Bot in the Library

[awkwardbot]

MISSION: Scout Milliways for Intelligence and Possible Threats

Tactical Objectives

1. Explore the bar proper.
   • Figure out whether the fish in the fireplace are real or holograms
   • Determine the interval at which the Window resets
   • Discover the resources available through the Bar's feed (media?)
2. Explore the other indoor facilities.
   
   • Find the location of the Security Office
   • Determine whether the Infirmary has a MedSystem
   • Library
3. Explore the outdoor area.
   
   • Establish location and configuration of training grounds
   • Establish location and configuration of shooting range
   • Ascertain perimeters of potentially dangerous areas (forest, labyrinth)

Operational Guidance

• Remember to take appropriate rest periods and bathroom breaks to simulate human behavior
• Obtain camera drones for outdoor reconnaissance
• Talk with people who have been here for a long time for additional intel

I had been engaged in my scouting mission for about a cycle, including a rest period and bathroom breaks. During my rest period, I 
watched some of the media I'd downloaded from the Bar's feed. Star Trek was probably something ART would like.

I had achieved two out of three of my Tactical Objectives, with the third being indefinitely delayed since I had discovered the library and needed to explore it thoroughly before moving on. I had read a lot of books over the feed, but I had never actually held a physical book before and read words off a page.

Oh, and I'd never been in a place with that many books before. It turns out when you put that many books together, they actually have a smell, which was an interesting discovery.


[OOC: Please read character bio in full before interacting with Murderbot! Thank you.]

[Tinytag: Murderbot]
[Tinytag: Fives]

Comments

[5ame_heart]

In the library they'll find Fives, who didn't get a booklet, and therefore didn't find out about the library until his conversation with Bastion. He came up here now to look for the device with the language learning game, hoping it will help him with his English studies, but as soon as he comes in, he stops short.

He's never even encountered a book before.

"Wil you look at this place?"

[awkwardbot]

I'm not usually good at small talk, but the human and I seemed to be thinking the same way. "I've never seen this many books in one place outside of a media serial or a documentary," I said.

The human seemed to be male, but I was more confident that they were either a soldier or a security professional - that haircut is the kind you have when you spend a lot of your time wearing the kind of helmet that comes with a set of armor.

[5ame_heart]

The bodysuit he's wearing is also very functional - designed to go under the rest of his armor. Fives just doesn't have any other clothes, so it's either armor or this.

He offers an awkward grin at the person addressing him, relieved at least that this so far isn't a conversation about how little life experience Fives has, and more about similarities.

"I've never seen real printed-on-paper book in my life. I don't think there is this much paper in the galaxy."

He picks one off the nearest shelf at random - it has to be because he can't read the spine - and weighs it in his hands. "Heavier then I'd expect."

[awkwardbot]

The book was called Space Atlas: Mapping the Universe and Beyond. It seemed like it would be hard to fit everything about known space in a single book, even one that big.

"I think once you get a few hundred pages together, it adds up," I said. "I've seen books on some planets. Not a lot."

Dr. Mensah had a small collection of books at her family farm on Preservation. They were heirlooms, or decoration, or both, so I'd never touched them.

"But I spend a lot of time on ships or stations, where most people can't afford the space for physical books."

[5ame_heart]

It's awkward to open and hold as well, somehow needing to be held in both hands, but also requiring another hand to manipualte the pages? Fives gives it a go, and decides he's not reallt a fan. But the pictures really are interesting, and mayeb he can ask Bar to update his datapad with some of the info.

He shuts the book after a few moments' examinatiion.

"Maybe they've got some books in the libraries on Coruscant, but I have a hard time picturing it."

After a second's attempt, he discovers that putting a book back on a shelf is more complicated than taking it off for someone not used to it, and leaves it flat on a nearby table.

"You a traveller, then?"

[awkwardbot]

"I'm an independent security consultant. I move around a lot for different contracts."

Meanwhile I was trying to look up 'Coruscant' in my internal database under multiple spellings and coming up empty.

[5ame_heart]

"So a bounty hunter, then?" Fives replies wryly. It's not that usual for people to be so coy about it in his experience, but still that's a limited experience in which the bounty hunters he encountered were employed to train him so didn't have much call for coyness.

"I'm a soldier in the Clone Army. Name's Fives."

[awkwardbot]

"My name's Rin. My gender is indeterminate and I use they/them pronouns."

(I wondered if I would ever get used to saying that instead of just broadcasting it on my feed.)

"I don't usually do that kind of work." There are security contractors who specialize in that, but as a SecUnit owned by a bond company I had never done that kind of thing. Actually I'd never done that kind of thing, period. "Mostly I just take contracts that are too small or specialized for security bond companies."

Yeah, that sounded like my work might not be strictly legal. But every kind of work in the Corporation Rim that wasn't associated with one of the big companies was kind of in a legal twilight anyway.

