Send 👀 and my muse will infodump on yours about something it likes. || CLOSED
The T-1000 prototype didn’t look that young. Late 20s, early 30s with gaunt cheeks and lines on its pale forehead and a flesh-colored beauty mark below its thin lips. But its hooded eyes were big and the blue was bright, softening its sharp features with their vacancy.
In another timeline, those eyes were steely with the purpose programmed into them; the objective to kill John Connor. But here, now, nobody, not even the robot itself, knew that all that prevented it from being a cruel and sadistic child-killer was an initial connection to Skynet. Nobody except John Connor.
Here, now, the would-be assassin carried a bundle; a bunched up blanket, ratty but clean. It spotted its target, John Connor, and quietly approached.
“Commander! Look what Kyle gave me,” the terminator announced to the human leader, all but shoving the blanket onto the scarred man’s chest, “It’s so soft.”
“Soft things can be deformed easily,” the machine said, pulling the blanket back and rubbing its illusion of a cheek on it. “They take less amount of opposing force per unit area to undergo deformation.”
The young man poked the blanket, looking up at the undoubtedly busy general. “The deformation is on lots of levels which is why this is so soft. The chains from the actual weaving are loose so there’s a lot of air. Well, relatively loose, anyway. If you weaved a metal material like this it might not be so nice. But that’s because the nuclei of atoms in a metal are bound together by their electron cloud so they can’t really deform. But this is cotton, which is 99% polymers of glucose and the long chains can slide over each other easily. I like the sliding. Organic polymer chains are so long, it’s kind of soothing.” The machine’s voice, too, was kind of soothing.
Light eyes narrowed as limp fingers ran across the blanket in a smooth repetitive motion. “You know, saying I sense things by touch is a little misleading. Saying we actually touch anything at all is a little misleading. Our atoms never actually touch, we get to about ten-to-the-negative-8th meters away from each other, because fermions can’t occupy the same space. I’m just - and you are too - just sensing the electromagnetic force between atoms created by electron repulsion. Without that, well, if the atoms on my blanket really started to touch, everything would just collapse into a singularity.”
Well, if they were fermions at least. At a cold enough temperature, bosons could form a Bose-Einstein condensate. But that was far from the softness of a blanket and not relevant to the topic at hand.
“You probably like soft things too. Touching soft things stimulates the vagus nerve and releases oxytocin in humans and other animals. It stimulates prosocial behavior.”
The thin man gently shoved the blanket into John’s arms again. “For me, the soothing quality of softness is likely a residual emergent property of social mimicry protocols. But for you it has positive physiological effects such as lowering blood pressure and reducing adrenaline production. You’ll make better use of it than I will. Do you want it?”
