrible with it usually. I always e-end up wondering about the programming behind it. H-hopefully it w-won't, o-or we won't have a-any defense against i-it."

Anwei had usually seen this level of virtual detail only in entertainment complexes - and those were pre-programmed, not set by the patron's thoughts, and didn't include materializing objects.

"You've done a splendid job here, though," she said tactfully. "It really does look like a park in a city. Is this a place you visited on Earth a lot?" She was curious what level of concentration you needed to maintain something like this - or to be more precise, she was curious to see how deep Stacy was digging.

Alex nodded and pointed to a field off in the distance. "F-Father usedta play c-catch with me over there, wh-when I was r-really young. M-mom also useta take me ta g-get ice c-cream!"

"It sounds wonderful." Anwei thought of excursions with her own family: always in a group, every move and gesture carefully orchestrated for the cameras, surrounded on all sides by people to adjust and prompt and inspect her. Certainly she had never been allowed to play catch in a field.

"I wonder if there's anything too complicated for Stacy to display here."

Alex's face fell. Wonderful. Right. If that was the only part of their family you saw.

He forced another smile, "Y-yeah, I guess it k-kinda was." Until they got back home. At least he had a few fond memories though.

"P-probably, b-but there's always a c-computing limit. I imagine the ship's very high."

She didn't miss the way his expression drooped. It made him look older than he probably was, and that made her sad for a moment. She was - jealous, she supposed, of human childhoods: how they got to spend so much time with their families when they were little. How they could remember all those things that happened, instead of them being lost in a blur of changes as they grew up.

"With a ship this size, there could be huge volumes of space devoted just to brain tissue. I suppose the real test would be to have Stacy build a model of herself in here, and see how high she can drive the complexity...but I suppose we would hit a 'Classified' restriction if we tried that." Too bad. It certainly would make exploring the ship easier.

The funny thing was that he had forgotten most of it in a blur, and in only half-remembered memories. Even the times playing catch with his father- the good times- seemed more dream than memory.

He was a bit happy for that though. He didn't like what he could remember, so he was a little happy that he didn't remember all of the things that were done to him. Somehow, only remembering one actual night in that spare room was a lot easier than if he could remember every instance.

"Th-there's always the possibility th-that she won't a-allow access t-to the r-restricted areas even in the sensorium version of herself."

Free ice cream! [open]

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