Electra
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"You can think of it that way," Miss A agreed. "I'll be taking his personal backup, all the things about his program that made him unique among all the residents of Tronik, and fusing it back to the general Tronik template that actually provides him with the basic components of his body and lets him live his life within the computer. Everything has to be configured just right or it can cause failures and errors across the board, but I have very detailed specs to work from. You can tell the others that I'm working on him, and I'll let all of you know when he's back. I'm sure he'll be very happy to see all of you again."
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Stesha laughed a little. "Ah, well no, I suppose not anyone. I mean, I don't think we could solve homelessness in Freedom City by dropping everyone here, or anything like that. It would be hard for people who've always lived in a city to adjust to suddenly being totally agrarian, and very light on the modern conveniences. But I suppose that if there was a refugee population who really needed a place to go, we could work it out. I do want to have more people on Sanctuary eventually, it's just not something I've made any move towards yet. Well, besides the monks and the people like Jacen who come out here to get experience and educate people. The space is certainly there, though. I don't know if you remember the Gorgon invasion? During that whole mess, we filled up acres and acres with sod houses, worried we were going to have to evacuate as many people as we could in the event that the Gorgon couldn't be stopped in time. Now they're just sitting empty, in case of another emergency." She frowned at the remains of the cylinder on the ground and waved a hand at them, whereupon they dissolved into dust. "Plant-based," she observed. "We'll definitely have to have words about cleaning up after oneself. Now you said that your father taught you how to hunt, yes?" she asked Tona. "Where are you from, originally?"
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"Oh no, I'm from Earth Prime," Fleur explained, hopping nimbly over the fallen branch. "I found this world by accident when I was learning to use my dimensional teleportation powers. I can travel anywhere with plants, you see, but this one was a bit of a stretch because there was so little that was alive. It was obviously empty, or so I thought, so it seemed like a good place to practice some of my other powers that it's not easy to play with on Prime. People tend to frown on it if you try to raise a forest in the middle of the city!" she added with a laugh. "On Sanctuary, I had a place of my own away from the city noise and smoke, a place to practice, and a project. It's a world that needs some love, you understand? People did this, ruined the whole place, it seems only fair that I try and help patch it up." She paused again for a moment to check a text message, but seemed to decide it didn't need a response. "Then the Beekeeper released his giant bees on the city, and when he went to jail, they needed a place to live. I felt a bit responsible, since he was my archnemesis at the time and I was one of the reasons he created them, so I said they could come here. Sanctuary, right? Gaian Knight helped build their hive, and I make sure they have their giant flowers. Then we realized that there were actually some survivors on this world, living in terrible conditions, and of course I wasn't going to just sit here and not help them. Gabriel and his monks have been very good about that, they've been helping to teach agriculture and animal husbandry and so far it's all going very well." She was obviously quite proud to talk about her giant pet project. "Oh and Tona, you should go ahead and call me Stesha when we're on Sanctuary, most people do."
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ic This Was A Triumph [Outside] (IC)
Electra replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in The Realms Beyond
In spite of herself, Gina had dozed off on the way back, exhausted physically and mentally by the exertions of the last twenty-odd hours. She managed to remember herself before rubbing her blackened eyes this time, and instead blinked hard as she studied the sensor screens. "This is North Bay," she said in a voice scratchy with sleep. "I'll have the car come pick us up. The windows are tinted, nobody will see in." In a pinch, Gina's car was perfectly capable of driving itself, a trick she seldom exploited but that did come in handy. "You can get cleaned up, I've got lots of clothes for you still at my house." She chuckled ruefully. "Guess you never saw the Christmas present I got for you, did you? Well, it'll come in handy now. You'll come with me, won't you?" she thought to ask belately. "Debriefing or whatever can wait a little while." -
Fleur, obviously loathe to get wet in the cold weather, teleported across the river and examined the metal scrap. "You're right, that's nothing I recognize from around here," she agreed. "And it doesn't even seem like something that comes from Freedom City. I suppose it could mean we have a dimensional or space traveler running around, one who doesn't know better than to litter. But that raises the question of why! Nothing we have here is particularly valuable to a high tech civilization, not even the land. Everything I've rehabilitated is suitable for small-scale agrarian living, not for building cities or industrial planetary farming. What could have drawn anyone here in the first place?"
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"And I've been thinking about starting potty training, but she's still a little young, and I'm not sure I want her growing up any faster," Stesha commented to Min with a sigh, one eye on the little girls playing on the carpet. At this age, a playdate mostly involved Amaryllis viewing Eden as a big and fascinating doll, but once the inevitable poking stage had been dealt with, they seemed to be getting on well. For now, Ammy was happy to empty her own diaper bag of toys, one by one, bringing each one over to where Eden was sitting almost steadily among a pile of pillows. "But washing diapers is such a hassle, and diaper services won't deliver outside the dimension..." She laughed, then checked herself with a puzzled frown as the communicator in the diaper bag chirped. "Phone!" Ammy called, digging it from the bag and bringing it over to her mother. Stesha checked the message. "That's not good," she murmured to Min. "There's a potential jumper on Pyramid Plaza, but she's got some sort of metahuman power going on as well. Apparently she knocked a negotiator unconscious by just looking at him. STAR squad is calling in the Aux League to try and talk her down. Would you like to come with?"
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Fleur followed Tona without complaint, walking with seeming tirelessness through the thick forest. Out this far, the forest had been allowed to winter naturally, so the trees were bare and the leaf litter thick on the ground. Occasionally she used her radio to talk to different people, mostly about what seemed to be an anticipated shipment of vegetable seeds for spring planting. Tona's question took a moment of thought on Fleur's part. "Well, let's see, if you're only counting humans and close-to-humans, there's one hundred fifty-three in the village... no, wait, one hundred fifty-four since Eliza had her baby the other week, then there's me and Ammy, Gaian Knight, Teagan, Gabriel when he's in the neighborhood, and thirty monks at the monastery...so one hundred eighty-nine right now. We're growing!" she added, sounding rather proud of that. "And of course there's the giant bees, but I've stopped counting there because it seems like they're always hatching out some new youngsters. About two hundred there, I would guess. But they're strict vegetarians, and they'd have a hard time getting into and out of the barn even if they wanted to."
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"Well, the question of whether a backup copy of Sharl's program is the same as Sharl's original program invokes a lot of substantial philosophical questions related to the metaphysical nature of being and the soul," Miss A began with some enthusiasm for the subject, 'depending on whether you're a fan of Cartesian dualism in which case you're already up a creek if you've got a holographic body,or if your thoughts align more closely with the monists who believe that existence is wrapped up in some combination of body and mind. Or if you'r an anomalous monist, in which case you believe that body and mind are the same thing so that what happens in the physical and mental realms are identical. Of course that means that whatever you think is who you are and a sentient computer program really is the sum of his programming as much as a human baby is the sum of every thought he's had since birth and the life of the mind is simply a construct created to differentiate between existence qua existence and existence as the service to some greater cosmological theory..." Miss Americana trailed off. "And I'm afraid that's probably not exactly going to answer your question," she admitted, "at least not without some graduate-level work in philosophy, but it's a hard question. I think it's safe to say he will be the same enough. He will be the Sharl he remembers, and the Sharl you remember. And yes, I do believe it will work, though like I said, it won't be easy. He is a very, very complex program."
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"Really?" In a moment Fleur was up the tree as well, hoisted by a thick curl of green vine as easily as if she'd been riding a cherry-picker. "You think it was a person climbing the tree to watch the village?" Like Tona had, Fleur turned her head to look over the village, mismatched and somewhat haphazard, but clean and busy nonetheless. A group of older children were just being released from what was apparently the school building, making a beeline for the small clutch of playground equipment behind it, while a few younger children followed behind with a teacher. One of the children, Tona could see even from this distance, had a mop of curly green hair. "If we have strangers around here, it could mean real trouble," Fleur said with concern. "We've had some problems with the Grue this past year, but I thought that was all cleared up. Maybe it's more refugees after all," she said hopefully, "and they're just terribly hungry and afraid. Can you tell where they went from here?"
