trans_9 | Tightrope

Entry tags:

Tightrope

It had been a few days since the Outsider's gathering, where Hit Girl had finally been able to utilize her strength and talent to help others. All in all, it went pretty well: choices were made, friendships were had, blah blah and kumbaya. What SHE had wanted to show was that she was the type of girl who got the job done, and if anyone needed to be reminded, she would show that to them. Grabbing the flag had just been the start: now she wanted to make sure that whatever happened next, she would be ready, she would show people the type of person her daddy trained.

Which led to today's excursion in the Sensorium: she was doing tightrope walking, one of her weaker points, in order to maintain balance and poise. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop had demanded both, and while she had mastered that, she had not yet made her foray to really careful jumping in tight spots. To give her some energy, she had this playing in the background, and she jumped from rope to rope, her eyes concentrating, her tongue sticking out slightly in concentration.

Each step took courage, and the slightest imperfection would result in her falling, although of course it wouldn't be that big of a deal when you were in the Sensorium anyway. Despite this, Hit Girl demanded nothing less than imperfection: once she had this mastered, going to Negi and learning the delayed spells would be next, not to mention training Sasami.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I might be best put to use with the braniacs," she said dryly. "I'm a lot better at computers than I am with weapons. My plan is just to keep in training, hope my AI shows up, and see if there's any way to stabilize the neural networks long enough to find out what's wrong with them. And doing that while you're flying inside the ship that is running those networks is - not recommended."

What she wanted was a super spacetanker full of neural jelly that she could copy Stacy's autonomous systems into, and then take the whole mess apart from the baseline up. Not going to happen, of course. She would bet a tooth that if they got too aggressive the ship would start handing out Punishments, if not just jettisoning pods outright. And alerting the Daligig.

"Maybe we don't have to be that drastic," she said thoughtfully. "Billy in Engineering has a calendaring program set up. Maybe just push out a message for people to start using it, and casually ask the Council to populate it with their meeting dates. If they don't, ask why."

She nodded. "You just said a lot of things I didn't understand, but I get the jist of it. There's always going to b a shortage of stuff we have conveniently missing that would help us to get to the bottom of half the shit going on on this ship."

Whatever worked, really. "I'm not exactly planning on starting a riot, but I think it would help if the ship started to get involved in who is representing them, and know what it is the people they elected are doing, you know?"

"The ship is broken, our tools for fixing it are broken, and if we try to fix either we'll all end up getting a quick vacuum cleaning - or worse. So I'm just going to repair what I can, make everything run smoothly for people. And keep lots of backup material, so that if I get conveniently disappeared, someone else won't have to start over from scratch."

A serial killer would have a field day with this set-up, wouldn't she? Get the computer to declare all her victims repodded and - Anwei choked off that line of thought.

"I agree. Right now I just don't have any feel for the Council - I couldn't even put a face to half their names - so how can I know how they will debate? How can I trust them? And it will just keep getting worse, as the people who do know the Council die or are repodded, and new people come in."

"That sounds like a good plan. Knowing this crew, something insane will happen at the most inconvenient time, exposing exactly how inefficient some things around here can be. So I say the more back ups we have, the better. You never know if Stacy might get damaged or attacked."

She nodded. "I mean, the Outsiders are far from perfect, but I at least see familiar faces, I can watch them on the field. I get to know 'em that way. This council, I barely know any of them, and I wanna know if they're really going to be working in our best interests when it comes to another off planet mission."

"Backing up Stacy's processes would be ideal, of course, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was impossible with the current set-up. She may just be too full to have any leftover room for backups. She may have been designed," the corners of her mouth turned down, "not to have any leftover room."

She considered. "Kang is on the Council, and he went on the mission himself. It's usually a good sign when your Councilors are willing to step up and take a potential hit alongside the rest of the crew. Of course that was a fairly benign mission."

She nodded. "They did say there had been other crew members in the past. It might not be too far fetched to think they might have made sure Stacy had a way of going on, even when they were all killed. So maybe we have to find a way to do that, just in case. I wish I had the smarts to help, honestly."

She knew what she was suited for.

Hit Girl shrugged. "Yeah, but Kang's also pretty bad ass. What the hell does he have to fear, going on a mission? He's probably stomp some aliens flat if they tried to attack us anyway."

"I wish I was a better melee fighter. You know you can fight. I just have to hope that I have some useful information to pass along, and that Stacy doesn't resist by altering my memories or just taking me away."

