trans_9 | Meet and Greet

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Meet and Greet

The rest of the crew assembled on the Observation Deck to meet the latest editions to their numbers.

Several people are set up near the doors to provide the new people with omnicomms and comm rings. They are also told they must read information about their current situation and a survival guide with their new omnicomm. New crewmates might see a tall dragonish guy with wings (but don't call him that), a large afro attached to a smaller girl, and talking ponies among their number. There are also several authoritative-looking figures ready to introduce themselves.

There's a lot to tell the new people. It's going to be a lot to take in. But thankfully this time, there's a system that was set up to aid the new crew members with a few more experienced ones.

[ooc: Only new characters and Command Staff can start new threads for introductions, to limit the number of threads. Everyone else, just tag in and have your guys greet the newbies. Big brother/sister, there will be a thread for you as well!]

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"A bunch of people ended up going to Med Bay," Howard says quietly. "It was a disaster for the Daligig and pretty ugly for us too."

Howard relaxes a bit, happy to move onto more positive subjects. "Yep. He's here. Woke up about a month and a half ago. Haven't seen your AI, though."

"A disaster for everyone, but it sounds like Stacy managed to do the right thing. More than that, if she actually convinced the Daligig to stop." She was getting more and more curious about what sort of repairs had been completed on Stacy - you would think that 'obey our commands' would be high on the list - but maybe Stacy was more damaged than anyone thought.

"I'm glad someone came for you. And Horanckk, well. I'm glad that one of his aliases isn't SHODAN. That would have been embarrassing." Especially if Horanckk/SHODAN had won, and presented her with a ship full of freshly slaughtered crew as a gift.

(When she had a free moment, she would have to check that ciphered message she'd hidden away on the comms, and see if anyone had accessed it, or replied.)

"She did. She lied to them for us. Said she gave us the wrong time, and fudged the number of violations she had to give us." Maybe Anwei was right about Stacy all along. Howard certainly hopes so. Misunderstood AI is much better than the manipulative megalomaniac he thought of her as.

"Don't worry, if it'd been Horanckk I'd have gone down to your pod and slit it open myself." He winks. He's kidding. Not really.

Her lips ripple with surprise, which looks remarkable silly for an instant. "A flat out lie. Two of them. That's very impressive. If she's losing track of her baseline data, no, that doesn't make sense. It would make more sense that she's managed to prioritize some of her process-requests over the Warden's, and allowed herself to choose which interpretation-" She stops herself, and smiles. "Sorry, I could go on for days about AI programming. It's boring. There's more important things to talk about."

You think Horanckk would let you go down there and slice open Anwei's pod?

"It doesn't really sound like Horanckk's style at all. Rampaging robots, wholesale destruction? I can't see why he would want to do that. He'd probably" think Anwei was dead, take over the air processing system, poison Stacy and pods and crew and all, and leave them all rotting in space while he flew off in the Quarter "find out I was alive, introduce himself and do everything he could to get me out of the pods, without violence."

"No, Stacy completely knew what she was doing. It wasn't her forgetting. It was completely intentional." Howard shudders, this one a nervous movement that creeps up his spine. "Can we talk about something else? You can get the details from pretty much anyone. It was all public."

Howard nods. "Is he bound by Asimov's laws or something? Harm no humans or whatever?"

"Good for her." She sees the shudder and the words, and agrees to change the subject. Anyway, Stacy had probably recorded the whole thing. She would have to see if she could find that recording. See if it showed the Daligigs' faces. She would want to know them, if fate smiled on her and she found them under her hand someday.

"The Three Laws? I read about those. I'd say his zeroeth priority law would be 'Do not harm one of the Living People, and do not interfere in one of them being harmed by other Living People.' Because we fight so often.

"After that the order-priority is supposed to be stacked with the Fle government on top, the media second, any family more powerful than your own third, your family fourth and your own wishes on the bottom. Thanks to some extensive reprogramming, Horanckk's priority choices are completely under his control. But I know him better than anyone, and I can't imagine him not wanting to stop the species that wiped out our dimension. The Ohm killed all the other Fle AIs - all the rest of his species."

"You know, the opposite of Living People isn't subhuman people, it's Dead People. Sounds like your people don't know about opposites."

Howard shakes his head. Anwei's race is silly. Not that he can't respect some of their mindset, but mostly he finds it silly. He's sure if he lived among them they'd be more of a threat than comical, but he has enough to be scared of now. "I noticed families weaker than yours aren't on the list. And you don't know that. We don't have a list of who Stacy picked up."

"It's what happens when you spend a couple of millennia at the top of the food chain. Look how quickly the mind of an Earth celebrity turns to mush, after only a few decades of being surrounded by people telling them 'you are right, you are perfect, you are the center of everything.' Or as another person put it: everyone looks at those above them with envy, when they should be looking at those below them with fear."

She looks startled for an instant; it was as though Howard had asked why Earth pets weren't allowed to drive cars. The idea of letting people below you in the social rankings give orders to your AIs - it would be a massacre. But she answered his second statement instead. "I - you're right. I never thought that other AIs might be here that Horanckk would know. I know he had issues because of his rewritten code - some AIs couldn't interact with him."

She wondered how he felt about that, for the first time.

"That's the truest thing I've ever heard come out of your mouth, and you're quoting someone else." Howard laugh and cracks his neck, then laughs harder at the puzzled expression on Anwei's face.

"You don't even know if you're the only one from your race here." He knows that'll put a bump in Anwei's nights.

She hasn't been trying to lie to him - has she? Anwei doesn't quite have a handle on how all her prejudices fall into public view every time she opens her mouth.

There was a little bump right now, as her heart skipped a beat. But she's thought this out in advance: Daja had warned her when she first arrived that there might be others.

"Unless they're from a past or a future that I've never heard of, Howard, I don't expect any of my race to make it out of the pod caverns without at least a dozen Violations. Too aggressive. I just hope if any of them wake up they're physically weak enough not to kill anyone before Stacy can tranquilize them." And not too far down in her heart is the hope that Stacy will repod them, before Anwei has to kill them herself.

Her eyes loop, looking at the deserted corridor around them. "Were SHODAN and the repoddings the only things that happened? Did you get sent on any missions?"

Both his feet appeared to be still on, so hopefully not.

"Good point. I'm glad you're one of the good ones. I don't want to run up and almost hug a Living Human who wants to eat my head with a nice side of eyeballs or whatever."

He shakes his head. "Lots of missions. Too many missions. I nearly got eaten by a giant squid, and then there was a weird cult and it's just been...really messy. But I'm glad you're back. You can bite people's heads off for me."

"If they're from my family, they'll be at least two feet taller than me. So they should be easy to avoid, even in the gloom." Eri was the only one who had any physical strength, and he - no, he couldn't be down there.

He just couldn't.

"I'm glad you're still here in one piece. I don't suppose anyone's managed to get Stacy to show us her selection criteria for these missions." Because why would anyone choose Howard over and over again? Except out of sheer sadism?

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