milliways_bar | (no subject)

"Hi Ray. You look shattered."

Guppy appears beside him, with tea.

"Huh? Oh... morning, Guppy." Ray smiles, reaching for his coffee. "Yeah, I guess so. Last night lasted a while, for me. I'll be okay though. How about you?"

"I'm fine. It's quite quiet in Holby. I think everyone's gone abroad to escape the rain."

[ooc: Can Ray please tell him about Naraht at some point? He needs to find out before he can visit.]

"Mucky weather, huh?" Ray shakes his head sympathetically. "That stinks... Oh, hey, question. D'you know my friend Naraht? The Horta?"

"It's near Wales, so it's a very wet place. I'm sort of used to it really."
He sips his tea.
"Yeah, I know him quite well. I saw him yesterday. Interesting guy isn't he?"

"You could say that, yeah. He's currently sick. As a dog. He picked up some silicon-lifeforms-only microbe from my world faster than you could say 'Legionnaire's disease' and he's down in one of the cells because they're easier to customize for his needs than his room upstairs."

Guppy looks alarmed. "Oh dear. He said he was hungover but I didn't realise he was that bad. Is there anyone here who knows how to treat him?"

He's not sure where he'd start.

Ray rubs at his face. "Unfortunately, I don't know. Silicon-lifeform illnesses are extremely rare. We're trying to find either the doctor who fixed my hands or one of the magical healers, since Horta medicine hasn't generally been a problem before this. I don't even think they have medical texts on his species."

"I don't know where I would start to be honest, but I'll go and see him and see if I can help. Does he know what's wrong with him?"

"Best he can do is list off symptoms, unfortunately," Ray says. "They mostly map out to the same things as in human influenza, except that his body temperature's going down instead of up."

Guppy thinks for a moment, before reaching for his notebook and jotting this down for later reference.

"Ray, you know how there are people here that are like... from films back home? Does that mean that things that come up in sci-fi movies could actually work here?"

There's a strange look on Ray's face for a moment, before he smiles. "Guppy? Hang on just a second."

He gets up, walks over to the Bar, and returns with a DVD.

"You probably needed to find out before things got much further... and yeah. Yeah, they actually do work here. I can vouch for that personally," he adds, indicating the scars on his palms.

Guppy looks at the scars and the DVD. Fortunately the mun has got it. He looks at the pictures on the back.

"Hey, you're in a film. Cool! And there's Venkman. Do you mind if I borrow this? I'd just kinda like to see you in action."

He wonders if he's in one.

"Sure, go ahead," Ray says. "I was planning on watching it with some people from here at some point anyway. I've already seen it twice."

"Thanks."

He puts it in one of his many pockets.

"The reason why I asked is that I've got a friend at work who's a real sci-fi buff. Silicon based life is a fairly popular topic in those sort of films. Any information would be a start. You don't happen to know if Naraht's in one do you?"

"Naraht himself, no," Ray says. "His race, yes. He's a Horta- they're on old-series Star Trek, the episode "Devil in the Dark". Do not, under any circumstances, mention this to him. He has no idea about the fact that people from around here seem to have made appearances in movies and television, and he doens't need to know."

"I wasn't planning to mention it to him. That sort of thing could really freak a guy out. I was just wondering if there was any information about his species."

He looks down at the Ghostbusters DVD.

"I wonder if I've ever been on TV. I didn't realise it could happen without knowing about it until recently..."

He stops, having just had a horrible thought. He stares at the video.

Of course, the producers and writers have to make these things exciting... Oh shit

"Ah, okay. Well..." Ray thinks for a bit. "Naraht appears in several Star Trek books as well, although I don't remember their titles, except for one called The Romulan Way by Diane Duane. It might be worth checking out at the local chain bookstore."

He catches the look on Guppy's face. "Oh, oh," he murmurs. "Okay, spill it- it won't be anything I haven't heard before, most likely..."

Guppy has gone slightly pale.

"Ray, you remember a while back I was asking you about curses, because there were a very large number of disasters and deaths of staff where I'm from? Well producers and writers have to keep things interesting don't they?"

Guppy has just been canon-punctured.

"I suppose they do," says Ray evenly, "but bear in mind that they get things wrong, too. I prefer to think of it as our reality manifesting as shadows of inspiration in their worlds."

"I really hope you're right."

Guppy puts his head in his hands on the bar.
Jim, Fin, Simon, Jack, Patrick, Andrew, Tom, Ewart, Anna, Kelly...
They're dead. They're all dead.
The chap who used to be in charge of paramedics before Josh is dead. Nicky has a paralysed arm, Charlie has been shot and had a pulmonary embolism...
Thirteen deaths in nineteen years.
The gladiator steps into the ring. And let there be lions.

"Given that I've been to a reality where everything looked like it was part of a cartoon, and where that movie there was based on the story of our first major adventure, and it still looked exactly like the world I come from, I tend to think that yeah, it's the radiation of inspiration thing."

He blinks. "Are you all right?"

Boring characters get killed off. There's nobody more boring than you in the department.
And it's quiet... oh so quiet...

Guppy blinks and comes back down to reality.

"Um... I'm... not really sure."

Ray sighs. He's seen this before. "I think you need to talk to Peter," he says quietly. "He's been where you are now. I think he can help you."

Guppy is in total shock. So much so that he makes a mental note never to label any event as the weirdest thing he has ever experienced again. Because there cannot be anything weirder than this.

"It's..."
It's oh so quiet. It's oh so still...
There are no words.

"Thanks. I might do that." he says quietly.

Ray watches him for a while.

"There's one thing you need to know, first," he says at last.

Guppy looks up.

"What's that?"

"Whatever happens. Whatever it turns out is the case. Whether you're on TV or in a movie or in a comic book or a novel or- or anything-"

Ray leans over and thumps Guppy squarely in the middle of the forehead with a forefinger.

"You're real here. You make your choices. You. Not some writer, not here." Another forehead thump. "This is where you're real. None of the rest matters, unless you let it, and then it's no one's fault but your own."

"I'm real here." Guppy repeats, sort of dazed.

He blinks. "But I have to be real. I exist, I move, I feel, I think. How could I not exist?"
Brain in a vat
"This is horrible. They're killing people... and I can't do anything about it. I almost wish it was a curse."

Ray grimaces and swats Guppy across the top of the head with one hand. "No! No, they're not! Don't you understand? There's no conspiracy of writers. There's no circle of murderers plotting to ruin your life, or the lives of the people around you. It's just you, and the other people, and the rest of the world. You can't think like that, Guppy, it's abdicating responsibility for your own existence!"

"There's no circle of murderers." Guppy repeats. He still seems a bit dazed by the whole thing.
"They're just watching us? Somehow from somewhere? Or not even watching, sort of feeling our existance."
To be honest, he doesn't understand.
"Then how are people being killed off?"

[ooc: Mun has to go to dinner. Back in about three and a half hours]

Bonnie sat down beside Ray, looking rather tired herself, laptop settled in front of her. Not opened. Notably not opened.

~~And mun has not yet written the OOM that it will take to have Bonnie and Eddie meet.~~

"Mornin', Ray. Can't stay long. Dead tired."

Ray looked up and smiled. "Morning, Bonnie," he said. "Late night for you?"

"Been out with the plane 'til now," she said, nodding. "Had a chance to look over the code, and he's not having logical inconsistencies. He's dredging up masked memories."

Ray whistled softly. "Hoo boy," he said. "From when he was one of yours, I take it?"

"His memories are vague. But he knows, now, that EDI wasn't his original acronym." She leaned back in her seat. She would head up to bed soon. She needed it. "He told me about some trauma that was... very recent for him. Turns out he was trying to make a landing during a storm onto this carrier, the Abe Lincoln? Lightning struck the only one of his wingmen still in the air - Talon One, he called 'im.

"Well, if it'd been just a simple lightning strike to Eddie, he could've handled it. All planes, even in my time, have all kinds of lightning baffles and surge protectants. But the lightning funneled off of the guy's plane and went straight off his wing, like a static discharge, into Eddie's CPU. Ripped his neural net all to hell, so he had to basically reprogram himself on the fly - literally - to stay alive. But his new programming... he didn't know about the masks over the original programming, so he didn't reinstitute them."

"Aaagha." Ray winced, in much the same fashion as half the class had done when his Anthro 102 professor had launched into the World-Famous Legs-Crossing Lecture. "That sounds like it must've hurt. A lot. Poor guy... The Lincoln, huh? That must've been what Johnny saw when I gave him the piece of Eddie's wing. I, um, couldn't find anyone with the right connections to get news the normal way, so I gave that piece to a psychometric reader before I gave it to you," he offered by way of explanation.

"I wouldn't know - Eddie just told me about the harm to his software and hardware and interfaced with my laptop. It was a dead giveaway when his code started appearing on the screen. Didn't even have to convert OS. He's definitely Knight-made. But there are some things I've got to check on yet. Because... Knight AIs have those nice, distinctive little touches like core programming to be worried about, but he's already given away part of it. 'My mandate is to survive.' Sound like anybody we know?"

"Yeah," Ray said. "Sure does. How do you think Karr's going to react to finding out he has a cousin in the Navy? And one without a driver, at that."

"Good question. I know Kitt won't care. Kitt hates flying. Scared of it. Karr... He'll just probably think Eddie needs to learn some manners. As Eddie is, technically, the oldest of all three.

"And that's another question. Whether or not that partnership programming came through in Eddie, or whether it was first introduced in Karr and strengthened in Kitt."

"It's an interesting question, to be sure," Ray says. "Do you happen to know if Wilton Knight's original plans for the plane included solo flight? You know, as some kind of aeronautical test vehicle or something? I mean, I know that's unlikely, but..."

"I don't know exactly. I don't know how much of that plane, besides code, is Knight and how much is military. I only know that he was in one of the hangars in Nevada before the military seized him. Twenty years of development hell can do a lot of things to an AI. And he sounds like he was reprogrammed to be the perfect little soldier. If I want to know about him, originally, I'll have to ask Kitt. He knows where all Wilton's files are - were - and can get to them. He's due to go back to work soon, even if that means L.A. instead of Las Vegas. He'll swing by there if I ask him to. Especially since it'll mean info for his little big brother."

But then Bonnie stood, hiding a yawn, collecting her laptop. "I've got to head to bed, Ray. And I don't know if I'll be back in tonight or not. I've got a lot of stuff to do and not that much time to do it in."

Ray nods. "Okay, then. Sleep well. I'll talk to Eddie tonight if he's still up for talking."

Bonnie smiled - almost smirked - a little as she gathered herself up. "Might catch him in a test run," she said and waved as she headed up the stairs. "G'night, Ray." And then, yawning, she was gone.

((And so was the mun - to bed!))