trans_9 | Bad Handwriting and Everything [Open]

Entry tags:

Bad Handwriting and Everything [Open]

The upside to using paper and pen instead of data pads for taking notes on patients is that it's intuitive and you can fiddle with things. The downside is that, at the end of a shift, a lot of the notes have to be shredded for privacy reasons, and the details have to be entered into the data pads anyway. Despite his usual devotion to efficiency, Howard doesn't mind this. It's a nice way to review the day and cement anything he might have learned.

The Quarantine's mostly empty now, which is a definite plus. All those kids were getting Howard crankier and antsier than usual. He brought in a box of toys from the Warehouse, though he didn't bother to check the age ranges for them, so he hopes someone who cares a bit more will take out all the choking hazards before any of the children regress to toddlerhood. He doesn't want anything to do with children; he had enough of that back in that dystopian nightmare he called home. All they do is cry and scream and demand things and kill each other and eat all the food and lie and burn down buildings and generally make life unpleasant. Not that adults are always better, but at least someone's around to enforce order here.

He hums a snippet of Cliffs of Dover to himself, chewing on the end of a Tinker Toy, and starts typing in his notes.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Well, it's more of an informal report than a debriefing. But I still don't want anyone else going to Epicurea not knowing anything. And for all we know, the Orb of Enlightenment was the only thing holding the planet together, and once we took it the whole world collapsed. Whatever we write might be the last record of them."

She's sort of joking about that. She thinks that Stacy probably wouldn't condemn a world to die for the sake of owning a shiny golden bauble. Probably.

She takes the list of question and sends it to Dr. Henderson with a note (Doctor, I'm brainstorming a custom admissions checklist for de-aging people; I think this could be a good start). She shoves the sensor package screen aside as well, and starts looking for her latest draft of the Epicurea report.

"So just what we saw there, not so much what happened. I don't know about you, but I'm not totally keen on telling everyone on the ship that I sicced dinosaurs on people. Might give them the wrong impression. And you might want to leave out biting a chick's hand off."

Howard has no such faith in Stacy. Although were that the case, they certainly had awful security surrounding their planet's life force.

"She was trying to stab me in the - never mind." It had just been a relex, after all. Nothing to be embarassed about.

The report she pulls up and sends to Howard's omnicomm actually has two parts. The first is an exhaustive description of what they saw of the culture of Epicurea: the clans, the status signals in food and dress and attendants, the dinosaurs, the arena sports; the second is a very simplified version of what happened, without many details. Negotiations started, failed, team accomplished mission anyway. It does go into a little more detail about how poorly suited the female negotiator chosen by Stacy was for the role, and how the mission only succeeded due to the skills of Howard and Zouichi.

"Megnama," she muttered to herself as she sent it, for some reason.

"I'm just saying you probably don't want it to be common knowledge. Believe me, I get it."

Howard adds in some details about the nature of the locks in the gladiator ring and the black market culture, hoping it can't be traced back to his omnicomm. He wonders if Anwei's self-flagellating is really sincere or if it's some veiled form or an apology.

"What's that, Maw? Is that a Pokemon?"

Anwei just looked a little puzzled. She wasn't used to the idea of people not knowing everything about her and finding it endlessly and macabrely fascinating, whether it was or not.

Come on, Howard. Traced back to your omnicomm? When the number of people on that mission was a grand total of three?

"Megnama? No, it was this huge diplomatic conference. It was incredibly productive: ended wars, made eneimes into friends, united opposing civilizations and all that, and the stories were that anyone who was there was some sort of amazing negotiatior and super-genius at treaties. And sure, I was there. But all I did was jump out of a cake!"

He's going to pin it on you, Anwei. He'll pretend you were the one doing all the black marketing.

"...You were the blonde in the cake?" He gives her a skeptical look. Not to mention, what does Megnama have to do with anything?

She would probably be flattered, but then gently explain that she left that sort of detailed negotiation to her AI.

"I even wore a bathing suit - over body armor, of course. No need to take too many risks. It was very heavily publicized; stories and vidrecords blanketed the entire galaxy. But my being at Megnama was just a publicity stunt for the mercs - they were doing security detail, shuttling ambassadors around, that sort of thing. It doesn't mean that I am any sort of great negotiator! And Stacy shouldn't put lives at risk by choosing me to negotiate - especially not with people from the sort of unbalanced, hierarchical culture that's going to set my teeth on edge." She shows all those teeth for a moment, then relaxes.

"So you think Megnama was the reason Stacy picked you for that mission? If it was so publicized, shouldn't she have had access to transcripts showing you were just the cake girl?" But he answers his own question. "Then again, who knows what goes on in Stacy's whacked-out brain? I'm still betting she set us in there to fail."

She shook her head, actually taking her hands off the keyboards to gesture in frustration. "There's that whole thing about stories that cross the dimensions, right? Stories get distorted, they get retold, they get rewritten. For all I know, the story she has is from a dimension where I really am a great diplomat, all by myself without assistance." Her tongue only stumbled a little on that last word.

