ic Someday, Somehow (IC)

[Electra]

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?"

[Gizmo]

"O-oh!" The voice on the other end of the seemed startled, getting softer as the phone was reflexively pushed away from the speaker. In this case, since Kimber was telekinetically lifting the phone into the air near the ceiling of the dormatory room she shared with Indira Singh at Claremont Academy, it was able to go much further than arm's length. The poltergiest quickly drew it back to where she was floating with her legs tucked under her, biting her lip in consternation. "Hello? Ah, this is me. I mean, I'm Kimber. S-sorry, I'm just-- I tried getting through to you! I didn't know any other numbers to try and you should have known already and it's my fault but I tried and..." The rush of words broke off as the phantom choked with emotion despite her lack of a corporeal throat. "Jams. I'm sorry, ma'am. This is so, so hard but I wanted to be the one to tell you." There was a pause before she added. "Y-you... may want to be sitting down? I think that would be a good idea."

[Electra]

"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?" 

[Gizmo]

"Y-you do?!" Kimber sputtered, completely caught off guard with the terrible news she'd spent the past days and nights incessently practicing in her head and aloud, trying to figure out the best way to deliver it to Miss Americana suddenly rendered unnecessary. Of all the possible scenarios and reactions she'd dreaded this hadn't even occurred to her. "I... okay," she finally replied dully, shoulders sagging.

"Sharl and I went into Tronik while everyone else was fighting off all the robots and tentacle and the Curator was in there making people disappear and destroying everything and talking all crazy," the poltergeist began again, her voice picking up speed and getting tighter as she went. "So we were fighting him but he was still hurting people anyway and I thought we were going to beat him up enough that he had to leave but Sharl wanted to make sure the Curator could never, ever, ever come back so he... did something, I don't understand it!" the teeange apparition lamented. Over the phone line, Gina could hear the telltale signs of tears. "He did it and the Curator was gone and Sharl... he was... he was just a body, there wasn't anything there and I should have felt him go but I didn't and I don't know what the means it's not fair I should have stopped him we were the good guys I couldn't let his parents and sister see somebody had to know--"

With a shuddering inhalation and choked sob the stream of words cut off. There was a long silence before Kimber very quietly said, "Somebody needed to know he died being very brave. That it mattered."

[Electra]

"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?" 

[Gizmo]

There was a silence that lastest long enough to become increasingly awkward. In the dormatory room, Kimber's expression went from confusion to horror to anxiety, fluxuating between those emotions and settling on a mixture of all three. "W-work...? Ma'am, I... I don't think you understand," she managed with considerable difficulty. With the phone floating in front of her, both of the phantom's hands were free to knit into her hair in distress. "Sharl didn't just get hurt. He-- there wasn't anything left. H-he..." Kimber squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself to say the word. "...he died."

[Electra]

"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." 

[Gizmo]

"What? B-but... no!" Kimber blurted out, aghast in more than the usual manner. It took her a while to process what Miss Americana was telling her but the initial reflexive objection was difficult to overcome. "I mean... that can't be right, can it? It wouldn't really be him, it'd just be a copy..." she added more quitely sounding hesitant now that she was arguing a topic of which she clearly lacked an understanding with a respected adult. "Do you... do you really think it could work?" More than anything the phantom was terrified of getting her hopes up after the crushing blow of losing her friend in the first place.

[Electra]

"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." 

[Gizmo]

"Mnngh..." Kimber made a muffled, beseiged sound at the mention of the word 'soul'. She didn't really expect the scientist to understand - Miss A didn't really believe in magic let alone necromantic attutunement, except in a very clinical way - but a big part of her distress was due to Sharl's passing triggering nothing for her awareness of death around her. It had been comforting when it meant they didn't have to feel bad about destroying the robot posing as Headmaster Summers but in the case of her friend it raised a number of questions she just didn't feel equipped to answer. "So... is it... sort of like being in surgery? I don't want to get anyone's hopes up for no reason, is the thing. Ko- Papercut took it pretty hard. ...we all did." There was another sniff before she added, "He was the first one of the team I met, you know. Back in Thunder Bay?"

[Electra]

"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." 

[Gizmo]

The combination of Miss Americana's breezy allowance of Kimber's analogy with the technical specifics of what she'd be doing rally didn't do anything to settle the poltergeist's turbulent misgivings. "I... I guess he'd want you to have his techie stuff anyway," she rationalized uncertainly. "We kept all the pieces. I thought maybe we should bury it, kinda like my bones, since it went pretty bad for me when my corpse was just left lying around, but some of the others thought there might be important information still on it."

