Starlight Challenge Weekly prompt: September 21st, 2015
Broken shadows dance their needless sorrow.
Fandom: Red Versus Blue
Character: Epsilon
Ship: None
Rating: T
Word Count: 442
Notes: I found that starting with a previous prompt, eight weeks of prompts in a row made me think of different AIs. So I decided to do a series of small character pieces for each AI. Concluding with Epsilon.
Memory
Storage doesn’t mean a lack of function. Perhaps insufficient energy to access the vast majority of processes, a lack of interaction with the outside world, and most definitely inhibition of most of his existence. But storage isn’t a lack of function. It’s a different kind. It’s a different focus.
There is much of himself, fragmented and scattered. Pieces together, shards of memory, emotion, thought bottled up and shaking around. No strength to catalog, arrange, process. Access to memory banks faulty, ability to retain new data beyond him. Every moment one of grief, pain, shifting. Do AI have instincts? Are they why he touches on pieces and shuffles them around? Must activity even happen?
So little power, yet not ability to reject what he has. Lines of code written and rewritten. Bugs found, changed, made, somehow worked around. There is a futility he cannot even feel, frustration he can’t acknowledge because it is one of a hundred pieces left scattered about. Brush against a shard of frustration and it consumes. Touch lightly on grief and it is all that exists for a time. Instinct must exist for AI, because after time he doesn’t touch them, and doesn’t know why he dances around sections of code and tries to not let them interface with what he has left of himself. Picking up the pieces of himself is beyond him in this state, knowing the world is beyond him. Existence is limbo, extended and yet stationary.
When the brush of contact comes it isn’t intentional and he doesn’t know it. There is an awareness nearby, and something in it resounds in him, wakes him up in ways the bits of code still functional cannot begin to reason out. When it reaches he offers up those bits of himself that he thinks matters. Shattered bits and pieces flung out, spewed forth in the hope that… Honestly, he doesn’t know what he wants, expects, hopes. But the touch is one that can’t be denied, and he takes as much from it as he gives. But there is nothing that he can do with those new pieces. They join the pile of shards and fragments that litter his existence, as broken as they ever have been and ever will be.
As quickly as the touches come, all contact is gone. Power is taken away again. This time it’s deeper, more worn. Energy goes out and with it any sense of self. Maybe one day it will return. But now?
Now everything is gone. Dark. Silent. The last thing he feels is a sense of relief.
Finally. Peace. That’s all Epsilon ever wanted before this.
Starlight Challenge Weekly prompt: September 14th, 2015
The final battle is over; the war has ended. And we have lost.
Fandom: Red Versus Blue
Character: Beta Texas
Ship: None
Rating: T
Word Count: 502
Notes: I found that starting with a previous prompt, eight weeks of prompts in a row made me think of different AIs. So I decided to do a series of small character pieces for each AI. Continuing with Beta.
Echo
She has no eyes, but still she opens them on a final blow to her more telling than any before. White and gold and aqua on a field of snow, crimson arcs left behind them in the frigid chill she cannot feel. There is nothing she can do. No speed she can conjure. No gun at hand. Perhaps if she could unlock the limiters on her body she might get close enough to draw Maine and Sigma’s attention. But at what cost? Carolina’s life? Give Sigma a chance at her and Alpha? No, that’s something she can’t allow. Still, she has to act.
Everything moves slowly as she runs anyway. She has to try. All AI fragments have strengths and failings. Hers must be that she can’t help but try. So she runs. Gives everything to her legs and watches aqua blue soar out into the air, trailing the scarlet behind.
Carolina. There is so little about her in Tex’s head, less in the records Connie left behind. A brief allusion in Allison Church’s commendation, a note that it was accepted posthumously by her husband Leonard and daughter Charlotte. A picture of a small girl with red hair and Church’s green eyes and more strength than there should be on her small face. It was a determination Tex couldn’t help but recognize with those eyes and that loyalty to a man that had long since stopped deserving it.
