Automata 3
Tuesday, 18 October 2005 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keaaluJust seen the advert that most makes me go "buh...?" on the TV. In among the adverts for coffee makers and shavers and washing powder, there came an ad for... an MRI scanner. Yeah, them big noisy things they have in hospitals and use for looking at the body's tissues when x-rays won't do it. WOAH GEE I THINK I'LL JUST GO BUY ME ONE OF THEM, BABY! Nowhere to put it but HEY it's GOT TO BE GOOD, they ADVERTISED IT on the GOGGLEBOX! Right? RIGHT?!
Meh. Anyway. Chapter three (or whatever) of my little story, bumbling away happily... And hey guesswhat, the other pivotal character is FINALLY introduced.
-------
Automata
Chapter Three
Her first stop when she got home was to flip the Comms terminal on and rattle out a hasty message to her contact in Kiravai Territory; a young dark pewter Cob by the name of Shie. She wanted his opinion before she did anything – he was her main contact in the Kiravai equivalent of the industry; for practicality’s sake he was an engineer, but for reasons more to do with psychology he called himself a surgeon.
Kirasiinu held a strange place in Vei’la society – so when she’d first introduced herself to Shie, he’d been fairly hostile, naturally polite but sharp-natured and curt of manner, seeing her as just another of the money-hungry “Drivers”. (They didn’t complain outright, of course, what people did with technology that had exchanged hands fairly was none of their business, but there was a simmering resentment in Kiravai society, and the subtle opinion that they’d sold their adopted-kinsfolk into slavery.) After getting to know each other a little better, though, the relationship between Shie and Ivy improved vastly; he was quick to give her information so long as she used it to further the “greater good”, and in turn she kept him abreast of latest developments on her side of the territorial line.
It’d take him a fair while to return her communiqué, she knew – face-to-face over this sort of distance needed an ultra-high-speed Infraspatial uplink, and they were expensive, you only even tried it if you were sure your contact was waiting at the other end of the line. Besides, the planetary calculator said it was night-time over there, so it’d probably be late evening, her time, before he even read it, let alone replied to it.
That left her a lot of thinking time. She sat down at her dining table with an incredibly-old-fashioned pencil and paper, and tried to plot out what her experiment was designed to actually do. It was nothing more than a wherg-brained idea spawned by too much caffeine and bad spice in the café at lunch, right now. She wanted to have at least an idea of what she was trying to accomplish before her precious (expensive) purchase arrived, if only so she could tell it what she was doing, because it was bound to ask.
So. She chewed her pencil. What was she trying to achieve? That was the biggie – she didn’t even really know what she was trying to do. She sighed. Impulse buys had always been a problem for her – she’d fork out more cash than she could afford (lots more in this case) and then rethink it and decide it was a bad idea, but always too late to do anything about it. This would be a spectacularly unfair impulse buy, if that was what it turned out to be.
Ultimately, she guessed, scribbling her ideas hastily down, it all boiled down to one thing – proving her thesis that Synth (or “Siinu”, to go along with Kiravai thinking) were more than just the sum of the components they were crafted from. That given the opportunity and a little freedom of thought, they could be as capable (and as ‘alive’) as any living breathing biological being.
She tapped her pencil on the table, knowing it probably wouldn’t go down well if she succeeded. After all, nobody wanted anything more than they had. Nobody wanted autonomous, self-aware non-organic intelligence – they just wanted servants. Which she could understand – the overworked single mother trying to keep a family of three together, the elderly couple who needed a hand with the more difficult tasks in life, the student who’d left home to go to University and didn’t have time to study and cook and clean and iron clothes… She could even vaguely understand how the rich, spoiled little girls “needed” an Attendant (although she guessed it was more to keep them out of trouble than anything). And while everyone was happy with the status quo as it was now, there’d be no problems – no “artificial rights” getting in the way of “progress”.
Most people seemed to think her ideas were rather more science-fiction than science-fact in scope – machines didn’t go outside their programming, after all. But she was concerned that this continual use of them as a convenient commodity, with no concerns given to feelings, would spawn rogues – and rogues had a tendency to self-perpetuate, trading bits and pieces of code to strengthen and augment. And that in turn would mark the start of some sort of uprising – as all slaves did, once the wool had been pulled from their eyes. And even with the best Quality Control, errors occasionally slipped through – Syntheticorp had a number of big problems at their initial startup, and hundreds of faulty Automata had to be returned for reprogramming and recommissioning. She hoped her harebrained plan wouldn’t result in that.
She predictably didn’t sleep well, that night, her rest plagued by dreams – and when she woke up, everything felt so surreal she was halfway convinced it had all been a dream. But when she staggered into the kitchen and spotted her invoice pinned to the refrigerator, it sank in that it was real, and that in a day or two there’d be Synth in her home. It made her twitchy, and more than a little reluctant to have spent all that money on an experiment she could ill afford. She got plenty of contact with Synth, after all – never did a day go past without meeting one, at very least, if not the postman then the bus-driver on the way to Uni, and if not there then she’d meet them on the streets, trailing their owners.
As the sales rep had predicted, it took more than a day for her delivery to be made; she swam through the first day in a nervous anticipation, feeling like she was floating an inch off the floor, and managed to drop at least half a dozen things during the day, one of which was a cup and which broke into ugly white chunks and spilt her hot herbal infusion over the polished wood floor of her dining room. She slept even less well that night – unable to get comfortable, too hot, anticipation and fear making her light-headed and nauseous.
Her delivery arrived early the next morning – she’d only just finished drying her fur after a brief, distracted shower, and was leafing through the news when the doorbell rang, startling her reverie. A glance out of the window revealed a Syntheticorp van, the same understated pale grey-violet with which the depot had been so extensively decorated, and a Vul driver, just emerging from the cab and scratching behind his ear with his stylus as he checked the address. She skipped lightly down the stairs to let him in.
The delivery driver gave her a curious look, helping her arrange the lifeless Synth in her living room, propped awkwardly in a wicker chair in the corner of the room.
“Bit basic, isn’t he?” the driver observed, patting it on the shoulder.
Ivy nodded. “I’m planning on doing the work myself.”
“Work up the Uni, right?”
“That’s the one,” she scribbled a hasty signature on the delivery note and let him out the front door. “Tell your Boss thanks, right?”
“Right,” he grinned, toothily, and loped down the front steps to his van. “Have fun, lady!”
She waved to him, closed the front door, thoughtfully, and cast a glance over her shoulder to the living room; a shaft of sunlight from the large picture window glittered off silver. It felt a little like opening your letter with your exam results – trying everything you could do to put it off, maybe a cup of tea or go down the shops to buy a newspaper, bubblingly nervous, trembling with an odd mixture of fright and excitement.
Part of her wanted to say it looked like it was asleep – and yet it looked a lot less than just asleep, it looked… lifeless. Less even than dead. A gruesome doll, stripped down to skeleton and servos.
It was a lot more basic than she’d anticipated, she observed, walking the full way around it three times before pausing in front and gazing at it. It. It was odd, considering this pristine silver creature as an “it”. Even the most sexless specimens seemed somehow more personable than just “it” – “it” had connotations of nothingness, not-a-person-ness. She wondered if it’d choose a gender, and in turn which it’d go for.
At last she steeled her nerves, reached out, and pulled the impeder clamp away from the gap in its cerebral housing; the gap closed automatically (so that once activated, you couldn’t just turn a Synth off on a whim) and there was the transient, fading hum of microcells powering up.
After a moment, it opened its eyes and for a few heartbeats merely stared at the ceiling, blankly, then blinked and automatically sought out a face. Even its eyes were about as basic as you could physically get and still be operating, Ivy noticed (good job eyes were one of her specialities) – the silver interlocking weave of the iridiary complex, the soft gloss of the lens, but lacking the coloured iris altogether, lacking even the sclera that was typically barely visible anyway.
“Good morning, mistress,” it greeted, politely. Its voice was typically sexless in nature – sweet, mellifluous, but impossible to sense a defined masculinity or femininity in the delicate tones. “How may I serve you?”
She disguised a sad smile; barely out of the box and it was already into the swing of things. Your eternal servant, ready to serve before it even knows your name.
Meh. Anyway. Chapter three (or whatever) of my little story, bumbling away happily... And hey guesswhat, the other pivotal character is FINALLY introduced.
-------
Automata
Chapter Three
Her first stop when she got home was to flip the Comms terminal on and rattle out a hasty message to her contact in Kiravai Territory; a young dark pewter Cob by the name of Shie. She wanted his opinion before she did anything – he was her main contact in the Kiravai equivalent of the industry; for practicality’s sake he was an engineer, but for reasons more to do with psychology he called himself a surgeon.
Kirasiinu held a strange place in Vei’la society – so when she’d first introduced herself to Shie, he’d been fairly hostile, naturally polite but sharp-natured and curt of manner, seeing her as just another of the money-hungry “Drivers”. (They didn’t complain outright, of course, what people did with technology that had exchanged hands fairly was none of their business, but there was a simmering resentment in Kiravai society, and the subtle opinion that they’d sold their adopted-kinsfolk into slavery.) After getting to know each other a little better, though, the relationship between Shie and Ivy improved vastly; he was quick to give her information so long as she used it to further the “greater good”, and in turn she kept him abreast of latest developments on her side of the territorial line.
It’d take him a fair while to return her communiqué, she knew – face-to-face over this sort of distance needed an ultra-high-speed Infraspatial uplink, and they were expensive, you only even tried it if you were sure your contact was waiting at the other end of the line. Besides, the planetary calculator said it was night-time over there, so it’d probably be late evening, her time, before he even read it, let alone replied to it.
That left her a lot of thinking time. She sat down at her dining table with an incredibly-old-fashioned pencil and paper, and tried to plot out what her experiment was designed to actually do. It was nothing more than a wherg-brained idea spawned by too much caffeine and bad spice in the café at lunch, right now. She wanted to have at least an idea of what she was trying to accomplish before her precious (expensive) purchase arrived, if only so she could tell it what she was doing, because it was bound to ask.
So. She chewed her pencil. What was she trying to achieve? That was the biggie – she didn’t even really know what she was trying to do. She sighed. Impulse buys had always been a problem for her – she’d fork out more cash than she could afford (lots more in this case) and then rethink it and decide it was a bad idea, but always too late to do anything about it. This would be a spectacularly unfair impulse buy, if that was what it turned out to be.
Ultimately, she guessed, scribbling her ideas hastily down, it all boiled down to one thing – proving her thesis that Synth (or “Siinu”, to go along with Kiravai thinking) were more than just the sum of the components they were crafted from. That given the opportunity and a little freedom of thought, they could be as capable (and as ‘alive’) as any living breathing biological being.
She tapped her pencil on the table, knowing it probably wouldn’t go down well if she succeeded. After all, nobody wanted anything more than they had. Nobody wanted autonomous, self-aware non-organic intelligence – they just wanted servants. Which she could understand – the overworked single mother trying to keep a family of three together, the elderly couple who needed a hand with the more difficult tasks in life, the student who’d left home to go to University and didn’t have time to study and cook and clean and iron clothes… She could even vaguely understand how the rich, spoiled little girls “needed” an Attendant (although she guessed it was more to keep them out of trouble than anything). And while everyone was happy with the status quo as it was now, there’d be no problems – no “artificial rights” getting in the way of “progress”.
Most people seemed to think her ideas were rather more science-fiction than science-fact in scope – machines didn’t go outside their programming, after all. But she was concerned that this continual use of them as a convenient commodity, with no concerns given to feelings, would spawn rogues – and rogues had a tendency to self-perpetuate, trading bits and pieces of code to strengthen and augment. And that in turn would mark the start of some sort of uprising – as all slaves did, once the wool had been pulled from their eyes. And even with the best Quality Control, errors occasionally slipped through – Syntheticorp had a number of big problems at their initial startup, and hundreds of faulty Automata had to be returned for reprogramming and recommissioning. She hoped her harebrained plan wouldn’t result in that.
