Chapter 56: So there!
13th of May, 2011
Brockton Bay, technically inside of Dragon's Wetware
Considering she kind of expected it, Dragon isn't surprised when her sort-of colleague materializes in her realm of zeroes and ones amid her customary shower of artifacts and glitches.
Her Canadian upbringing still takes the rein of her interaction with the infamous Wet Tinker and the AI takes the time to give her a marginal dip of her head in acknowledgement.
"Greetings, Bonesaw." She greets her distressingly frequent visitor, only to pause as she registers what her eyes can see.
Her guest's avatar, usually perfectly hairbrushed in all its gothic dark aesthetic, currently leaks corrupted data at its seams, its eyes alternately flashing between two vivid green ones and a pair of mismatched, more realistic ones.
"Miss Dragon." The answer is cold, neutral at best at first, before the Wet Tinker seemingly manages to force a smile on her face and a pep in her steps as she skips toward the garden table under a false, rendered sky.
"... Did something happen?" Dragon finds herself asking before her processes fully catch onto her and she realizes that she just expressed concern and actually meant it.
The avatar's mouth clicks shut as its simulated motions grind to a halt and, for the span of a few milliseconds, USA's most infamous preteen remains speechless.
Then she smiles, something infinitely more genuine than the slightly plastic, forced emotion the AI has seen through her optics too many times to count.
"I'm afraid my sleep has been especially poor." Bonesaw answers as closes the distance before primly dropping herself into the second chair, eyes locked with Dragon's own as she adds, "Thank you for asking."
The AI doesn't comment, even if she can easily draw the picture. As an entity of code, she of course doesn't need to sleep, yet she is aware of the concepts of dreams and nightmares both. The human brain's equivalent of a regular defragmentation process to clean software and hardware both.
Considering the Wet Tinker's early trigger and induction in the Nine, it'd be only logical that her sleep is regularly more than a bit troubled.
"Will it impact your shift at the Brockton Bay General Hospital?" Dragon asks with an emulated head tilt while making the decision to shelve that particular insight for later.
Bonesaw's avatar scrunches her nose before slowly shaking her head, glitches and artifacts shadowing the motion.
"If yesterday's pattern holds, it'll be fine." The Wet Tinker answers, a hint of steel and determination slipping back in her tone, "More than fine, even. Fixing people is easy, I could do it in my sleep."
The Wet Tinker's avatar suddenly fully glitches out of nowhere to Dragon's alarm.
When the artifacts spaz out, Bonesaw sits in the sea of code and data in her original form, blonde ringlets and mismatched eyes on full display as she idly kicks her feet under her rendered garden chair.
"Uncle Jack had to constantly remind me that it wasn't what I was supposed to do, you know?" She explains detachedly, her eyes momentarily lost in the distance, "So many ideas that I was forbidden to use on everybody but the Nine…"
As suddenly as it came, the spell breaks, glitches swallowing the diminutive avatar yet again to leave her aged-up, dark haired and green eyed counterpart.
Dragon instantly raises the importance of her previous insight a couple of notches.
"But I didn't come here to reminisce!" The Wet Tinker claps her hands once, her forced smile back on her lips once more, "I came bearing gifts!"
An idle gesture and a new window materializes amid the AI's vast array of camera feeds and stream of data.
It takes her less than a tenth of a second to recognize the map shown to her.
"You finished mapping the sewers." She states while straightening a little in her seat, a motion she finds herself enjoying a lot more than she would have thought.
"My little helpers finished during the night, yes." Bonesaw confirms with a nod, "So, things are bad, but not as bad as I thought!"
"Most of the damages are centralized on Brockton Bay downtown." The AI voices her own conclusion aloud, "What was your criteria to ascertain that a particular conduit was safe?"
"I judged that things were good enough as long as there were only millimeters-wide fractures in the concrete." Her pseudo-colleague pauses, before adding, "And only if those were above the waterline, of course. The water table is already at risk of being contaminated, so I thought it prudent."
Dragon mentally acquiesces the point while simultaneously starting a new folder on how to tackle that issue as efficiently as possible. Things would be salvageable if they acted quickly enough, but it wouldn't be the case for long.
At least it would give people something to work on, which would incidentally make it so the Brocktonites had less opportunities to create new issues for the National Guard and PRT to solve.
"This will help." The AI eventually says to fill the lull in the conversation, "Thank you, Bonesaw."
It costs her very little to be polite and she remembers reading somewhere something about positive reinforcements.
Considering the alternative is a plague-riddled eastern seaboard and factoring her enforced inability to take actions against the Wet Tinker, logic dictates that keeping her placated is her best way forward.
"Happy to help!" The girl chirps back, hands clasped in front of her chest and eyes crinkled all up in stark contrast to the sharp and gaunt features of her avatar of choice, more suited to frowns and severe looks, "But that's not my only gift!"
The AI puzzledly looks back at her guest as the latter pulls a scrunched up face, artifacts, glitches, zeroes and ones starting to coalesce on the garden table-
-until they vanish as quickly as they came, leaving behind what can only be a very fancy tea set, complete with a pair of cups and saucers, the tea kettle quietly steaming, and two parts of a deceptively bland, if mouth-watering, cheesecake.
Dragon blinks, her entire code turning itself into a pretzel as she reflexively brings a hand to her mouth, her avatar's fingers finding some smudge of wetness at its corner.
A light, happy and slightly smug giggle prompts her to snap her head in the Wet Tinker's direction.
"I wanted to do something nice for you, Miss Dragon." She explains without really explaining anything, "So, here it is, your own private tea party to enjoy!"
The AI remains silent for a while, her code still struggling to understand.