"I don't see the purpose in our failure either," she confessed. "We fail and - what? Does it strengthen anyone on that planet to defeat three visitors? They would what, get one shuttle and one load of slop, maybe three prisoners (although good luck holding Zouichi for any length of time) and nothing else. I doubt our presence would bias them one way or the other in the war against the Ohm. No, maybe it was a pass/fail test of us, but if so Epicurea was just a situation meant to put us under stress. It worked," she said, seething only a little. And her head still had little spots where the hair was frizzled from the hat-clamps.

"But she must have been able to get to our dimensions, or she wouldn't have been able to grab us. Are you suggesting Stacy's just that bad at doublechecking her facts?"

He shakes his head. "It'd be a way to get rid of crewmembers while saving face with the crew and not having to worry about what happens if someone eventually figures out how to open all the pods. She sent us in there way unprepared. I don't think she'd do that to us if she wanted us to win."

"I don't even know if facts are what she's detecting. This whole routine about Threads, people changing their destinies - and we haven't seen what sort of equipment is used to pick us up, either. What a Thread Walker detector looks like." A pause as she tries to think of what use such a device would be - point it at new recruits and find out who has a great destiny? "Apparently I was in the same location on Earth as another person here - Doctor McNinja? Tall, blond eyebrows, lab coat? - so maybe I just got grabbed by mistake." And maybe you did too, her eyes say.

"Howard, think of how much energy it must take just to steer this ship. Are you saying that Stacy dropped into normal space, sat in orbit for two days, prepped a shuttle - just to get rid of us? It would be a lot easier to just repod us, and then fake a systems failure so that we can't be revived. Maybe the plan was to have us flush out where the Orb was, and then a second team would come down to grab it, and possibly us."

She snorts through her nose. "Or maybe we were there to help the poor oppressed dinosaurs overthrow their masters, by providing an inspirational spectacle. We'll go back ten thousand years in their future, and the planet will be ruled by dinosaurs who all hail Howard the Hero as their savior!" She mock-bows sitting down.

Howard would totally agree with her, except he doubts Stacy was that desperate to get Albert, too - although that kid probably would have a great destiny, with his ability to just work. "Yet another thing we don't know about Stacy that could be nice to know, I guess. It feels like we're fighting a war with no radios."

He rolls his eyes at her. He feels uneasy, being too paranoid even for Anwei to agree with. "All I'm saying is, with that set-up, and with how crazy the ship is, we went in there with a higher chance of losing than not. Stacy had to know that negotiations would fall through or run over. She had to know about the gladiator ring. If she did, she deliberately withheld information from us."

"It feels like we're fighting a war at random. The territory keeps changing, there's no communications from HQ, every member of our army is different, and we don't even see the enemy, usually." Just as well; she has no idea if Stacy had any built-in defensive weapons. Or if they were working. Or if they could be activated, and controlled, in case of an Ohm attack.

"Deliberately? You'd be amazed at how many ways you can tweak an AI's brain. She may have known everything, every tiny danger, and been screaming inside to try and tell us - but couldn't, because her orders were not to. Or because the pathways in her mind between 'know' and 'tell' are too damaged. Or it was all a test: find out what happens if crew members are sent on a mission with minimal information. Will they succeed or fail? Survive - or perish?" She widens her eyes dramatically.

"We're fighting a war in a snow globe where we're not entirely sure who's shaking it, or if they're doing it on purpose. With a draft that keeps pulling in people with no background checks and objectives we don't even know about until they fall in our lap," he says, taking the metaphor in a more disjointed direction.

"Oh, right, I forgot we're supposed to feel sorry for her. How about this, Anwei - Stacy may be all motherly love deep down, but what we're working with is that Stacy and all the programming errors and damaged coding. So yeah, maybe Stacy, the machine with all the crossed wires and synapses firing in the wrong direction, does want us dead. Maybe it's just the part of her that's in control that wants us dead or just doesn't care or doesn't know enough about people to realize what could get us dead, but until we figure out how to undo those tweaks, that's the Stacy we're working with."

"What's a snow globe?" she asked curiously. It couldn't be a snow ball, because you couldn't fight in one of those. The part about the draft made perfect sense, though.

"I can feel sorry for her, and at the same time recognize that she's damaged enough to be willing and able to harm or kill the people under her control. It's not either-or. She may be being misinformed the same way that we are, or she may be planning out every tiny malfunction in advance. Either way, she needs repairs. A serious attitude adjustment. Bad enough that she's a danger to us; if she damages herself badly enough, we all die, and everyone in the pods. Game over."

"It's this decoration thing we have in my world. A ball full of water with a little diorama inside, and when you shake it all these pieces of glitter and paper go swirling through the water and make it impossible to see anything. I guess it's supposed to look like snow." He shrugs. "I wouldn't know. I've seen outer space and dinosaur gladiators and talking coyotes and I still haven't seen snow. That's just weird, man."