"What's the Clone Army?"

[5ame_heart]

"Plenty of Bounty Hunters in my galaxy take on a variety of contracts," Fives says, the implication being that the term covers a multitude of mercenary work, beyond just tracking down targets for the Guild. And he uses an example in the answer to the direct question.

"The army of the Grand Republic," he says. "It's only called that because it consists of thousands of clones," and he punctuates this by tapping his thumb into the centre of his chest, where the Grand Republic logo sits, black on black.

"We were trained by bounty hunters back in the facility we were birthed in."

It's still so weird to explain this to everyone he meets, but he's not awkward about it.

[awkwardbot]

The company never gave us person-to-person training, just hard-coded neural implants and crappy education modules.

"This might sound like a weird question but...do you have any implants? Like something to give you an internal knowledge base?"

Or a governor module?

[5ame_heart]

Oh yes

"Like a droid?" Fives shakes his head. "Nah, not like that. We've got some bioengineering to make it easiier to pick stuff up, pre-established language centres, that kind of thing, and accelerated growth. But it's all organic.

"Why, do you?"

[awkwardbot]

Oh, I have a shit-ton of them. "I have augmentations," I said. "Some of the usual stuff for working with the feed, but I also had to get some of my parts replaced."

Which was true, except it's not really augmentation if you're built with it to begin with.

"Where I come from we have constructs that are built with both synthetic parts and cloned tissue. That's why I was asking."

Fives seemed to be transgenic (and not particularly bothered about it), but not a construct.

[5ame_heart]

"Nah," Fives says.

"I mean, sometimes people need to get prosthetics - eyes, limbs, that kind of thing, but droids are something else. We do just fine with flesh and blood."

He grins a soldier's grin when talking smack about the opposite side. "And you can't beat an organic brain, you know?"

[ostro_goth]

In the library, there's a dark-haired man with a long purple cloak, looking through the card catalogue.

[awkwardbot]

Part of my operational guidance was to talk to humans who knew their way around Milliways. This person looked promising.

(I did have to take a breath and a few seconds before starting a conversation: I've gotten better at talking to humans, but it's still awkward. Especially when they don't have feeds.)

"Excuse me," I asked, because that seemed like the right way to start off. "Is that what you used to find books in the library?"

[ostro_goth]

"That, or a computer," the man says. "I prefer the cards that one may touch; I am from old times, long before any electricity."

[awkwardbot]

Yeah, this person had probably been in Milliways for a long time, otherwise it probably wouldn't occur to them to say a thing like that. "So how do you use a card catalog to find a book?"

[ostro_goth]

"I am not a librarian but a fighter, a skald, and a smith," the man prefaces his explanation, "but it will depend on the way you are looking for a book. Are you looking for a book the author or title you know? Then here they are, listed by alphabet, one card per title, sorted both ways, telling you in which shelf you may find it. Or are you looking for books on a certain subject?"

[awkwardbot]

"A subject, I think. I'm trying to learn about something called qi." The Bar either didn't have a knowledge base or, well, the library was the knowledge base.

[ostro_goth]

"Then you need the subject catalogue," the man says. "It is that rather larger cabinet over her. In it, you find many subjects by alphabet; there are little riders in the drawers that name the subjects one may find books upon, and then it is as it were -- the card tells you about the book and where to find it. However, as there are many subjects unter the heavens of all the myriad worlds, and books often speak of many things between their covers, so it is futile to find every book on every subject there is in this large but limited cabinet. Instead, one would rely upon the facts that the books talk to and of each other: - find one or two books on your subject, read them, and find what other books they mention. Also, the books are ranged by subject upon the shelves; if you find one book on what you wish to read about, other books nearby nay be helpful, also."

[awkwardbot]

So if the library was a database, the card catalog was a crude search index. Great.

I had time, though, to work my way through the card catalog and the books. And I could store references to other work in memory for later.

"Thank you," I said. "I'm used to working with a feed, so this is all new to me."

[ostro_goth]

"A feed?" Teja says. "That would be, upon a computator, knowledge pushed into a place that you will look at, that you have asked before that you wish to see?"

Pause.

"A feed would not help with new things that you know nothing of. You need a query for that."

[awkwardbot]

"That's what it used to mean, I think," I said. "But it's not what it means now. It's just...people have feeds, and some organizations or shops have feeds, and people can use their feeds to send information to each other or look up information they want."

There was probably a documentary somewhere on how humans and augmented humans (and bots and constructs) had ended up calling all these different functions 'the feed.' If I was going to spend a lot of time around here, I might want to look it up.

[ostro_goth]

"A feed in your world would be what some future worlds that I know, like the one my Pyrrha hails from, would call internet access?" Teja says.

[awkwardbot]

"Um," I said. "I would have to read up on what an 'internet' is."