milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

It is a sad state of affairs when you have to come to Milliways to get some peace and quiet to work, but here's Susannah Toren with her laptop. Her brother-in-law is visiting Maine for the first time in a couple of months and Guitar Hero on the Wii is making the old farmhouse sound like the scene of a riot.

And ~~now that she is done ruining people's shit on the drums~~ she is far too busy and mature at her age to put up with that kind of nonsense. She has an action plan to finish writing and a bunch of resumes to go through. She's going to be spending the summer consulting with the Atticus Circle, and they offered to provide her with a personal assistant, but hers will need... special qualities.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There's a sound not unlike the THX Sound played in reverse, and a set of doors open in one wall; the elevator to the garage, for some reason, has always been well concealed. There had been a full-sized 2009 Camaro Concept sitting in the elevator just before the sound started. It's now... well, at 1/5 or so its normal size it would probably not be entirely out of place at a bumper car ride or something of that nature.

It rolls forward, engine purring quietly, and then transforms up into a yellow-and-chrome robot perhaps five feet tall at the very most.

Susannah does not know any of the Autobots by sight, and is more tactful than to assume any robots she sees is one, but Bumblebee will find a note addressed to the Autobots at the bar, including her description, and asking for more information on the topic of data sprites.

Susannah is generally aware of his entrance, because he's a robot and because... well, he's a robot. Prejudice is an ugly thing, but her experience with AI is decidedly mixed.

Ironhide tends to order beer when he's here, and Optimus usually gets some form of scotch, as the alcohol burns up in their fuel chambers. Bumblebee isn't looking for those particular chemical by-products tonight, which is why he gets a small glowing blue cube instead; it's something of a traditional dispenser system for energon. It comes with the note, of course, so after a moment he turns to look for the person described.

There's a brief twitter not unlike a Star Trek communicator chirping (okay, exactly like- Bee has a lot of recorded sound files), and he approaches the woman in the motorized wheelchair with one hand raised.

She maintains the polite fiction that she isn't as aware of her surroundings as she is of her laptop by taking a few seconds before reacting; it's habit. You can creep people out like that, outside of Milliways.

"Good evening. I'm Susannah Toren?"

Not that she's dubious about it, but more is that who you're looking for?

Bumblebee nods and holds up the note. A speaker plays the voice of Kirk Franklin (http://www.kirkfranklin.com/):

"Don't'cha know that
I've been looking for you..."

"Well, go ahead and have a seat," she says, not--or not really--missing a beat.

"It's just what it says. I saw someone had made an addition to a note someone posted about video games, and it caught my eye."

And something else; a flicker of memory.

(I'm not a devil. I'm a sprite.)

Bumblebee nods and sits down at the nearest available chair. He only weighs two hundred or so pounds in this form, so it's not as if the furniture is in any danger. He thinks a moment; he could probably dredge up enough quote snippets to get by with this conversation, but it takes forever to find the right ones in a database as large as his... well, no time like the present to test the holoprojector Alyx helped him build. A speech balloon worthy of any comic appears directly over his head. It reads:

"I've found that few here care much about video games except the sprites. Does someone need a system checked?"

She finds that about ten times more interesting than the quoting, but the trouble with Susannah is that she learned to guard her reactions from Roland fucking Deschain.

She's a fast reader, too.

Without missing a beat: "I'd like to be on the safe side," she affirms. She moves aside a file folder and takes a disc case out from underneath. "I brought this with me this time; just haven't been up to the bar yet tonight. Is it enough, or do you need the whole system?"

She'd rather not trouble Eddie about this, unless it becomes a thing.

The balloon winks out and is replaced by another:

"It should be all right. I would recognize the pattern of digital life if I scanned it."

He holds out a hand for the disc. This is a function he's used to, thanks to Milliways.

She passes it over. It's one they never got much use out of. "What's the connection between the data sprites and your... Autobots?" she asks. "I'm not actually sure what a data sprite is, to be honest."

The disc visibly shrinks as Bumblebee brings it up to a slot on his chest, not that it's easy to tell where slots are as opposed to seams in different parts of armor. When the disc is inside, another speech balloon replaces the one before.

"The data sprites are digital intelligences. Sentient, self-replicating code. They exist outside of computers here, but in their native world they inhabit even simple computers and perform the machines' functions."

He'll wait until she's read the balloon to erase it and go on to the next one.

"Fornit some fornus," she mutters under her breath.

She notes the shrinking, also, but interruptions must be especially irritating with his... disability? and instead she nods when she's finished reading. "All right."

Bumblebee nods and pops up the next balloon.

"Their structure is very like that of our own code. A human-built machine in another universe developed the program that lets us seek them out, because she wanted to know if she was alone. She gave us the code so that we could find any other sprites that might be out there. We do not have them in our world."

He ejects the disc into his hand; it resumes its normal size.

"You do not have them in yours, either."

"Thank you."

She takes the disc back, although she has no intention of taking it back to her world. She's thinking. "These sprites, though--they must have a... metaphysical component, isn't that so? If they can have whole personalities on even primitive electronic equipment."

"Our Wii isn't powerful enough to simulate a reasonable enemy AI for a video game, let alone anything you could call a person."

She's in way over her head, here, but she's trying to keep up. "It's as if you were saying that a... squirrel's brain might contain not just one human intelligence, but dozens of them. A whole civilization."

Bumblebee nods.

"The sprites say they take on roles of antagonists when a game is played, and have to defeat the player to avoid being turned into mindless bits of code. They are much too sophisticated to be data alone. Their structure is more like my people's Sparks than anything else- and a Spark is our life and our soul."

That's where she was leading.

"I wondered, when you said that they were like you."

"Is it rude if I ask you more about that? I'm interested."

"Ask away. I will answer as best I can."