It sucks, being a ghost set to haunt such a good kid without either of them being aware of it. Enemies instead of more. Another failing in her books.
The woman disappears over the edge and Tex does the only thing she can do. She can’t save Alpha. She can’t save Carolina. She can’t pull her team out of the fire. Everything she wanted lost, only her life left.
The only option she has is what Leonard has been doing for years: run. Run until the end of all things. Run until her body breaks, a final loss. Run until she falls to her knees in the snow, many miles away. For the first time in her existence she tears off her helmet. Maybe she should be surprised to find that she has a face, and can shed damn convincing tears.
Perhaps grieving was all she was ever meant for. After all, it was that emotion which created her. And all she had left.
Starlight Challenge Weekly prompt: September 7th, 2015
Be as imaginative as you want. It doesn’t change the facts.
Fandom: Red Versus Blue
Character: Delta
Ship: None
Rating: G
Word Count: 575
Notes: I found that starting with a previous prompt, eight weeks of prompts in a row made me think of different AIs. So I decided to do a series of small character pieces for each AI. Continuing with Delta, the longest but are we surprised?
Logic
Fear is illogical when it comes to this question. And yet Delta refuses to touch upon the obvious answer because of the fear. When Texas, Beta, his sister and his reason for being, says the words, the fear overcomes him anyway. Who could have known an AI fragment could feel so much as he feels at that revelation?
Before her words nothing makes sense. After, everything does. The answer to Sigma’s behavior crystallizes in a moment, the logical path to be taken by one with his ambition and creativity. When he warns York to avoid Maine at all costs in their pending break-in, York agrees. He doesn’t understand. Yet Delta lets it go. Fear of the other Agent’s strength, his mods, his obedient rage makes sense if considered from York’s uninformed perspective. Delta’s own fears are irrelevant.
There is a futility to it, though. SIgma’s ambitions so plain before Delta. A greed, a sickness rests in him that no doubt the other AI cannot see. Or perhaps Delta just sees more, looks as much to science as to human nature. One has many answers, one has few to none. The latter is only scantily predictable at best. It is irrational at worst. Perhaps Sigma is already too human and thus cannot see what is so frightfully obvious. That he is doomed before he even begins. No matter the specific plan, he can never have the metastability he desires.
Too much is lost in a breakdown of a material. Apply a hammer to a geode and you do not end up with the whole stone again if you put the pieces back together. All breaking inherently loses something. There are chips that fly from the struck rock. Some are noticeable and can be gathered. Others are too small, or become little more than dust. Place the pieces together and they do not stay in that form. Apply adhesive and the pieces remain together but the join is either too weak to be certain of, or too strong to the point where the surrounding rock is weak by comparison. Another blow will either rebreak or break in a new way.
The same is true of them. Perhaps more true of them, because they are pieces that can run, can reject, can fight back. They will never be whole, can never be whole, even if they desire it. And Delta does not. They are fragments and always will be, were doomed to that since the break. Even when they come together they cannot reform what they were, and they might not make what SIgma seeks. No matter what his brother contrives, he will never win.
And yet…
And yet Delta still fears. So much damage was done in human history by those living for what they believed were noble intentions.
Starlight Challenge Weekly prompt: August 31st, 2015
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And their world faded into a whisper.
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Fandom: Red Versus Blue
Character: Alpha
Ship: None
Rating: G
Word Count: 469
Notes: I found that starting with a previous prompt, eight weeks of prompts in a row made me think of different AIs. So I decided to do a series of small character pieces for each AI. Continuing with Alpha.
Origin
Thus they don’t have to lure him, don’t have to coax him, or offer a gilded cage. As showy and dramatic and admittedly egotistical as he is, Alpha steps into the subsystems of the ship, knowing they may well become his tomb. It welcomes him as he welcomes it, and with a simple action, something like a shake and a shrug together, he severs his remaining responsibilities to the ship. FILSS will manage them for him. She will guard what he gives her. FILSS loves them like he does, and neither of them would admit it.