[Electra]

"No, you did exactly right," Miss A assured Kimber hastily. "I'll have someone stop by campus to pick them up sometime this afternoon, if you could just leave them in the office. Thank you for calling and telling me what happened, I really do appreciate it. I'll make sure that you hear as soon as anything happens with his rebuilding. You can go ahead and tell your friends that, too. He's very proud to be working with all of you, and he'll be back with you as soon as possible." She ended the call quickly after that, then sent a quick text to Steve to ask him to pick up the emitter on the way home from work. Not having the robot body was going to be damned inconvenient, she could already tell.

 

It took another hour for her to return all her messages, even with shunting the less important ones off to her assistants at ArcheTech,  but after that she ordered her calls held and no disturbances.  It took hours just to set up a clean workspace within her mainframe to her satisfaction, but there would be no errant variables, no lost snips of code coming in to mess things up. Theoretically, she could keep trying again and again till she got a proper copy of Sharl that worked just right, but the philosophical implications of a string of mistakes were more disturbing than any question Ghost Girl had raised. She intended to get it right on the first try. 

[Avenger Assembled]

"That’s true,”  Sharl admitted, “But I guess I’m more like a starfish that learns how to fly and starts rescuing the others, I...”

 

Sharl's voice trailed off as he looked around himself. He wasn't in Miss A's lab in the 13th Floor, that was for sure - instead he was inside his 'house' at the desk Gina had programmed for him, looking down at Lora sleeping at his feet. He was just about to ask Miss A what was going on when the dog woke up and looked up at him. With a yip, the big dog jumped on him and began licking his startled face, woofing excitedly, and Sharl automatically gave the excited dog a hard hug before gently shoving her weight back onto the floor. "Easy girl, easy..." he said out loud. "Miss A? Gina? What happened?" he called out loud, knowing his mentor could watch him without him seeing her. 

[Electra]

Gina startled at the voice, raising her head off her own desk to stare blearily into the computer screen. "Oh hey," she said in a scratchy voice. "The recompiler is finished. Awesome." She ran a hand over her face, wiping a trace of drool from the corner of her mouth. Too many late nighters on this project, what with one thing and another. Typing in a series of quick commands, she overlaid a set of diagnostics on half of Sharl's interface window. "Looking good," she muttered, "no major error flags, no glitches so far... how do you feel, Sharl?" she asked him. 

[Avenger Assembled]

"I feel...fine," said Sharl suspiciously as he took in his new circumstances. He'd gone from projecting in Miss A's lab to the inside of what felt like Gina's personal hard-drive. Sharl was quick on the uptake, and Gina could see the monitors that showed his stress jump a little. "Why did you upload me?" he asked, a little bit of concern in his voice and even the shadow of hostility fading as he scratched behind the still-excited Lora's ears. "Sssh, ssh...Is there something wrong with my program? Everything seemed okay when I got up this morning, and I didn't have any problems interfacing with the backup drive system or the Wonderbus..." His voice trailed off as he stared up at the spot he knew Gina preferred to communicate from. "What's going on?" 

[Electra]

"Okay, that's good," she told him distractedly. "Your program is looking good, all the integration points read clean and the memory matrix is stable. I'm going to synchronize your internal clock now, hold on one second." She tapped in another series of commands, and suddenly Sharl realized how much time had passed, nearly ten days since he'd laid on the table in Miss A's lab. But where all the memories of that time should've been, there was... nothing. Blank void. 

 

"All right," Gina told him, her voice brisk but in the way she got when she was avoiding talking about something. "Give me your personal information, then tell me everything you can about the last day you remember." 

[Avenger Assembled]

"My name is Sharl Tulink, I am a citizen of Tronik. My teacher is Gina Evans and my best friend is Koshiro," said Sharl automatically before he said, "What do I remember? I was sitting on the table and you were scanning me, and we were talking about my plans for the trip to Erde, but that was ten days ago now. Did something happen to my memory?" he asked, looking very concerned. "I can't...I can't feel my projector. Is something wrong with me?" he asked her. "Can I project in your lab? I can't remember anything after you were scanning me, it's like I just...popped from one moment to the next, with nothing in between. Did my memories get wiped?" 

[Electra]

"Not exactly," Gina said carefully. "Here, give me a minute." In just a few moments, there was a knock on the door of his simulated bedroom, and Gina was standing there. She'd given up the generic matronly avatar she'd used with him in his first days out of Tronik and now looked substantially as she did on the outside, just somewhat more attractive. "I can finish the scanning in here just as easily." First, though, she took a long look at him, then smiled in what seemed to be great relief. "You look good," she told him. 