"We may have to wait until the next mission to find out. So far as I've heard, they don't seem to come on any set schedule." Another frustration: random events she had no control over.

"You'll get there. There are plenty of people who are willing to train you. I know I can do it, and so can many others. Besides, you sound like you have a ton more useful abilities than I do anyway."

She nodded. "Yeah, I'm kinda hating that. I'd like to know when we're going and why. That way I can get bags of the shit that I need later."

Anwei shook her head no - not at the first part of that statement, but at the last. "There's no way to tell what will be useful in a war. You can have the best gear, the best people, and you'd lost if it wasn't for the random windstorm or a bout of sickness or the passing messenger who mentions that the enemy is colorblind. This war may not be won with fists or with coding - maybe it will end up being who has the hardest heart, or the deepest soul, or the shiniest scalp, or something." She was thinking of Megamind, who could probably get quite a gleam on his head with enough oil.

She wondered why Stacy didn't just provide the shit - clearly her own systems must produce some organic by-products. "I'm hoping for some dehumidifiers myself. Hook it up to a filter and I'll have water wherever I want. And it would probably help with keeping gundpowder dry."

"I guess you're right," Hit Girl said. "Personally, I like the idea of it being about heart though. Kinda hard to be in a war and not care about its outcome and the people in it. That way we could get rid a lot of the people dragging their feet, not caring about what happens."

Then again, she might be a demon before the Ohm attacked, so who knew?

She nodded. "Makes sense, which is why we probably won't have it."

"Insectoid races - their heart is not quite a part of each individual; it's an aspect of their hive. Their hive is the center of their life, the focus of their attention at all times. If you ever want to make an insectoid really, really angry," she leaned a little closer, "call it a hiveburner. That's not just a fighting insult, that's a shoot-you-in-the-back insult; it means killing your own mother, and all your siblings, and destroying all chances of new life in your family line. Might be enough to make it pause, long enough to shoot it."

Anwei had been planning to retire and become an artificial intelligence; turning into a demon probably wouldn't phase her.

"Well, running a large dehumidifier is probably going to dry out Stacy's skin, which would be inhospitable. But a small one, or small ones, hopefully won't be a problem." Something along the lines of a self-filling thermos was what she wanted - and if it could make the water cold, that would be a bonus.

"I don't know if that would have any effect," Hit Girl said. "The Ohm seem to be completely devoid of making any contact with anyone, from what I hear. There's no way to talk to them, and there's no way they can speak back to us. All we know is that they seek out life and planets and destroy them. That seems enough to convince one of the members of the Council that we should try attempting to communicate with them."

She chortled. "Where I'm from? The last thing you ever wanna do is give you enemy the benefit of the doubt. Once you go around killing with no remorse, I don't care how come we can't talk to you. You need to die."

Of course, she would likely be on that list too then.

"Would you be able to have one in the city?"

There was real fire in this Hit Girl, laughing at the death of her enemies. Anwei wondered for a moment how she would look in Vizsnunishne gray, with mask and guns. Formidable.

"At this point I think we'd all be rather suspicious if we managed to communicate and the Ohm said they were remorseful. On the other grip, if we knew how they communicated, we could jam their communications maybe? Send false messages - 'The hive is on fire! Retreat and protect the queen!' Or just eavesdrop and find out what their next targets are. Or how they choose them."

"The City would probably be better than the upper levels - I think they have to stay moist or Stacy will get flaky skin. Imagine how nasty dandruff would be - flakes of her falling down like gray-green snow." She snorted. "But drawing off water that stays in the system - as in, we drink it and then sweat it out - shouldn't unbalance her too badly. Not with this few crew."

She laughed. "You know, I like the way you think. To me, that would be the only reason to try talking to the Ohm to begin with. What would you possibly want to say to the alien species that destroyed your planet? 'Hey, I'm sorry buddy, were you having a bad day? Were you on your period?' Fuck that. I don't want to talk to these guys, I want to strike back and blow them the fuck up."

She made a face. "That's just gross, flaky Stacy. But the water should be ok. Stacy was the one that supplied it for the Spa and in the forest, right?"

"Well, you could say 'We regret the inevitability of destroying you, and your hive, and your hive's hive, back to the creation of your first egg.'" She winked. "Of course, we could be lying."