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"Honey, Sharl's a computer program," Miss A told the distraught girl gently, even as she fought the completely inappropriate urge to laugh. "He was never alive to start with, not in the way you're thinking. Not in such a way that being destroyed means being dead and beyond help. I have very detailed backups of Sharl in my central database. It will be difficult, and it might take a long time, but there's a very good chance that I'll be able to restore him nearly intact. He won't have any memories of the time since his last backup, of course, but that might be for the best anyway. I'm sure you all can explain to him what happened. If you could send me his emitter and his laptop, it will speed the restoration process up, since I won't have to rebuild them from scratch."
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*wander* This is also a test.
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"I'll be glad to come along if you want me to," Fleur told her. "I just don't want to get in the way of your tracking. I've got a connection to the planet that lets me feel things on it when I try, but that's a bit different from learning what's happened in the past. If you do want to go alone, I'd prefer that you at least take a radio along. We don't have cell towers here or anything, so we communicate by radios to stay in touch. I don't want you to get into trouble out there, especially if there's something we haven't seen and accounted for hanging out in the wild areas."
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Fleur looked up from the conversation she was having with the men, seeming a bit confused. "Snakes?" she repeated. "We don't have any snakes here, at least none that I've seen or heard of." She looked at William, who nodded agreement. "There's just not enough of a rodent or large insect population to sustain them, and no reason to import them for husbandry. Did you find something?" The three came over to have a look at the track Tona had found. "I don't recognize that at all," Fleur admitted. "I would think it might be a wheelbarrow, but there are no treads or anything. It looks like it came right in the barn."
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"Of course it did," Miss A reassured Kimber. "The technical details don't matter so much, but what Sharl did essentially overwrote parts of the Curator's program that were causing it to want to do experiments on living creatures. What he did, and what your team did in bringing down that Curator ship, was enough to send the Curator back to its ringworld for repairs, and even then it may well not be the same afterwards. What all of you did mattered very much." Gina muted her phone just long enough to blow out a breath, wondering how well the overwrought energy being would respond to her excuses at this juncture. "I'm planning on getting to work on him very soon now, but it's a tricky and delicate piece of coding and compiling. I was injured in the fighting and didn't want to work on him when I wasn't certain I'd be at my best. I don't suppose you have his laptop and emitter still?"
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ic This Was A Triumph [Outside] (IC)
Electra replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in The Realms Beyond
"There's nothing I can do for him now," Gina admitted, closing her eyes to feel the headache still pounding behind them. "After today, and... huh, I have no idea what time it is. Maybe today is yesterday already. In any case, I'm spent, got nothing left. Can we just go back to my place and not do anything for awhile? I need to recharge, and you probably do too. It would be a mistake to try and work on Sharl while I'm not on top of my game and before I know exactly what happened. But he'll keep for a couple of days." At this point it seemed like too much effort to even open her eyes or raise her head to look up at him, so she reached out and squeezed his fingers instead, knowing he'd understand. "Let's just go home for now." -
"There is no other village," Fleur said matter-of-factly. "This is the only one. Or if there is another one, it's not anywhere within a five hundred mile radius." She laughed. "The first group of survivors from this world was a total surprise to me, I hadn't realized there were any humans left on Sanctuary at all. After we set up the village, I conducted a very thorough search of the entire surrounding area, just to make sure I wasn't missing even more. The world beyond this cleaned area is really not at all fit for human habitation. Oh, and here are the men who can answer the rest of your questions." The green-clad heroine waved to two men down on the other end of the barn, both of whom seemed to be doing something with a cow's front hoof. One was a weather-roughened man in his mid-thirties, the other was lean and ascetic-looking, maybe early in his twenties at most. "Tona, this is William and Jacen, our animal husbandry specialists. William grew up on Sanctuary, so he's an expert on the area, and Jacen is a third year veterinary student interning from Freedom City. Guys, Tona was wondering if it's possible that the animals might have escaped and wandered further than our search." The older man, William, immediately shook his head. "Nope, not even a little," he replied, his voice accented in a way that was impossible to place. "Not unless a goat's got thumbs they're keepin' secret from us, so's they can work a latch and string. Not only that, but they'd have had to close the door behind 'em for this last one. The cow got taken from out the field, but this one last night went right out of the barn." "That nanny goat is heavily pregnant," Jacen added, frowning. "She wouldn't have wandered away from shelter at night, it's not natural. And if we lose her, that's a serious blow to the herd." "Every animal is precious here," Fleur explained, "they're all carefully selected for genetic diversity and specific hardiness factors. We have to figure out what's going on!"