She predictably didn’t sleep well, that night, her rest plagued by dreams – and when she woke up, everything felt so surreal she was halfway convinced it had all been a dream. But when she staggered into the kitchen and spotted her invoice pinned to the refrigerator, it sank in that it was real, and that in a day or two there’d be Synth in her home. It made her twitchy, and more than a little reluctant to have spent all that money on an experiment she could ill afford. She got plenty of contact with Synth, after all – never did a day go past without meeting one, at very least, if not the postman then the bus-driver on the way to Uni, and if not there then she’d meet them on the streets, trailing their owners.
As the sales rep had predicted, it took more than a day for her delivery to be made; she swam through the first day in a nervous anticipation, feeling like she was floating an inch off the floor, and managed to drop at least half a dozen things during the day, one of which was a cup and which broke into ugly white chunks and spilt her hot herbal infusion over the polished wood floor of her dining room. She slept even less well that night – unable to get comfortable, too hot, anticipation and fear making her light-headed and nauseous.
Her delivery arrived early the next morning – she’d only just finished drying her fur after a brief, distracted shower, and was leafing through the news when the doorbell rang, startling her reverie. A glance out of the window revealed a Syntheticorp van, the same understated pale grey-violet with which the depot had been so extensively decorated, and a Vul driver, just emerging from the cab and scratching behind his ear with his stylus as he checked the address. She skipped lightly down the stairs to let him in.
The delivery driver gave her a curious look, helping her arrange the lifeless Synth in her living room, propped awkwardly in a wicker chair in the corner of the room.
“Bit basic, isn’t he?” the driver observed, patting it on the shoulder.
Ivy nodded. “I’m planning on doing the work myself.”
“Work up the Uni, right?”
“That’s the one,” she scribbled a hasty signature on the delivery note and let him out the front door. “Tell your Boss thanks, right?”
“Right,” he grinned, toothily, and loped down the front steps to his van. “Have fun, lady!”
She waved to him, closed the front door, thoughtfully, and cast a glance over her shoulder to the living room; a shaft of sunlight from the large picture window glittered off silver. It felt a little like opening your letter with your exam results – trying everything you could do to put it off, maybe a cup of tea or go down the shops to buy a newspaper, bubblingly nervous, trembling with an odd mixture of fright and excitement.
Part of her wanted to say it looked like it was asleep – and yet it looked a lot less than just asleep, it looked… lifeless. Less even than dead. A gruesome doll, stripped down to skeleton and servos.
It was a lot more basic than she’d anticipated, she observed, walking the full way around it three times before pausing in front and gazing at it. It. It was odd, considering this pristine silver creature as an “it”. Even the most sexless specimens seemed somehow more personable than just “it” – “it” had connotations of nothingness, not-a-person-ness. She wondered if it’d choose a gender, and in turn which it’d go for.
At last she steeled her nerves, reached out, and pulled the impeder clamp away from the gap in its cerebral housing; the gap closed automatically (so that once activated, you couldn’t just turn a Synth off on a whim) and there was the transient, fading hum of microcells powering up.
After a moment, it opened its eyes and for a few heartbeats merely stared at the ceiling, blankly, then blinked and automatically sought out a face. Even its eyes were about as basic as you could physically get and still be operating, Ivy noticed (good job eyes were one of her specialities) – the silver interlocking weave of the iridiary complex, the soft gloss of the lens, but lacking the coloured iris altogether, lacking even the sclera that was typically barely visible anyway.
“Good morning, mistress,” it greeted, politely. Its voice was typically sexless in nature – sweet, mellifluous, but impossible to sense a defined masculinity or femininity in the delicate tones. “How may I serve you?”
She disguised a sad smile; barely out of the box and it was already into the swing of things. Your eternal servant, ready to serve before it even knows your name.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 19 Oct 2005 12:01 am (UTC)*rolls eyes*
Nice story so far, btw.
(no subject)
Date: 19 Oct 2005 12:18 am (UTC)Interesting so far; hints of potential rebellion, character development, and a lot of parenthesis. But I'm not sure where caffeine fits into any of this. Shouldn't the deliver/driver be Synth as well?
Anyway, it still has my attention.
(no subject)
Date: 19 Oct 2005 07:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19 Oct 2005 07:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19 Oct 2005 03:11 pm (UTC)