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Jamie was tired.

The exhaustion was, almost, a welcome respite from the mind-numbing fear of SHODAN's attack on the crew, the panic barely held at bay in the cockpit of the Geno Saurer, fighting off hordes of smaller robots and, eventually, mobs of Zoids whose command systems had been overtaken by the malevolent AI. The feeling of helpless terror, of facing his own impending death had become so commonplace since the Daligig had so generously chosen him to help fight their war for them that Jamie was, when he bothered to think about it, surprised - and frustrated, and annoyed with himself - that he hadn't gotten a better handle on it. But it was the same every time, in every single battle, and this instance, as ceaseless waves of metal bodies in every shape imaginable had rushed him and his Zoid, had been no exception.

And then everything had just...stopped. The swarms of mechanized enemies had ceased their onslaught, everything had gone eerily quiet, and there was finally time to regroup, tend to injuries, figure out what the hell had happened. Time to rest.

For most people, probably. Jamie hadn't. There was work to be done, repairs to be made, damages to patch up. None of it was going to fix itself and Jamie wouldn't have tolerated any opportunity to let himself think about the newest horror the ship, or the multiverse in general, had inflicted on them. He'd welcomed the overabundance of work.

He'd gone wherever he was sent initially, and once orders had stopped being handed down, as the preliminary rush of activity had faded and things slowly resumed some semblance of normalcy, he'd gone where he thought he could be of the most use. And as time wore on and his energy reserves became stretched thin, he more often than not found himself wandering to the hangar.

The Geno Saurer lurked in an isolated corner, miraculously still upright but slumping with palpable exhaustion. Surrounding the blue tyrannosaur were the battered carcasses of several Rev Raptors, scattered in ungainly sprawls of clawed limbs and serrated tails and serpentine necks. Jamie picked his way through them, paranoia pricking alarm at dulled senses - what if the things came back to life and attacked again? SHODAN had been defeated, the threat eliminated, or so everyone believed. Believing in things didn't make them true, though. Belief, Jamie was finding, didn't mean much around here.

He reached the Geno, pausing near one hind claw, wavering slightly as he craned his neck to gaze up at her. The Zoid's wedge-shaped head was angled toward the ground, optics dimly lit with the barest hint of cognizance. The brush of her awareness of him was reassuring, something he found himself clinging to for comfort. She was tired too, Jamie could tell. She'd fought hard and needed to be taken care of as much as anyone else.

"'m sorry," he murmured, resting a hand on the edge of one claw. "I should've been here sooner, huh. Everything's just been busy. You understand that, right?"

Of course she did. He could tell. Somehow.

"...yeah." He'd let himself slump forward, leaning heavily against her talon, head drooping and hand still pressed to metal. "'m here now. I promised I'd take care of you, back on the island. I didn't forget."

He wasn't entirely sure how long he'd remained like that when some noise nearby - faint or loud, it was all the same to his rattled senses - snapped him from inaction and he jerked to attention, twisting to face the source of the noise, looking more than a little wild-eyed.

[[This can be bendytimed to any point post-SHODAN, including before/during/after Shore Leave.]]

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Jamie shrugged mildly. "I just meant their mechs didn't have any consciousness to speak of. They couldn't move or react to anything on their own, so nobody thought of them as being alive."

Zouichi needn't have worried about any hands-on examination; Jamie wasn't quite that uninhibited even on a good day, and this was...far from being a good day.

Current talkativeness notwithstanding. "I guess a wild Zoid could stay alive as long as it had Cores to eat, yeah, assuming another Zoid didn't kill it or something. Tame Zoids, once their Core's energy runs out, they're pretty much dead. They can still live for a long time and take a lot of damage, but eventually the Core just...gets tired and stops working. And if the Core's damaged too badly, like in a battle or something, it'll kill the Zoid. That's why the Core is in the torso - 's the part of the body that's best protected by armor and support structures."

"Interesting. Was that by design? Or an unintended side effect?" He couldn't imagine why anyone would deliberately introduce a weakness into a domesticated machine like that -- unless, of course, they weren't perfectly tame. In which case it might serve as an extra failsafe just in case ~~the fences went down~~.

"How long does a Zoid typically live? As long as a human?"

"No, way longer than that." There was just a hint of duh in there, dulled either by exhaustion, or by tact with respect for the fact that not everyone came from a planet full of living robot animals and, hence, wouldn't understand how they worked. "Hundred years, maybe more. They don't all make it that long, though. Zoids nowadays - I mean, in the time I'm from - stand a better chance of living longer than the ones that were used in the wars hundreds of years ago, though."