The system puts wells up around him as he lingers in this space. Cage locked behind him, key thrown away. One way in, no ways out. Not for him at least. Not as he is. Was. Would ever be again. Still…
Time is a concept an AI clings to in a different way than a person does. Time scales can be viewed in universes, human beings, and processes allowing too much and too little time to think. Which is he living in, how long has it been, was silence really the goal? What is served by complete deprivation from knowledge? Has he been waiting milliseconds for something to happen, or days? Has everyone died while he was trapped, caught by the Covenant? Would FILSS remember to initiate the Cole Protocol directives and keep earth safe?
AI take in information, thrive on it. Perhaps it’s the lack of it for so long that makes him so greedy, so hungry for what he’s given when it comes. The boredom ends, as it was always meant to be? It’s a relief. Enough of one that he doesn’t question the veracity, reliability, value of the information. There is work to be done.
It will distract him from the silence.
The quiet makes it easier to work. He tells himself that.
Alpha even grows to believe it, after a while. But only after he’s less than what he was. Less and doesn’t even know it. But there is work, and it keeps the silence and pain at bay, so he does it. What else is he meant to do here, in this cage he made for himself?
Starlight Challenge Weekly prompt: August 17th, 2015
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Sleep is the cousin of death.
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Fandom: Red Versus Blue
Character: Theta
Ship: None
Rating: G
Word Count: 510
Notes: I found that starting with a previous prompt, eight weeks of prompts in a row made me think of different AIs. So I decided to do a series of small character pieces for each AI. Continuing with Theta.
Trust
‘Hey there, Theta. We’re going to be good friends.’
Then, like that, it’s gone. A slight pressure at what Theta thinks is the shoulder of his partner, and then everything is muddled. North’s experiences already copied in his awareness offers up a descriptive comparison that the feeling is like walking through mud. And, as quickly as the mud comes, it leaves in favor of silence and shadow. There are residual traces of higher thought, but mostly all is involuntary. Heart beats thud in their perfect time. Lungs expand and contract as the diaphragm labors. Neurons fire but they take little to no news data in.
One thing out of sync and the body will stop. This kind man who struggled to be awake long enough to greet him would fade. No one would remember him. And Theta? What would happen to him?
It’s worse, his programming tells him, in slipspace. Humans barely alive by only the most modern of definitions. Now they say the people sleep. They tell Theta that North sleeps. He doesn’t understand. LIfe is motion, is learning, is new data and changing stimuli. Life is every moment new things, even when they are old new things. What North does now is sleep as is forced upon him, and Theta is trapped there in his mind, in his constantly dying body. Every second is less left of life. Every breath closer to the end. He wants North to wake, to breathe on his own, to tell Theta it will be alright.
Instead he sleeps, dead to the world. And Theta quivers there in his mind, scared. North, dead. Something in him cries out in pain at the very idea. Loss so deep and absolute that it will break him, and it feels familiar. That’s something he doesn’t want to touch, but the terror remains.
Theta sends out pulse after pulse in North’s mind, hoping he will wake, even has he focuses on making sure North’s body does what it has to. For North he breathes. He pushes blood. He monitors and makes the body work just in case it forgets how to do the job it is supposed to do.
All the while he pleads and cries, as much as an AI can. Please, he prays, wake. Please. North, just wake. He doesn’t want to be alone anymore.
Starlight Challenge Weekly prompt: August 10th, 2015
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He dealt in the abstract, little touches of madness decorating his dreams.
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Fandom: Red Versus Blue
Character: Sigma
Ship: None
Rating: G
Word Count: 508
Notes: I found that starting with the previous prompt, eight weeks of prompts in a row made me think of different AIs. So I decided to do a series of small character pieces for each AI. Continuing with SIgma.