"Sure, Stacy is water-based, although I don't think she's mammalian - obviously. And I suspect she'd tell us if we were binding too much water into our systems - but how much can a few hundred people drain off, anyway, compared to Stacy's total volume? And it means you don't have to visit the bathrooms and get stuck if you're dehydrated."

"I would be lying." Ht Girl said immediately with a grin. "I wouldn't regret any part of it in the least. If there was a way, I'd probably be giving them the finger as did it."

She nodded. "Yeah, I never did get the lack of water and decent, no creepy bathrooms around here. It should be ok, its just water."

"They certainly seemed to have earned what they are going to be served." And oh, that would be quite the meal, wouldn't it?

"It can't be that there was a species here that reacted badly to water - someone like that couldn't take the humidity. No, it's probably another control mechanism." Another frown. "If I find dehumidifiers that can be powered from what we have here, I think I'll stand well away from the shipping crate when I bring them on board, in case Stacy decides to snatch or smash them. Do you know if she ever does that? Confiscates contraband?"

"Damn right," Mindy said, thinking about how she had performed so far. She was really going to have to get on the ball, if she wanted to really make sure she mastered keeping balance and all of that.

She shook her head. "I've never even heard of Stacy doing something like that. As far as I know, so long as its not gong to hurt anyone, Stacy is not going to go get herself involved. I imagine she'd count herself as someone who shouldn't be hurt when it comes to something like this."

Hopefully the free fall training wouldn't wipe out the muscle-memory of the balance training.

"Like I said, a little water condensation shouldn't affect her - it's not like we're draining tons of water out of the system for sale. I guess when they split Stacy off from the original ship's personality, they nullified the 'confiscate' function." Which of course meant that if Stacy was somehow damaged past the point of dominance in the neural networks, the 'Warden' personality might take over.

And she might be very, very cross with them.

That was still stuff that was way over head. Unlike her partner though, Hit Girl had to open her mind up to possibilities. There was no space for ignorance when it came to Stacy: if you were caught with your pants down, you were fucked and that was that.

"I'm not sure about all that, but I do know that I saw that punishment thing once. It's a pretty traumatic situation, and it makes me wonder what kind of things this ship could employ against us that was built into its programming."

Anwei sucked air through her teeth. "Things worse than Punishment? And memory tampering? And possible soul tampering, if what people say about the avia and GLADoS is true? Literally mind, body and soul at this ship's disposal. And we don't even know if what it's doing was programmed in, or if it isn't something kludged together from random code breaks trying to heal themselves."

She flickered her fingers outwards in a gesture of frustration. "It's like Stacy is this huge, torn, tangled net. And what she needs is to be stretched out flat, have all her broken threads mended, and then left to dry. But we can't, because we're in the net. And if we try to adjust it, we'll break ourselves."

She nodded. "That punishment was pretty brutal, and that's coming from me, who's cut people up and smiled about it. And I don't even wanna think about the memory tampering, to be honest. There's so much going on with this ship, the actual idea that we're still alive and breathing is pretty amazing. What I wanna know is what happened to the the people who've done this before us. What makes us so special?"

Hit girl got that: she just didn't like it.

"And why didn't the previous crew leave some sort of message for us, a history, a roll call? Or maybe they did and Stacy hid it or destroyed it." She brooded for an instant, then admitted, "She might not have meant to destroy it, of course. It might have been part of the general system damage."

"But - maybe the previous crew was all metahumans and they destroyed each other; or all non-powered people and they were wiped out. Maybe Stacy is testing, trying to find just the right mix of people that will be able to win the war."

"Stacy doesn't seem to have as much power as we originally thought though," Hit Girl said. "Remember how she reacted after dolling out the punishment? I mean, there wasn't really a point in doing that except to get the weak hearted to believe her."

She shrugged. "Well, despite a few idiots, I think we can manage it. It's all about getting us galvanized or whatever."

"Hmm. The personality split, or overlay, or whatever it was might have been to keep the original ship personality in check. Maybe originally you got Punishment for two Violations, instead of fifteen." Which would have meant Punishment would be explained a lot faster, and kept people from feeling they had so much wiggle room. "And her announcement - and getting people to believe her - may have kept someone from just flying into her brain and cutting up everything in sight."

If only Stacy would let them see a personality diagram!

"You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you have. So far I'd say I have a fair crop of fellow-soldiers."

Tightrope

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though

Re: NP - it's a good kind of insanity though