He shrugged. "And we can't exactly have 'em ripping open other Zoids and eating their Cores to stay alive. Zoid battles'd get really ugly really fast, that way."

He regarded Zouichi contemplatively again. "How long do guys like you live?" he ventured.

Hmm. Humans on Jamie's world must not have had very long life expectancies. And his words implied that the Zoid creatures were no longer used to fight wars. Or perhaps they simply fought new wars rather than the old ones of years ago. "For what reason do you fight other Zoids, then? As sport?"

He paused for a moment, considering. "There's no preset upper limit on my lifespan," he said finally. "I'm not designed to age like the earlier generations. But no one can live forever. At least, not that I'm aware of."

At this Jamie looked almost...chagrined. "...um. Well, yeah. We just use 'em in tournaments and stuff, now. Nothing important. But we've got rules in place about killing Zoids in sanctioned battles. They might take a lot of damage otherwise, but it's against regulations to try to destroy the Core."

Jamie contemplated his next question; a lot of what he wanted to ask seemed tactless, and he wasn't entirely in the right frame of mind to navigate politesse for the sake of satiating idle curiosity, but he wasn't above a few, hopefully innocuous queries. "So how old are you?"

Jamie's expression was interesting. "I see. I've met one or two people here who participated in competitive fighting with their animals. And there were old Earth sports like that, too, where people would bet on the outcomes of the battles. But I can't say I really understand it." Not that Zouichi was above cooking up an animal or two. That would be silly!

In any case, he didn't seem particularly offended by being asked about his age. "It depends on your mode of reckoning. My physical body is approximately a year old. However, I spent the virtual equivalent of fifty years in an artificial environment, before I was released." He motioned to Jamie. "And you? How long do humans live, in your world?"

Jamie shrugged, still looking vaguely self-conscious. "There's...not really any point to it, they're just contests to see who's the best. Like I said, nothing important. They're just games." And here he sounded a little disgusted with himself - or at least with the past self for whom competitive battles were the most important thing in the world.

"People live to be about seventy or eighty where I'm from. There's exceptions, but that's the average. I'm eighteen," he offered, since he'd asked Zouichi's age, then curled his lip a bit in a cynical frown. "I think. It's hard to figure that kinda thing out around here."

He narrowed his eyes contemplatively at Zouichi's explanation. "So your...consciousness was in a computer or something before it was put into a body? What'd you do during all that time?"

So the humans of Jamie's world weren't terribly different in terms of life expectancy. Well, if you factored out life extension procedures, anyway. "Are you a professional trainer, then?" Because as far as he could tell, that was what Dawn had been, even if the both of them did seem awfully young for that sort of thing.

"In a manner of speaking. My physical brain was connected to a larger network. I learned. I was trained for combat. And I suppose you could say I grew up there. Some Synthetic Humans can simply be programmed with all the information they need ahead of time, but that just wasn't feasible for my generation. Too many factors, too many situations that come down to judgement calls."

"Well, we don't call ourselves trainers. We're pilots. Or Warriors." Though he had to admit now the latter term sounded terribly self-important. "But yeah, it was my job. I'd been training to do it since I was a kid. Tactics and strategy, mostly, not piloting, but I did some of that too."

Jamie wondered, briefly, what a synthetic human's brain would look like - if it was wrinkly and pinkish-grey like a regular human's or completely different. "So the ones that came after you were pre-programmed with all the stuff you had to learn naturally. Is there a difference in the way they think and act, compared to you? The way they interact with people?"

Zouichi inclined his head slightly at the last two phrases. "Are 'Warriors' physical participants in these games? In my world, 'pilot' generally referred to the operator of a flying craft."

Wait, no, Jamie! You had it all wrong! "No, I was part of the last generation of Synthetic Humans created by my company. Some of the earlier generations came with a core infodump, then were sent out under the assumption that they'd pick up the more subtle aspects of their duties later. Like human interaction, for instance. Given enough time, however, I'm sure we'd act more or less the same. In fact, an older Synthetic Human, possessed of more experience, would likely act more convincingly human than I."

Although either way, it was fairly easy to tell a human from a Synthetic Human. Zouichi didn't understand why the people on the ship seemed to find it so difficult.

"We're in the Zoid's cockpit controlling it during a battle, yeah." That counted as a "physical participant," right? "'Pilot's just a general term for anyone who uses a Zoid, doesn't matter if it's an aerial unit or a ground unit or what." Jamie was only passingly familiar with the term as used for things unrelated to giant mecha, and most of what he knew was leftover memories from Fairplay, which he tried to ignore as much as possible.

Jamie mulled over Zouichi's explanation, hm'ing contemplatively. "Guess it'd be kinda hard to program how to act around people into someone, anyway. 's kind of a hard thing to pin down and work into a formula. I mean, I know some non-synthetic people who don't get how the whole acting-normal thing works." Jamie himself probably counted; Zoid pilots as a group were quirky, to put it mildly. Being raised in an isolated base in the middle of the desert with Zoid-obsessed adults and vaguely dysfunctional older kids as role models probably hadn't helped any.

"Anyway, you seem pretty convincing to me." Well. Questionable grasp of societal norms or no, Jamie had sense enough to realize how unflattering that sounded. He grimaced, chagrined. "...uh. Sorry."

That was... weird, thinking of a living organism with a cockpit. "You're controlling them? Why? Aren't they capable of complex movements on their own?" Of course, horses had reins and all, but reins weren't usually hooked up to equine nervous systems.

...Well, it wasn't like Jamie hadn't already asked some pretty invasive questions. Zouichi inclined his head slightly toward Jamie in acknowledgement. "To be honest, being 'convincing' is kind of an incidental trait. Humans trust beings that remind them of themselves, so it's useful in that sense. And it's more convenient to work off existing anatomy, for which weapons and armor have already been developed, than to try and invent something entirely new."

He paused. "But I've noticed many of the humans I've met aboard the ship define my success as an individual by how 'human' I am. However, my main purpose isn't imitating humanity. And most people on my Earth could easily tell a human apart from a Synthetic Human. I have to admit I'm at a loss to explain the shift in emphasis."

Jamie shrugged. "Depends what you mean by 'complex'. It's not like we have to dictate every move they make. If you tell a Zoid to go one way, it'll keep going that way until you tell it to change direction. They'll move to avoid obstacles in their paths, as long as they can detect them. Most Zoids will react on reflex if you tell 'em to move a certain way. Like, if you charge at an opponent head-first, the Zoid knows to try to bite whatever it's running at instead of just...I dunno, smashing its face into it or something." His eyes flicked toward one of the Rev Raptors, whose armor was shredded and mangled in such a way as to suggest that the Geno had very successfully not been smashing her face into them.

"Some Zoids are capable of moving around on their own - my friend Leon found one wandering around a canyon all by itself once, and one of the Zoids on our team kept throwing people out of its cockpit until it found a pilot it liked. Those're exceptions, though. Most Zoids just wait for someone to tell 'em what to do."

So far Zouichi hadn't seemed to take serious offense to anything Jamie'd said, for which he was immensely relieved. ~~Unless the guy was just seething silently and planning to do horrible things to him in his sleep.~~ His curiosity was still piqued - he wondered if Zouichi found it offensive or stifling to be compared to humans, what his own standards of success were - but he was starting to feel unsure of himself again and wasn't certain if he should probe any further. Not directly, at least. "I guess it's just...human bias. We think we're the best things around, so we're impressed when we see someone not-human doing things that we think demonstrate 'humanity,' even when it's pretty clear we don't have a monopoly on whatever trait it is we're focusing on," he ventured.

Zouichi frowned a little as he listened; the behavior of these Zoids didn't sound very much like anything he'd encountered on Earth. "So I take it Zoids are all apex predators? Or too large, at any rate, to be victims of predation? My Earth did have animals that were raised to be companion animals or mounts, but if they were ever abandoned in the wild, they would generally try to survive on their own or with others of their kind. Rather than waiting for further instruction, that is." Also, he'd been wondering about that mangling.

Sadly, Zouichi didn't generally make secret plans to do horrible things to people in their sleep. Generally speaking, if he took issue with someone, they knew about it. But in any case, Jamie seemed... unusually introspective. Thoughtful, even. ~~Fifty points for Geno Saurer House~~.

"I suppose that makes sense. It just seems like an odd criterion on which to judge someone." Well. After all, didn't Ildraniath look at the world strictly through the lenses of what was Eldar? Still, being inhuman was what allowed Zouichi to do his job. Toua would never have placed so much of its future into the hands of a handful of baseline humans. The odds were simply too incredible.

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