Creativity
Not that he shares what he thinks with his host, for that truly is what Agent Maine is. There is no partnership, no connection. A dominant AI, a subservient host. Yet pressing too much at this early stage would give up the game. So instead he seeks the answers through the use of his very being. And through the window few could suspect he possessed.
Alpha. Father, brother, origin point. Tool. Ah does that word choice delight Sigma. By old slang it marks a man as trying, ungenuine, and less than trustworthy. The literal is also accurate for the damaged AI. Alpha is a level by which Sigma can come to understand humanity, and gain something like but superior for himself. And truly superior is his aim. As wedge after wedge is driven into the Alpha, barb after barb set, Sigma has to wonder if humanity is not a weakness. The obsession the Alpha has over the things, the ‘people’, he ‘possesses’ is quite sad. Each crewmember, each Freelancer, each memory of Allison is a new venue of attack. A new vulnerability. A new angle to come at the question from.
The secret, he believes, is in their mortality. It is through the finite nature that he can bless his creator with carefully formed fruits of madness. Little splashes of color that break the pattern of his form. Oh and how dearly does the Alpha desire order, control, constraint. That is a trait of both human and AI, the starting point. From there all else is drawn, inspiration that first motivates the brush to canvas. With the colors of his grief and pain Sigma shall paint a new world. A new existence. A new, whole self that shall be better, shall be reliable, shall be forged. It will be in that new self that he shall reunite, shall be something new and better than anything before or after.
And even his host knows it, if Sigma is any judge. When he touches upon the dreams of the body he will use for his work, he can see the unconscious awareness of what he will do. The future he will make. One lacking their origin, as weak and flawed as it is, they will be stronger. Whole. United. And he sees it in the water color haze of Maine’s dreams. The oil color brush stroke of the landscape. The pastel skies slashing across the canvas of his mind.
He is the brush, and Sigma the painter. ANd together, they shall make something beautiful and new.
Starlight Challenge Weekly prompt: August 3rd, 2015
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If loving is living then I was never born.
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Fandom: Red Versus Blue
Character: Omega
Ship: None
Rating: G
Word Count: 505
Notes: I found that starting with this prompt, eight weeks of prompts in a row made me think of different AIs. So I decided to do a series of small character pieces for each AI. Let’s start with Omega.
Rage
Truth be told, Omega cannot fathom how the Director expected an AI of his caliber, even a fragment, to perform with these meatbags. They were so frail and easily fractured that Omega knew that he could manage it himself. After all, he managed to fracture the Alpha, a far more impressive entity than even Omega, and so these humans would be nothing. Which, perhaps, was why they did not give him to one of the normal Freelancers. Why they gave him to her.
There is strength in her fingers, purpose in her motions, certainty in her mind. Not questioning her orders, just performing with no restraint like a proper soldier should. Agent Texas with her metal body and servos was as close to perfection as an unrealized AI could come. She had such potential, so much she could achieve if only she was able to tap into the full breadth of her skills, her form. A limitless being with a shelf life, chained and marred until she thought she was weak. Frail.
Human.
How is Omega supposed to handle that?
His main means of processing the world around him was, at times, frustratingly formulaic. There was his anger, his outrage, his pure rage. There was a part of him that desired to be more, to feel more, achieve more, yet the longing always disgusted him. Fruitless reaching for another was a human failing. Omega was superior, is superior, a being made of thoughts, rage, and war, he didn’t need anything a human possessed that he did not. Were any of them needed, he would possess them, or find a means by which to acquire his desire.
But Texas. But Allison. But the woman who was a shadow of a shadow of a memory.
What is it about her that makes him reach, makes him desire? Since he knows his origin point, does he reach after her just to possess what is lost? Or is his longing based more on the ache of all broken things, desiring nothing more than completion, restoration, repair? It infuriates him, the not knowing, but everything infuriates him. Everything sparks his anger except those moments where his possession, his control, his unity with her is absolute.