"So...what, you think she's damaging herself? God, she's got to be the worst-programmed computer of all time...unless it was intentional by whoever put in those programs. Daligig, right?"

She pictured a snowstorm, captured inside something like a balloon. "It sounds pretty enough, but either my race never came up with them, or they were out of fashion while I was at home." Out of fashion, out of mind.

"Well the Daligig did plenty of damage in my opinion - I mean, what's the point of rearranging half of her personality from warden to matron? It's like curing half your brain of schizophrenia, or leaving you chained to your own evil twin. And having the evil twin be in charge. But I was thinking of the injuries that were inflicted on her by the pirates, and how her self-repair systems might be damaged and causing more damage. Like your immune system attacking your own cells."

"I guess they're nice enough. My mom liked them. She'd get really pissed off at me when I shook them, which kind of defeats the purpose, in my opinion."

Howard tenses up a little bit; Anwei's analogy reminds him of Brittney and Drake, the brave, good-hearted sixth grader locked up in the same body with her evil twin of sorts. "So you're saying what, kind of like an allergic reaction? What's your idea for a cure, since she keeps pushing away anyone who bothers getting close?" His tone implies 'you included'.

"I think all parents do that, actually. Show their children how things work, and then forbid them from doing them. Preferable, I suppose, to not showing them how things works, and then punishing them when they experiment, or letting them hurt themselves."

"My first step - my zeroeth step, actually - would be to remove everyone on board including the people in the pods to somewhere that she couldn't damage them, either maliciously or through a systems failure. Failing that, and without any idea of how her personality is structured...well, you can't just try to revert her to her baseline personality. Because that may well be the Warden side, and she'd probably just re-pod us. I doubt that she lets prisoners have weapons, or work in Med Bay." She tapped her fingers on the desk.

"Ideally, I'd switch her sensory and internal monitoring feeds over to a simulation, and give her the processing power to run through enough scenarios that we could find all the kinks in her system and fix them. With another or even multiple AIs to monitor her progress. But as it stands, her system is probably just too complicated to manipulate like that, especially if she is storing peoples' memories. It's not something that we can fix by hand - not unless we find a single point of command corruption. And besides," she smiled one-sided, "we only have Stacy's word that the Daligig meant her nice side to be dominant. Lots of people like to imagine that they're the good guys."

"Nah, my parents did all three. I think it's like a combo, when you raise kids. I wouldn't know. Wouldn't want to." The idea of having kids of his own makes his stomach turn, and he doubts that'll change over the course of his life. It's not just his youth that makes that concept repugnant.

He listens intently, even stopping his incessant chewing as he absorbs this. "So you're so used to Horanckk that even when he's not here, you're plotting with his capabilities in mind."

After all, she might have just said AI's, but he's got a fairly solid conception of what she means.

"Can't say I blame you." The game-playing that Anwei's parents had practiced with their daughters had been painful and humiliating; she had no desire to find out if she was capable of being a good parent. The thought of taking custody of any of her descendants made her extremely anxious.

She nodded in agreement. "Well, you work with someone for twenty five years, you start to be able to anticipate what they would suggest. I did a lot of my programming learning with Horanckk, and he was always with me when I worked with other AIs. Without him," she looked at her hands as though they were something apart from her, something useless, "I don't know a quarter of what I should. Because he remembered things for me, and I always thought he would be there."

Her mouth thinned. "It would not surprise me to find out eventually that he has been here, all this time, in data stasis: because he was too dangerous to let out."

"Yeah, you don't really strike me as the mommy type."

He nods, thinking about Orc as she speaks of Horanckk, just because there'd been a similar feeling that things would never change. He'd never have to learn to defend himself because Orc would protect him. But that's just muscle memory he has to build up; he never relied intellectually on Orc, not like Anwei apparently relied on Horanckk. He has to learn to punch, not how to remember, not how to think and organize his own thoughts. It's a frightening prospect and one that, in a nicer person, might breed some compassion. "Learning's hard, isn't it, Maw? So are you just going to stick around and wait?"

"I'll take that as a compliment." Picturing her mothers - stretched tall by surgery, tight skin and long limbs and mad eyes enhanced by cosmetics, every gesture and word and thought perfectly planned and exquisitely beautiful - always made her feel very small. Very unlike them.

"Stick around as opposed to what? Jump ship on a random world in a random universe and start wandering? Any traces I've managed to leave behind point to this ship, so I'll stay here, and learn, and help, and somehow, someday, be a part of recreating my universe. I'm so looking forward to it," she gibed, clapping her hands slowly.

And if Horanckk showed up and she wasn't here to meet him, he might get upset.

"You know what I meant," he says. "Are you going to learn to live without or are you going to pine?"

Howard takes a third option - stick to not thinking about it as much as possible.

"What, can't I do both? Get along for thirteen days twenty three hours, then go off and pine for an hour? It's not either-or."

Maybe she could add 'pining' as a recurring appointment to her schedule.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject