snowblindrpg | [network] @ADMIN; Arrival

[ Confused, homicidal, same thing in Catherine's books. Robots are dumb, okay? ]

Yeah, that's-- pretty much what I meant by confused. We used to call ours Mockingbirds, because they'd try to mimic what they were like as real people.

[ She's extremely interested in this latter description, though, thinking it through. ] I wonder why that's happening. It definitely suggests to me that we're not in our original bodies-- I mean, obviously I'm not, but everyone might not be. Our minds make up whatever they have to in order to make sense of what we're experiencing. When I'm disembodied in a computer system, I perceive myself as floating weightless in space, and if I think about it too hard it starts to get... bad.

Maybe it is the nanomachines malfunctioning...

They're over a thousand years out of service and have the mapped neural consciousness of thousands of people stored in them. I think it's a pretty good bet that they're malfunctioning at least some of the time.

We might have some cultists still around here, though. There was a program executed a few months back called convertpurge dot exe. It reprogrammed people, turned them into converts for the prophet and had them trying to convert other people with torture.

Right, of course, but I'm not so sure I buy them as the explanation for everything that's been going on...

[ She sounds speculative rather than argumentative, a scientist legitimately looking for answers. ]

Cultists, really? [ Okay, she's totally lost on that one. Catherine's weakness: illogical beliefs. How do they even work? ] When you say reprogrammed people, do you mean us, the mysterious arrivals? Can we have programs executed on us?

[ Because that would be extremely interesting. ]

[They're part of the explanation as far as John is concerned, but only part, as she points out.]

Yeah. You'll read about it in the documents I posted, but the long and short of it is that this town was hit by nuclear bombs somewhere back around 2050. After that, the NIMA system, a system designed to heal people using medical nanomachines, malfunctioned. It shut down and a lot of people died from the resulted radiation exposure. When it turned back on, some of the patients started acting strangely, like... automatons. One of them murdered a nurse named Jia Xu who was a specialist on NIMA.

I think that's where the cult started. These people were changed somehow, whether it was a virus in the system or some breakdown caused by the bombs. They picked out this little girl named Sam who was blinded in the blast and designated her as the "Prophet." Mostly they just wanted to murder a lot of people. Sam escaped them and tried to work with an AI that lived here named Andromeda to fix the town. I'm assuming by reprogramming the nanomachines or fixing what was wrong.

We're all filled with nanomachines. They can and have taken control of us at different times. Sometimes to act in accordance with what the cult wanted. Sometimes for seemingly no reason.

[ Catherine listens so intently, she's trying to memorize it. Usually she's the one giving the exposition, but she hardly minds the reverse. ]

Wait... did the cult cause the malfunctions, or did the malfunctions cause the cult? Or both?

And what happened to Sam and Andromeda? [ Since that's the most obvious place for her to start. If there's an AI around here that can work with the nanomachines and their programming, that's where Catherine would be able to do some good. ]

[John has fallen more and more into being the exposition faerie. He doesn't mind it most of the time, at least.]

The cult is definitely some kind of malfunction. We've spoken to the people who were here before, the original residents, via a sort of technological seance. They said the cult is like a sickness, gets inside your head and makes you do horrible things, but it can fade out, too. But then I think maybe someone wanted to create the cult. Maybe to destroy Norfinbury? The Admin system? There were a lot of protests here before the nuclear bombs hit. It's a little confusing. But the cult might have been a computer virus of sorts that morphed and got away from everyone. The nanomachines have the ability to learn and exceed their original function. If they were programmed with a virus, they could have evolved that to unintended consequences.

Sam is, unfortunately, dead. We don't know how, but she's part of the... I guess you could call them digital collective. Andromeda's alive in some capacity. In the 300-odd days we've been here, though, she's only actively spoken to us twice. Those were both life-or-death situations that involved a lot of people. We've had echoes of her apart from that two other times.

Most of what we know is from SD cards we've picked up here and there that show us the lives of the original residents.

[ A technological seance???? Not how Catherine would describe it, but you know what, okay. What does she know. ]

There's a lot of potential origin stories, [ she observes thoughtfully. ] It could've been a virus developed for a different purpose, and altered or rewritten and intentionally introduced to develop the cult itself. Even if they did keep to their original primary functions, changing the priority designations for how they're implemented could account for some pretty drastic changes in behavior.

Do you think Andromeda's in hiding otherwise? I wish I could speak to all these A.I. [ Catherine lets out a momentary sigh, but doesn't dwell on it. ] Or even the digital collective, as you put it. There's no reason we can't restore particular consciousnesses if the data still exist. That's practically my specialty.

[ SD cards sound bizarrely dated to her for a place a thousand years in her future, but she's definitely going to keep an eye out. ]

[Contacting the mapped neural pathways of the dead via the tablet network? Technological seance sounds snappier. It takes John a moment to respond as he's trying to understand what she's actually saying. Technology, apart from the biomedical sciences, isn't really his area of expertise.]

Yeah. Could be.

[He'll just go with that. He's too emotionally to delve deeper.]

There are a lot of people with different theories.

I think Andromeda's hiding, though, yeah. And I really wouldn't try to restore any consciousnesses. The people in the nanomachines are trapped. Their bodies are dead. I don't think we should be putting disoriented and abused minds into corpses. They're echoes. They were never meant to be held and trapped like this.