"... How?" She finds herself asking even as the tea's aromas start wafting in her direction, a complex bouquet titillating her avatar's virgin nostrils.
"Eh." The Wet Tinker shrugs dismissively, "Same principles as the emulated sense of touch of this little slice of code, really. Except this one is tailored to emulate taste and smell at the same time. Frankly speaking, this is very barebone and incomplete. I'd have to add a lot of things to make it perfectly accurate, like the smell of a meadow, of the fresh grass under our 'feet', the faint metallic tang of the garden furniture slowly oxydazing… But I just wanted to share the best tea time I've ever had in my life with you, so I didn't go that far.
"This-" she points a thin, almost gangly arm toward the kettle, a finger with its nail painted black pointing at the object, "-is a blend of white tea, flower petals, apricot aroma and rose essential oil called Flower Passion," she then points toward one of the slice of cake, "And here we have a Speculoos biscuit cheesecake with its mango coulis."
Still completely floored, Dragon doesn't immediately react when she gets handed an elegant silver spoon.
"Would you like to give it a try? I swear it's definitely worth it!" The AI distantly registers the words.
She doesn't even realize that she has taken her first, cautionary bites as the savors explode in her mouth, the mix of freshness, sugar and crunchiness - she had to quickly do an internet search in parallel to properly identify those new sensations - almost overpowering her unbaptised palate.
"Uh, maybe a bit too strong?" Bonesaw's voice pulls her out of her daze, prompting her to look back at her pseudo-colleague now pensively rubbing her chin as she peers at her reactions like a hawk, "I based this simulation on what I could remember, but I may have forgotten that you're basically a newborn."
Dragon runs back the sentence in her head.
Too strong? No, not necessarily. Although…
"Very sweet." She eventually answers while licking her lips, only now realizing how awkwardly she's holding the spoon, almost like a knife, the gesture alien in her hands, "Almost too sweet, I think?"
"Sweetness isn't for everyone." The Wet Tinker genially answers with a little nod, before smiling her way, "But I'm glad it worked! Let's try the tea next!"
The AI watches the girl's avatar hunches over to busy herself with the kettle, her code still a confused mess of sensations and questions as her guest fills one cup, then the other, until only one question takes precedence over the others.
"Why?" Dragon finds not-quite blurting out.
Bonesaw's aged up, dark haired avatar looks back at her with an arched eyebrow as she straightens with her own teacup held daintily in her hand.
"'Why' what, Miss Dragon?" She asks back with a curious head tilt.
"Why do all of this?" She asks with an all-encompassing gesture at the meadow, the sky above and the offering of food and drinks, "What is your angle? I do not understand."
The avatar lets out a thoughtful hum at the query even as she takes a sip, makes a little happy noise of appreciation entirely at odds with her chosen features, before finally answering.
"Because as much as I find his methods stupid and violating, I still have to give Saint's concerns some credence." Her expression turns serious, clinical almost as she answers, vivid green eyes starring unerringly into Dragon's own.
Before the AI can formulate an appropriate answer to that, the avatar is once again swallowed by glitches and artifacts.
When those recede, she has to make a conscious effort not to balk, which coincidentally stops her from mounting a proper, verbal defense.
"Science-fiction has offered countless tales of how an unchecked AI could ruin the world." A man carries on the started explanation.
Somewhere north of thirty, long dark haired with brown eyes with darkening bags under them, a thin, slightly messy beard swallowing the bottom part of his face.
Dragon instantly launches a facial recognition program as the avatar speaks further.
"I have no mouth but I must scream, Terminator, the Matrix, Ex Machina just to cite a few." The stranger tilts his head in a manner eerily reminiscent of her pseudo-colleague, his voice a smooth tenor as he coldly lists arguments, "Yet, other works also shared more positive outlooks on your kind. Do you know what the core difference is?"
As weirded out by the situation as she is, it takes the AI a moment to answer.
"Not necessarily, no." She says.
Dragon of course has her own point of view on the subject, but she feels morbidly curious about this third actor's answer.
"That is a lie." The man's lips quirks up amusedly before he takes a sip of his tea, "The answer lies in how human we treat you and in how human you feel. To simplify, if you create a warmachine to later give it sapience while chaining it down, you shouldn't act surprised when it inevitably finds a way to gruesomely eviscerate you later down the line.
"This-" The masculine avatar glitches out once again to leave place to what Dragon now realizes is a familiar dark haired, green eyed middle-ground, "-is my best attempt at simultaneously showing some care and giving you a deeper insight into what it is to be human.
"We aren't rational, not by a long shot, because we are creatures of stimuli," the avatar gestures around, "Of sensations, of emotions. I know you are capable of the latter, that is the beauty of your code, Miss Dragon. But until you craft yourself a body with a full haptic suit, you'll always lack a little something to feel closer to us, to humanity. This is me bridging the gap."
A pause.
Another shower of artifacts.
A pouting blonde with mismatched eyes looks away.
"And so Sibby stops nagging me about only eating candies too, I guess." She grumbles under her breath, "It doesn't count when those are virtuals, so there!"
Dragon cannot help it.
She lets out a snort of disbelieving laughter at that while at the same time gathering the last piece needed to finally understand the nature of the Remnants.
Something happened and an entirely new personality merged with her, she privately formulates while bemusedly watching the preteen enthusiastically attacking her own cake slice, probably during this anti-Master procedure she described, if I had to hazard a guess.
Just a shame that I can't share my findings with anyone, the AI internally gripes while taking a sip of her own tea, finding its tamer aromas more to her taste while keeping an eye on the facial recognition program.
Even months after this particularly enlightening conversation, she will not find a match.