"To begin with--how much like the sprites are you? I guess what I'm thinking of is, are you more advanced than your hardware is capable of as well, or it more of a mind-body duality issue? If you're familiar with that terminology."

"What I mean is that humans have intelligence proportional to their biology, but they also have a metaphysical component. A soul, as you say." She says with the absolute confidence of someone who was married to a disembodied soul for several years.

"Whereas an animal that's as intelligent as a human has either been altered or is inhabited, or--" She pauses.

"Oh good God." For a moment her poise abandons her, and she looks gobsmacked.

"I- hm?"

Bumblebee had started to form his sentence, but clearly something just overrode Susannah's initial question.

"It's just that I realized," she says. "I know of an exactly parallel case to the data sprites, but in human biology. That clarifies things quite a bit."

Not possession, exactly, but a resonance; a worlds within world. Different levels of the Tower, and metaphors come to life.

"I'm sorry, go on."

"Very well."

Bumblebee thinks for a moment.

"Our processors and hardware affect our thoughts and shape our intelligence. Our programming affects what we are likely to do. We are not completely bound by our programming, though. Unless very specialized, very dangerous code is used, we can choose to act or think counter to our programming. There is that."

He waits for her to read the balloon before putting up another one.

"But we are not brought to life simply by bringing a power plant online in a new protoform. Each of us was incepted by a part of the power of an ancient device, the Allspark. When we die, our individual sparks return to that beginning, and in time become part of all the others."

The main implication she caught there was the past tense.

"So very like a human being, or another thinking biological creature," she says. And for all she knows, like the robots and machines of Roland's world. Those ancient, pathetic creatures were certainly more than simple mechanisms. They were capable of insanity, and spite; duplicity and kindness.

"May I ask who built you? Or the Allspark?" He's so clearly a made thing. And he resembles the cars of her own world and time, although that's fairly meaningless--Blaine was a train, after all. But she wonders if it's a blasphemous question to ask at all.

"By the generation of Cybertronians before me," says the next speech balloon. "Every one of us was built by other Cybertronians and incepted in the Hall of the Allspark back to the original thirteen. My faith says that the Allspark put forth its power when it landed on a barren rock in space, called thirteen mechs into existence, and gave them life. We do not know who built the Allspark, but many of us believe it was the physical form of a being called Primus- the embodiment of life and creation."

He'll keep his balloons shorter after this if he can, but this one ws kind of important.

can-ah, can-tah, annah oriza.

It might be mythology, by a race of machines who have forgotten the organic life that made them. But then again--

Who built the Tower? Not re-built it into a doomed machine, as the Great Old Ones did, but laid those stones, in the dawn of time? If Oriza breathed life into all that lived in Mid-World, who was her father?

"We call him Gan," she says, thoughtful. "You've certainly given me a lot to think about, Mister--?"

"Bumblebee."

There's a pause, and another line appears in the balloon.

"We don't have them on Cybertron. My Cybertronian name means 'small, hard-working, steady worker'. It's more or less the same thing."

"The colors being a coincidence?"

It's a lighter question.

"I was mostly yellow on Cybertron," says Bumblebee, "but the stripes came from Earth. My people disguise ourselves as local machines, if we want to move around without being detected. I happened to scan a yellow Camaro with black stripes."

"What brought you to Earth?"

The idea of alien intelligences moving around Earth in disguise is pretty alarming; once again, she manages to keep that alarm under wraps.

Bumblebee looks down a moment, optics dimming a little.

"My people," the speech balloon says, "have been ruled by co-rulers since the time of the Firstforged. There has always been a Prime, and there has always been a Lord. The greatest of these were Optimus Prime and Lord High Protector Megatron."

A new balloon.

"The Prime allocates, the Lord protects. But there were no wars, and no enemies left, and no challenges, and Lord Megatron had nothing to protect against. He grew idle and dissatisfied, and in time decided that he did not want to share power any more. Any power. Ever. He wanted rulership of Cybertron, mastery of the Allspark, and all possible power over life and death."

A new balloon.

"It led to war. And the only way to stop him from total victory was to send the Allspark away, firing it into space before he could reach it. We tracked it, as did he; in the end it had landed on Earth. That was why we came."

It sounds like a fairy tale. The act of reading it, rather than hearing, cements that feeling.

It sounds more than a little familiar.

"Did you find it?" she asks.

Bumblebee nods. His speech balloon says:

"The humans who found it built Hoover Dam to hide it. And to hide their other find- Lord Megatron, who had gone into stasis lock when he hit Earth's atmosphere thousands of years earlier. They took him for study."

A pause.

"I did say the advanced tech of our Earth was derived from a single captured Cybertronian."

Oh, that kind of thing never ends well. She nods when she reaches the end of the speech bubble, and waits for the other shoe to drop.

"When his lieutenant freed him," Bumblebee's next bubble says, "he led his followers against us, to reclaim the Allspark. It was our human ally, my friend Sam, who used all the Allspark's power to kill him for a time. What remains of that power is in the boy now. We stay on Earth to protect him, and to help his species protect themselves and their planet."

And because they have nowhere else to go any more, but... yeah.

Susannah connects a few dots for herself, both within his story and between it and other stories she knows; the Calvins no doubt will be able to do more with it, but she can see enough to know what to say next, which is:

"So it was lost. I'm sorry."

She didn't miss the past tense, back there, when he talked about the new generations.

Bumblebee nods.

"Optimus was planning to destroy the Allspark and himself with it rather than let Megatron control it for his ends. We knew this was coming."

"But thank you."

"You've been very gracious, answering all these questions," she says. "Thank you for your help."

"I serve as something like an ambassador at home," Bumblebee's bubble says. "Your questions are much easier than those of the Robotics Society of Japan. And you are much easier to deal with than some of my own people. So you are welcome."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only