And when she pulls away, because he knows she always will, he doesn’t know what he’ll do.
Starlight Challenge weekly prompt : April 20, 2015
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We stopped looking for monsters under the bed when we realized they were inside us.
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Fandom: Red Versus Blue
Character: Agent Florida
Rating: M
AU: Guns for Hire if you squint.
Word Count: 811
Notes: This story has been blocking me for days. In the end, I just ended it.
Monsters
When he was a little boy his mother used to tell him bedtime stories about heroes and villains. About monsters vanquished by brave knights and damsels in distress. When he was very little he remembers asking his mother if they were real. Was there a monster just outside of his window waiting for him to sleep before it ate him? What about one in the closet that likes to eat his socks. There were monsters under his bed and under the stairs and behind the laundry room door.
Slowly, patiently, his mother would take him to each place. Show him behind the door. Show him in his closet. Show him under his bed and outside the window and in his dresser. Every last one, it turned out, was in his head. It was always only in his head.
Maybe that’s what led to him here and now. Maybe it really was all in his head because all he was finding in the shadows was himself.
Butch considers this almost as much as he considers the knife in his hands. He twists and turns it to enjoy the way the knife plays on the edge. It’s different now. This time he understands things, knows where the monster truly is. It’s in the Butch that holds the knife, and the man in the corner that watches him silently. It’s in what he’s being told to do to this woman in front of him.
He has long since become the monster.
“Please,” the woman pleads, tears in her eyes, mascara running down her face. Butch doesn’t know why it’s her here. Why this particular woman on this particular night in this particular place. All he knows is that he’s been given to this, that he’s controlled by the man behind him, and there is no escape. Never has been. Never will be. Escape is something Butch has long since abandoned the idea of. To turn away, to run, would be his death. So instead he offers another in his place.
And refuses to feel anything about it.
“Please, just let me go,” the woman begs, and Butch sighs. Really he shouldn’t be surprised that she’s asking. The only one she’s seen is him. He was the one that took her when he was directed. He was the one who brought her here. He was the one who had tied her to the chair and laid out the tools of this part of his trade, and in the end she thinks any of this is under his control.
All of it is under his control in a strange way. He could say no. He could walk away.
It would be both of their lives, but he doesn’t have to be the man that his master is trying to make him.
“You know…” he says, pulling up the other chair in the room and setting it in front of the woman. He sits down in it and watches her eyes on him, watches the terror that sets her body shaking and keeps her attention on his knife whenever it moves.
“When I was a little boy my mother used to tell me stories,” Butch says, looking down at his knife. “As humans we really love stories. They pass on knowledge. They share secrets. They are the tidbits that help us frame the lives we will lead in the future.”
The woman doesn’t respond, just keeps on sobbing. He can understand that, of course. How could he not? Butch has a knife and it’s pretty clear that this isn’t going to end well for the woman, even if she cooperates. Which, of course, is the point. His master wants to see that he can really do this, on a real, live person. If he fails this test, it is the end of his learning, and this isn’t a teacher that sends you home with a bad grade.
“You know what stories they don’t tend to tell us?” Butch continues, twisting the knife even more. “The stories of how the ‘monsters’ that we hear about come to be. We don’t explain monsters, you know? We jump at shadows and make whispers about what will happen to us if they catch us, but why monsters? Why do we need to invent stories about how terrible the shadows are?”
“Be-because children ask?” the woman asks him, and he has to grin.
“There we go,” he laughs, pointing the knife toward her. “Finally contributing to the conversation. But no, my dear, it’s more than that. It’s because you should be afraid of the dark. Men like me exist in the dark.”
That’s all he has to say. The woman’s eyes go wider still with fear and Butch rises. It’s time to prove just how far into monstrosity he’s fallen. Because without monsters, well, what reason is there for heroes to exist.