 

Motioning him to sit down on the bed, she sat next to him and began running a scanner up and down near his body. "Your memory wasn't wiped, per se, and there's nothing wrong with you. I had to restore you from a backup," she finally admitted. "There was a serious incursion by the Curator just after your trip to Erde, and you were killed fighting him. Luckily, I had taken that fresh backup just the day before, so you didn't lose much beyond the one day. It just took some time to restore you properly afterwards." 

[Avenger Assembled]

Sharl had looked very glad to see Gina face-to-face, but her words made him white as a ghost. "What? I died? How?" He shook his head. "I mean...start from the beginning. The Curator attacked after we came back, okay. Did we make it through the mission, at least? Is the other Tronik safe? Are my friends okay?" He ran his hands through his hair, his computer vitals, at least, still looking fine. "I know I have a lot of questions but you're telling me things and I don't understand!" His mind ran to its obvious conclusion and he looked at Gina, his eyes wide. "What happened to _my_ Tronik?" 

[Electra]

Gina recoiled visibly from Sharl's display of emotion, but the computer gave her enough of a buffer to keep her from retreating entirely. "No, I mean no, Tronik is safe, both Troniks are safe. I had someone check on them personally after the dust settled. Your team is okay too. When I said you were killed fighting him, I guess I should've said you were killed defeating him. You... jesus, I don't know exactly what you did, but you dismantled yourself and threw yourself into its mainframe like a virus. Stopped up the whole works and ended the battle right there."

 

She twisted her fingers together, but kept talking. "And it was a good thing too, because the Curator had agents all over Freedom City, and heroes it had kidnapped. One of your classmates, Quickstep, was abducted more than two months ago. And..." she swallowed. "And Steve was one of the abductees as well, since early December. They were very clever Curator-drone duplicates. By now everyone who was taken is back, and they're cleaning up the remains of the Curator's ship at the North Pole, so things are getting back to normal." 

[Avenger Assembled]

"Oh..." Sharl fell silent at that, gradually accepting the bizarre circumstances his mentor was describing. He tangled his hands together on his lap, pulling away from Gina when he sensed her reaction. "I guess I have a lot of catching up to do. But you're okay, and my friends are okay, and Steve is okay?" When Gina nodded at that, Sharl said, "I don't...I don't remember any of it. I've never know what I would do if the Curator showed up, or attacked Tronik, I always thought I'd call you, or the Freedom League, or Dragonfly...but I guess I came up with something." He smiled thinly at Gina, then his face fell. The fate of his body didn't cross his mind, but who might have seen it did. "Was the fight in Tronik? Did my family see it happen? "

[Electra]

"I don't know," Gina admitted. "I wasn't part of it and didn't hear much about it for a few days afterwards. Miss Americana got slagged in a fight during the initial confusion in the city, and then I had to help rescue Steve and the other abductees off the ringworld. Your friend Kimber told me a little about what happened, but not much. I haven't had time or the ability to go investigate for myself. But I know that both Troniks are safe and functional, and that because of Young Freedom's timely intervention, the casualties were light enough not to require an attempt at backup restoration." She spread her hands helplessly. "Maybe your friends will be able to tell you." 

[Avenger Assembled]

"Okay, well...if something bad happened, I should go to Tronik first," said Sharl hesitantly. "I mean, people there will be looking for Citizen to help them, even if he doesn't have any answers. I can't just go talk to my friends and worry about my family. If I go there right now, I can help and come back in the morning to see everybody. I..." He fell silent for a moment, thinking things over. "Gina, I'm still not sure I understand what happened. You said you were able to fix me, right? Using what you knew about how my body works to put it back together. Like doctoring? So when you talk about backups, what do you mean?" 

[Electra]

"You're not going anywhere just yet," Gina told him firmly, "not even out to the projectors in my lab. I didn't pull three all-nighters in a row to have you spaz out on me and have your legs fall off or something wretched like that. Once I've got these diagnostics finished, then you can project into the room, and if that works all right, maybe onto the network at Claremont to see your friends. But you're not going to be visiting Tronik for a few days yet, not till I'm totally sure you're physically ready to reintegrate." 

 

She stifled a yawn, wishing the simulated soft drinks in Sharl's fridge would have any effect on her. On the other hand, if she had any more caffeine she was likely to throw up anyway. "Backup, you know, like data backup. You got important computer programs, you back them up. I took one of you every time you came in for checkups, just to be on the safe side. I wasn't copying everything every time, obviously,but your brain patterns, your memories, the things that made you unique. When your program was destroyed, I took the backup and recombined it with a stock Tronik template and fused them together, and restored you to exactly the state you were in on January 14."