trans_9 | Denial? Just a little bit.

Entry tags:

Denial? Just a little bit.

Who: Kaya, open to all.
Where: Sensoriums
Summary: Ed not remembering her is sort of the last straw, so she's getting her aggressions out.
Warnings: Um. Are there any? TBA, I guess?

But so much for that now. Right now Kaya, who had had a pretty bad last few months, found the last straw was bringing Ed back and having him not even recognizer her had been the last straw. Now she was just standing here, around a background of water and streams, and she was moving in a combination.

First there was her own bending. Smooth, flowing each movement into the other, legs supporting the base as arms and shoulders tensed and drew forward, calling the water up and around her, making waves into developed whips, turning that into solid substances and back again.

And then, when the Bene Gesserit came into play, that slowed but accurate action became quick, deliberate fast. Her body become a putty oin increments as she geared for offensive kicks and movement, pushing her body to the limits here. There was no turning back, no moment of reflection.

At this moment, Kaya wondered what would become of her training, if they would form a base of strength and bending even she didn't fully understand yet. She would put aside those feelings of helplessness, of pain she could not do more.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The air was humid from Kaya's art, but that probably wasn't why Anwei's eyes were wet.

"I'm so sorry. They'll be missed. I'm sorry I wasn't here to help when I might have been able to ... Were there many injuries during the attack by SHODAN?" There must have been.

The Sensorium was starting to warp again, this time to Kaya's home in the Northern water Tribe. It was a relaxing place for her, and she at least wanted the chance to center herself right now.

"The injuries weren't so bad. At least we helped each other out. The worst was when the sleeping pods were attacked. Some people were lost. Zhin, my companion, was killed at the hands of those robots."

She didn't really pay attention to the changing background; all her attention was on Kaya and her grief.

She hugged Kaya harder. "I hadn't realized - Maridian said the pods were attacked, but I didn't know who was lost. May Eight Wings fly them all to their final home." She dropped her forehead to Kaya's shoulder for an instant.

Kaya didn't say anything for a little bit. Had she done so, she would have just burst into tears all over again. She still missed them, including Zhin, and she'd hardly had time to mourn before having to treat injuries immediately afterward.

She met her forehead, sighing. "It seems like you can hardly take a breath before something new happens."

Anwei felt like she'd walked into a room and found everyone wounded by some ghost that had just left. She hadn't even been gone that long. What was going to happen if she was repodded for years instead of months - would there be anyone left who knew her? ~~Could you be any more self-centered, Anwei?~~

"I feel like we're dancing on ice, and it keeps melting under our feet and sends us tripping everywhere. Or falling through the ice... And someone else has control of the temperature." She was thinking of the Daligig.

"The more we learn about the Daligig, the harder it is to believe the actions we've been taking in all the time we've fought the Ohm couldn't have been avoided. I'd like to believe we were in the right, but if the Daligig is so bent on making us their personal task force, how much are they pulling the strings?"

She grit her teeth. "I don't think I need to tell you how I feel about what's gone on, or how the people on the ship are reacting to it all."

"And what makes it worse is that the Daligig are right here, available to answer questions or offer reassurances - and they're doing nothing of the sort. In fact they seem to be acting to escalate tensions, if anything. At this point I half-expect them to produce some superweapon that runs on frustration."

If only such a weapon existed, surely the crew's combined ire would be enough to send the Ohm back to where they came.

"You don't. And I've heard enough from Billy and Howard to know that your feelings are well-based. But it may be better to speak soft, or not at all." Her eyes dart around as though to indicate Stacy all around them. Which she was, of course. And listening, always listening.

"Stacy is supposed to be their superweapon, when you think about it. I heard how the punishment for Howard actually went down: Stacy somehow couldn't give it to them because they hadn't racked up enough violations. What they're hiding is anyone's guess, but I have a feeling they don't want us to learn any more than we have to."

She nodded, lowering her voice. "Oh, I'm starting to be very careful with what I say. But I do have two places where we actually can speak more freely. But that's something we can talk about later. But when taht happens, I trust you'll be there?"

"Yes, Stacy. Not us." Her mouth curls at the corners in something not at all a smile. "It makes you wonder how little they think of us, that they let us run loose. Do they really think there's nothing we can do that would make them change their plans?

