milliways_bar | (no subject)

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(no subject)

It's a good day.

SARAH's door appears, right next to her sign affixed by Ray Stantz:

The door to the right of this sign, and the rooms behind it, are part of SARAH, a self-aware house and machine intelligence. SARAH is fond of visitors, human and otherwise, and welcomes meeting new people. She is not paranormal or supernatural in any way that I can tell.

-Dr. Raymond Stantz, Ghostbusters

But more than that?

She's going to have residents. The new Sheriff!

"I really must tell Doctor Fargo I want to rearrange the living room," SARAH says to no one in particular, voice echoing up from the concrete stairway beyond her steel door.

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"Thank you," says Ray's voice. "There was a lot of upgrading and replacing involved, I can tell you."

Pause.

"Actually, I can probably directly tell you, if you have the capacity for streaming wireless data transfer."

"Of course."

Somewhere in SARAH's harddrive, space is earmarked, preparing, and:

"Whenever you're ready."

"Right," says Ray's voice, and a few moments later there's a protocol being negotiated- ah, there we go. Ecto's upgrade and maintenance history, including information on the molecular bonded shell system that protects the car's body- not the formula or how to make it, but its existence and tensile strength and resistance to attack.

Oh, and very recently, quite a lot of work done with parts of unknown origin, including the installation of a pair of retractable arms.

It certainly is a lot to process.

"Many of the more recent files are corrupted, or at least not in a format I can understand. Mostly the files are about technical modifications.

"How much have you had changed, recently? Arms, what else?"

"Oh- that would be the Autobot files," says Ray's voice. "Those files come from an autonomous robotic lifeform named Ratchet, who hails from the planet Cybertron. I wouldn't expect his information packets to be compatible with Terran systems without some serious translation time. When he did the inital system scan he was talking about making sure Ecto would be able to reach full potential once she had the body back. I'm guessing he probably upgraded the fuel system and threw in some redundancies while he was working on adding the arms. "

"You can't sense what this Ratchet changed?"

That's very unnerving, SARAH would guess. Like people having surgery without knowing what got sliced and diced.

"I can sense it, but I don't know what it's for, exactly," corrects the hearse. "There's been performance improvements across the board since, but I can't exactly tell what some of the extra circuitry is, beyond much more detailed and advanced monitoring systems that hook up to a few extra processors. Some of them are very definitely related to the arms, though. This whole subsystem-"

Another data transmission, this one containing a partial translation of one of the Autobot files.

"-looks to me like it's the design specs for all of the necessary sensors and feedback units to keep the arms from smashing things or picking things up wrong. It's essentially a set of reflexes and instinctive limiters. There's similar systems in place for several other parts of the vehicle."

"Makes sense to me."

A little.

"Are you going to be able to return to your original state?"

"The transfer wasn't accomplished by technological means, but paranormal ones," says Ray's voice. "All we have to do is find a similar paranormal procedure to undo what was done, and I'll have my original body back, and Ecto will be in this one again. The physical alterations shouldn't make a difference."

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