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"Sure, the barn and the night pens are right over here," Fleur said, leading the way across the field towards a large stone and wood building. Upon closer inspection, it seemed as though the stone portion had been hollowed out of a single massive stone block, fifteen feet tall and half the size of a football field. The loft area was made of widely separated wood planks, topped off by a shake shingle roof. We normally keep the sheep outdoors, but the grass means we're seeing some early lambs already. Whatever it was seems to have gotten right into the barn somehow. We don't lock it, but there's a latch. I'll have William and Jacen explain it to you, they're the experts." The ground was springy under Tona's feet as they crossed the field, her feet and Fleur's leaving faint impressions in the dead grass. It shouldn't be too difficult to follow a trail, except for all the other human and animal tracks that could confuse the matter. "So where did you learn to track?" Fleur asked casually. "It's not a very common skill anymore."
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From the album: Character Pictures
Erin Keeley White (Wander) circa Young Freedom 1.0, 2009. Drawn by alderwitch. -
Pictures of your characters!
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"Kimber, is this about Sharl?" Miss A asked gently, Even without the assistance of the robot body, over the phone it was easy enough for Gina to pretend and slip into the reassuring vocal patterns of the robot, rather than her own clipped "say it as fast as you can and get your mouth shut again" speaking pattern. "I know what happened to him," she told the girl, hoping to spare her at least the agony of saying that part. "I encountered the Curator afterwards and saw what had become of it, and of Sharl. It was obvious..." Miss A paused a second, cleared her throat. "It was obvious that he sacrificed himself to rewrite the Curator's program and stop its attack on Tronik and Earth. Could you tell me exactly how it happened, please?"
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ic This Was A Triumph [Outside] (IC)
Electra replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in The Realms Beyond
"Oh, absolutely," Erin said with great feeling, her arms still looped around his waist. "Though I guess I really ought to go check on how the others are doing downstairs..." She bit her lip, then gave in to the temptation to be just a little irresponsible. "But I'm sure Redbird has them all in hand, even Stratos. She'll tell us if anything weird starts happening." Sliding her hand into his, she started towards the hatch leading the the crew quarters. "I could also use a shower, if you've gotten them working," she admitted with a laugh. "Both of us could." -
January 18, 9:30am Three days after the havoc wreaked by the robotic hero doppelgangers, Freedom City was still finding a precarious balance of normalcy. The rescue work was done, the destroyed buildings were being put back together, the rubble swept up and carted away. Funerals and memorials were being held for the dead, funds raised for the care of the living. As usual in these sorts of events, the Viktor Archeville Foundation, the charitable branch of ArcheTech, was one of the earliest and largest donors of both money and equipment, but for the first time in more than a year, the charismatic CEO was nowhere to be seen. In fact, no one had seen the unmistakable Miss Americana since before the Day of Wrath, and people were beginning to wonder. On the morning of January 18, ArcheTech released a statement that Miss Americana had been injured while defending Blackstone Prison against a robot doppelganger and would be recovering at her home. All inquiries would be routed through her office until further notice. Not too far away from ArcheTech, in an unassuming house on an unremarkable street, Miss Americana herself was busy catching up on her correspondence. Or rather, Miss Americana lay in useless pieces on a lab table in the corner while Gina sat at her computer and picked through her messages. There were a lot of them. She felt no guilt about taking a couple of days off after the crazy trip through space to save Steve. It had taken almost that long for her to just start feeling normal and safe again. She might even have been willing to play hooky a little longer, but Steve had insisted it was time for him to get back to his job, so she'd done the same. The first thing that stood out when she checked her transcribed voicemails was the more than a dozen messages from Ghost Girl, aka Kimber Storm, all wanting to talk about Sharl. Gina remembered, of course, being told about Sharl's teammates, and suspected she knew what this was about. Sharl was another topic she'd been unfairly putting off, but it really had been a difficult couple of days. Steeling herself, Gina activated the voice modulator that would trade her own voice for the more dulcet tones of Miss Americana, then called the offered number. "Hello, this is Miss Americana, calling for Kimber Storm, is she available?"
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ic This Was A Triumph [Outside] (IC)
Electra replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in The Realms Beyond
Erin sighed, studying Trevor with a hint of frustration. "There's nothing to make up," she told him flatly. "So you got fooled by a robot designed by a superintelligent space alien specifically for the purpose of fooling you. BFD, so did everybody else. If I do go through a weird time when I'm not feeling like myself and I need to be alone, I'd rather you give me the benefit of the doubt than start wondering if I've been replaced by something sinister. When things really started going down, you figured it out quick enough, didn't you? And then you were out here as fast as humanly possible, without even taking time for a meal or a shave or a nap, just so you could get to me, right?" She put a hand on his cheek, gently but with just enough pressure in her fingers to keep his eyes focused directly on hers. "Just because something bad happened doesn't necessarily mean you screwed up. Sometimes bad things happen and there's nothing you could have done, and all you can do is try to fix it. Now are you going to wallow in it for awhile longer, or are you going to be as happy to see me as I am to see you?" -
ic This Was A Triumph [Outside] (IC)
Electra replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in The Realms Beyond
Gina sighed at Steve's question. "The data was protected," she told him, "inasmuch as I have a fresh backup of his files in my database, taken just before he left on his last mission. But of course that data isn't all of him, otherwise every backup I did of him would requite petabyes of memory. I tried to isolate all the things that were unique to him as opposed to the patterns he had in common with all other Tronikians. In theory, it should be a fairly simple matter of recompiling all that data with the stock Tronikian "physiology" coding, then doing the same emulator programming I did when he first arrived in Freedom City to allow him to interact cleanly with our technology. In practice, though..." She was quiet for a minute, then admitted, "In practice, I've never done it before, and I'm not 100% sure how it will work, or if it will work. If I was wrong, if I missed anything important, part of him could be lost forever. Even if all goes well, he's going to lose memories, maybe more than that. Truly sentient AI is such a tricky thing, and every AI is a little bit different. All I can do right now is hope for the best. I shouldn't have let him go!" she said with sudden anger. "It was stupid to give a bunch of kids access to a lot of high technology then send them haring off by themselves with no supervision. I should've made him stay back where it was safe. Safer," she amended. "But he wanted to be a hero so badly." -
ic This Was A Triumph [Outside] (IC)
Electra replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in The Realms Beyond
Erin studied Trevor for a minute, then gave Charlie a kiss between the ears and set him down on the floor, where he immediately scampered off to harass the little robot in the corner. "Well, it kind of does make me feel better," she allowed, letting herself see the bizarre humor in the situation. "I mean, the Curator made a robot with my memories and it stayed sane for almost six entire weeks. I think that's promising." She rose from the chair again and crossed over to him, sticking her hands in the pockets of her borrowed clothes. "But I feel kind of bummed now, because I missed the holidays. You had to put up with another year of crazy Erin, and I really wasn't going to do that this year." She leaned against the wall next to him, her face inches from his. "I had plans for us to do Christmas together, you know, maybe put up a tree and stuff, do eggnog and turkey and presents with your grandpa and all that. Do you think it's too late?"