[ Right, and she's just one theory, got it. Catherine doesn't mind being wrong about anything-- she'd just like to know the answer.

As for this, though. She's not kidding that it's basically her specialty. ]

What? I wouldn't put them in corpses! That would be cruel. [ Also... meet Simon. ] If I could find a decent computer around here, I could write a simulated environment for them, and run the scan in the simulation. They're packets of data-- you can run them like programs if you have the right environment established. It just has to be sufficiently realistic to live up to their expectations.

It just seems wasteful to me to have all these scans around and not talk to them.

[John's hackles begin to rise.]

Echoes. They're people. And they don't want to be trapped here. Putting them in another cage isn't gonna help.

[Not to mention one of the theories they have still is that they're just brain scans in a simulated environment.]

Edited 2018-03-15 17:00 (UTC)

Hey! It's not a cage.

[ Catherine sounds genuinely miffed, even approaching offended. Describing a simulated environment as a cage destroys the entire concept behind the ARK, something she's deeply invested in. ]

I wouldn't be trapping them anywhere. And you don't need to run the simulation forever. [ Because that's a comforting thought, Cath. ] Just as long as it takes to talk to them. Then they can go right back to being whatever weird merged collective they are now.

It's a box you create to hold them. That's a cage.

[John's not usually this immediately combative, particularly not with a woman, but he's not in the best frame of mind in this very moment, and this is something he's grown to have strong opinions about in the past 8 or 9 months.]

And if we can get them out of that collective, we're sure as hell not putting them back into it. Their minds are all tangled together into chaos. They're fragmented. Taking them out of that and then putting them right back in would be torture. We need to shut the whole system down.

It's not a cage, [ she reiterates, showing some conviction for maybe the first time. ] The environments I create are just as real as what you see around you. I'm not going to bring people to life in some half-baked metal box.

I don't care if they return to it or not, but you realize shutting the system down is killing them in a certain way, right? If they're whole, coherent scans-- like me-- they're not just echoes of someone who used to exist, they are people. Different, separate people. It should be up to them individually what form they want their existence to take.

[Catherine, that is the definition of not-comforting for a man who already has anxiety and general issues related to gauging what is real and what is not. He's getting properly agitated now, which doesn't help his tone sharpening.]

A gilded cage is still a cage. It's something designed to contain them for a purpose. Your purpose. They've told us they want us to shut the system down.

[ Expecting Catherine to be comforting is like slamming your head against a wall and expecting something to get better. This is about how it always goes. Catherine has her moments of tactfulness and empathy, but the literal day after her launching the ARK, being the copy left behind, Simon yelling at her to the point that her omnitool malfunctioned and that iteration of her is likely, de facto, dead-- just like the original, human Catherine is dead, from a crewmate-- with that one lucky version of her out among the stars, forever. A fate this Catherine will never reach.

It's been a long, harrowing few days for her. Five days ago, she was a human being watching a comet approach Earth. Four days ago, she woke up inside a robot on a dead planet. Three days ago, she met Simon. Yesterday, she launched the ARK.

And rehashing an argument she's had time, time, time again from people who don't understand her work is just not something she has in her to do one more time. ]

Fine, [ she says curtly. ] I have nothing against shutting them down if that's what they want. With access to the system, I can do that easily.

[ Catherine is, despite everything, not really a combative type. She'll argue until the cows come home, but genuine conflict shuts her up, and she sees no reason to explain why she's taking this so personally. It'll either sound like an excuse or like she wants to talk about her feelings, and neither of them is true. That she'd just been trying to help is not a statement that has ever worked for her before. She swears she's never going to understand why people always get so offended at her suggestions. ]

You and half a dozen other people here. [It comes out harsher than he really means it to, and John takes a breath, settles before continuing.] I'd recommend talking to Angel and Rhys. They're the most vocal resident hackers here. They're @guardian and @... uh... dickcheese. He didn't pick that name himself. [Not going to throw Rhys under a bus.]

America, @starspangledhero, is also familiar with quantum computers, which is what we're dealing with.

[ Catherine is slow to offend, but once she gets there, she pretty much stays offended, which for her means staying short and to the point. Not even the ridiculous humor of someone with a username like dickcheese is enough to throw her off.

She doesn't think she's anything special, but she is used to being one of two people left alive, and it's already given her the mentality that either she does it, or no one does it. Other people being here is definitely a good thing-- but it's taking her a bit to come back around to her much earlier mindset, that of being part of a crew. She's getting there. ]

Fine. I will. I'd rather not hack anyone, [ she says with all the distaste of a law-abiding digital entity, ] but since I don't know anything, I'm willing to go along with whatever everyone has decided the best plan is.

[John rolls his eyes at what he assumes is her sarcasm about not knowing anything. Right. He should probably just... end this and let people who are in a more genial mood step in. Bloody hell.]

I'm sure you'll catch up. In the meanwhile, good luck, Catherine.

[ It's both sarcastic and sincere. Catherine is perfectly open to taking direction, and aware she just got here, but she's also not the sort to be quiet about something she's confident in-- at least not online. In person is another story. ]

Yeah. Thanks. [ Still even, level-- and sincere. ]

[network] @ADMIN; Arrival

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cw: mentions of torture/mind-control

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