"And according to Howard, Stacy was not as honest with the Daligig as she could have been." A roundabout way of saying she'd lied, but she had no idea what sort of audio keyword-monitoring might be on them right now.

"I'll be there, believe me. We all have to work together on this."

"If they want to maintain that conceit, they can," Kaya said. "But we are just as bad if we allow ourselves to continue life as it stands now. Things can stay dormant, or we can start to make plans to change the way we are."

She smiled. "No, she certainly wasn't being truthful, and that is another notch in our favor. Oh, they'll look for another way to stroke fear at us, but we'll just have to be ready then."

Kaya nodded. "I'm open to anything. We just have to get the numbers."

Of course the Daligig also had the option of making the entire crew dormant, in the pods. And then tinkering with them to suit themselves.

"The most important number to get on our side is one: Stacy. The fact that she's still in such disarray after this much time makes me think that the original Daligig neural team didn't leave any notes. Or maybe they were all pacifists, and refuse to work to repair Stacy now that she's a warship - of sorts."

"I know. I've often wondered if the Daligig just take for granted that they have her in their employ. If people would stop to think, it might very well be possible Stacy takes her mothering thing seriously after all. I still remember the reaction she had when she had to use the Punishment on Big Zero. If anything should indicate that Stacy could be salvaged away from the Daligig's grip, its the incident with Howard."

With a sniff: "They struck me as being the sort of sentients who think they are so much better than everyone else that nobody can ever reach their level, or dream of disobeying them."

Sort of like Anwei had been, until she was twenty-odd years old.

"I'm kicking myself for not joining up with Neuropathy when I was here before. If we only could get some idea of how the Daligig changed her, whether they made a code-copy or a true personality bifurcation, or," she sighed, "something I've never heard of, that I could be no help in fixing."

"I was worried it might be like this. If this is what's going to happen, I think we have to act soon. And pretty soon? They're going to have to be lured into thinking we aren't harmonious on the ship, and that they can divide us up easily."

Hardly a stretch, really.

"Do you really think you'd be able to do something about Stacy?"

"That depends if they even care about our harmony. Sometimes I feel like we're just here to keep the seats warm," Anwei grumbled. "So much talent here, so much intelligence - why aren't we being given information about the overall course of the war, potential allies, ways to detect universes at risk form the Ohm, and so forth? Are the Ohm really so powerful that they can scoop us all up as - as an afterthought?"

"I like to think I could help." Here comes the lecture, Kaya! "Based on what she said at the time of Big Zero's punishment, I think that the Daligig did a division of Stacy's mental architecture - probably with programming, hopefully not physically or chemically. One half Stacy, one half Warden, but sharing the same deep structures and personality-base. It may have been done as a way to control her as well: halving her powers of observation and action. Which makes me wonder just what the Daligig were afraid she might do..."

"In their eyes, were just the means to an end. They torture, they use the crews of previous inhabitants, and they have let them die. If this is what we're only good for, then we have to find a way to circumvent that somehow. WE have to find the answers someway. As for the Ohm, the biggest mystery is what part they play in this."

Kaya nodded. It seemed less of a lecture to her and more a good way to understand exactly what Stacy actually was. "It's possible. So maybe, once we reassured the Daligig that we are on their side, the next step is actually freeing Stacy. We need to stop looking at her as our enemy."

"When I think of the power and time they must have spent on converting this ship, on pulling all these people here, on finding their families and their ships; if they can do all that for people they don't consider more than expendable distractions," she hissed those last two words through her teeth, "then the power of the Ohm must be incalculably greater." A cynical look. "Or maybe it was the previous Daligig administration who spent the money, and this crew here are running down their efforts because they're from the opposition."

"We need to get Stacy to trust us, and we need to empower her to help us as much as she can. It's entirely possible that the same programming that split her from the Warden is set up so that if it's deactivated, all of her permissions and decision-making powers are stripped away and given to the Warden. And if we deactivate the Warden, we may find that she had the final controls on podpops, or the water supply. We don't know how long it took the Daligig to change her - even she may not know that; they may have taken those memories. It could take years to unravel her." A sudden gleam of smile. "But it could be worth it."

"Those are some pretty far fetched ideas, but you know, they at least give answers to the questions that we've been having since the truth about them has been revealed. The worst art of all of this is we can't even talk freely about this: until we know for sure what the next step is going to be, everything we're doing is going to be closely monitored."

Kaya nodded eagerly "It'd be one more step in the right direction, that's for sure. The Daligig obviously have no interest in keeping Stacy functioning at her best, just enough so they can keep her alive and their tool. I was with some of the crew in our initial attempt to recover Stacy when he was hijacked: I don't doubt this would be any easier. I only hope it takes less than 'years.' I don't think we have any."

Anwei drew her fingers in front of her mouth like bars. "When we can talk freely, please invite me to speak and share. I want to help."

Then she frowned. "I wonder if the Daligig even employ any AIs - I don't think we've ever heard of one that wasn't brought on board, have you? Editing her by hand may have taken years, but machines think hundreds, thousands of times faster than we do. If we can get Stacy to repair herself, get a proper cascade effect going, it would be like," she laughed and pointed to the water flowing around them, "like cold water where you introduce just one shard of ice, and it all transforms at once. Liquid to crystal."

And no changing back without fire.

Kaya nodded, putting her fingers to her lips a moment, winking.

"Who knows? What I know enough is that when it comes to Stacy, she's been through a lot, and if the Daligig had the power to change her she would be that way already. I figure that we aren't susceptible, we should find a way.

She nodded eagerly. "Can you do that?"

Of course, that assumed that the Daligig hadn't just haphazardly slapped Stacy into the shape they wanted, not bothering to put their full effort into it. Which was daunting. It made her wonder why the humans and their allies on board weren't so slap-susceptible.

"I think I could - oh, I wish Horanckk was here!" That loss stung her like a hot needle for an instant, and she clenched her fists and brought her feelings under control. "I watched him do similar surgeries, and I assisted as well, but I always had his help. It's not a task that one person can do," she warned. "It will take multiple people to scan Tracy and create a map of her code, write new code to shift her personality-structures, and enable and control that code running in her; and, we have to work on the premise that anyone could be repodded, at any time. Everyone involved has to know how to do everyone else's job, else it could collapse."

"Exactly. Heck, we were already starting to have talk of what we would do against the Daligig when more poddings happened. We may have many new people now, but they're still adjusting to being here to begin with. What on earth would we tell them, that there's a war against the Ohm that blew up their world, against the people who we're supposed to be fighting for, and Stacy may or may not be on our side? It's a lot to take in."

And what could someone who was NOT a technology savvy person do?

"I just wish I could help there."

"Get them settled first, I suppose...let them feel as safe as they can." She was thinking of the scared man and his Cube, in the Pod Caverns; what would it take to make him feel safe? "If we confront them right away with the idea that we can't trust anything, they may just refuse to participate in the ship's business at all."

Would Stacy drag a person physically onto a shuttle to participate in a mission they refused to do - or would it just be a Violation? She had the glum feeling that she would be finding out, one of these days.

"I suspect that everyone will be able to help. Operating on a sentient mind the size of Stacy's isn't something we can do by sneaking up behind her - she needs to be fully informed, if at all possible, every step of the way. At the minimum we need her feedback as to what each change is doing - how it affects her memories and her abilities; how it makes her feel. We need to convince her not to fight us. She'll need a friend. Lots of friends."

"I wouldn't be averse to that," Kaya said. "I've been on this ship a long time, and the truth is, I don't think people should blame Stacy for every little thing that happens. I think that the new people can get used to being on the ship so long as we don't have the older people using Stacy as a scapegoat again and again."

She sighed. "I never declined a mission I was told to do. The way I figure, its one step closer to the answers we need to find, so why would I turn it down? But having Stacy allow us to mess with her guts? how can we assure her that we mean nothing but the best for her?"

Anwei nods in agreement. "Especially if we then have to tell them that we are trying to improve and repair Stacy - if they think she's the enemy, they may want her to stay broken."

"Well, normally I would say that she can just read our minds and find out if we're sincere. But I think there's something - incomplete with the way her mind-reading is working. Of course I'm not a telepath, and maybe one of those could state it better, but either Stacy can only read our surface thoughts, or she can read deeper but she's forbidden to act on what she finds." A frown. "A telepathic prison Warden makes a lot of sense. Maybe the Warden can read everyone's mind, but can't act on what she finds; otherwise, how could anyone threaten the ship without being stopped?"

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