revivalproject | RATtrap

Entry tags:

RATtrap

WHO: Tony and Cal
WHERE: The Agrii ship and the Mainframe
WHAT: ReBoot. You guys know ReBoot? 🍁
WHEN: March, after the AI message
WARNINGS: Extra fake violence?

Returning to the ship had not been part of the plan. The plan, however, had not factored in the sheer amount of activity back in the city, so keeping his distance had become more relative. It still made Tony anxious to pass by the Glitter Food, then disembark on the Agrii ship in a slow saunter that might have come across as a swagger as he took his time assessing who was in the hangar and how to best get by without being engaged. Compared to the hangar back in Temba, it was downright peaceful, without so many little bots learning their basic programming and plants chattering anxiously. Tony could push his sunglasses back up his nose and heft D.A.T.A. against his chest, patting the side of his shell restlessly. Maybe it wasn't so bad. The trip had given him a few more hours before he had to say goodbye to the little nuisance.

It was only when he was close to the engineering bay that he sent Cal the text, brief and to the point. I'm here. Going to try the astromech. The timing was meant to reduce how likely he was to be seen around anyone else, but it didn't account for the cluster of Agrii around Enide's casing, slowing Tony's approach cautiously. They did seem excited to see him when they noticed, but it was Enide who greeted him, causing the Agrii to scatter and leave Tony considering the tools left for him. While Enide explained that she intended to go into stasis and these gloves and helmets were to interface with her in that state, Tony set D.A.T.A. down on the console to extend his spidery legs and wander a familiar ginger, tapping rhythm along the metal, leaving Tony's hands free to examine the new interface curiously.

"I kind of brought what I hoped was a workaround..." he ultimately said to the AI, thought he hadn't put the strange headgear down yet. A workaround wasn't actually as effective as eliminating the problem. Even if it meant putting his trust in untested devices and dampening his senses. And connecting to her network via Extremis only had him bouncing off of those same bugs. D.A.T.A. came tip-tapping back toward him, peering up at him with that big, guileless camera eye that said the bot knew exactly who Tony was. He didn't need Tony to mutter, "See if you can find a place to plug in," to keep him busy while Tony brought the helmet up.

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"On my planet, we call that skiing," Tony replied as he accepted Cal's help up, then daintily helped Cal straighten his poncho like he had been the one so abused. "It's just, you know, usually on purpose." And ice would have been a helpful clue before Tony stepped off the ledge. He primly gathered himself as he finally got a look around, tugging his cape back around his shoulder and combing his hair back, feeling fairly confidently that no limbs or parts had been left behind, though still ended up frowning back the way they had come. Very still and solid there were a set of normal, innocent stairs leading back up.

"Wait, I think I've heard of that too. That's when you use something on your feet for it, right?"

Once Tony's finished fussing with him, Cal turned to look around at wherever it was they'd found themselves in. Compared to the glimpse of what they'd seen upstairs, it looked relatively straightforward. But then that was probably because it offered but a singular new door to go through. That faint breeze wafted from there, although when Cal peeked around the opening all he saw was roughly hewn geometric rock formations, backlit by the faintest aquamarine glow. A cavern? He frowned, starting to look back over at Tony before freezing as an odd, skittering sound echoed from beyond the doorway somewhere.

"You hear that?"

Tony had made more than enough noise on his way down that his tiptoeing after Cal, hands splayed carefully and breath held to listen, must have been pointless caution. If there was something beyond the door, it was more than ready to receive them. Maybe that was why Tony couldn't immediately see anything as he leaned over Cal's shoulder, hands on his back to keep him steady for a listening beat. Something was definitely moving, though; a tap-tap-tap sound with a hollow echo, and the more Tony listened, the more he thought that faint pulse of light followed it along the inside of the wall. He tapped a finger where it still rested on Cal's shoulder, indicating subtly with his chin where the light might have been skittering and then came to a stop simultaneously with the sound, pressed into a corner.

Cal nodded slowly as he watched. So the light source was what was making the noise, was it...?

He had to wonder how well they'd be able to sneak up on anything given the armor, but at least they weren't going to be completely caught by surprise if something was waiting for them beyond that doorway. Cal put a hand to the hilt of his sword, glancing at Tony before he slowly drew it from its sheathe.

Time to go into the creepy dark cave, then...

With less confidence, Tony followed by finding his strange maybe-gun, both hands around it by his hip as he went creeping into the cool dark close on Cal's heels, watching over his shoulder for any other movement. The glow did seem to be everywhere in here, that richer pulse harder to spot now that it had gone still and blended into the ambiance. Slowly, he pulled one hand back to his holster, feeling along it for the snap that he knew was there and came away easily with a tug. It was a tiny, light notion, weighing less than a coin. Tony held his breath again as he flicked it with the nail of his thumb toward the corner where the movement had stopped.

He couldn't be sure if it even made a sound when it hit, but the reaction was immediate. All of the light in the room suddenly swarmed, bright and flickering enough to make Tony squint, that skittering noise suddenly a crashing wave as the the whole room seemed to shift with the roil of it. The light receded, fleeing from the contact, pouring its way down into the cavern. In its absence, the room suddenly felt warm, and dark.

...okay, that was a whole lot more than Cal was expecting, and he was left staring, almost mesmerized by the light show, making a slight face at the noise that accompanied it. Wow, but that sounded horrifying.

The Jedi started after the light, but the sources were moving far faster than he was, even as he threw caution to the wind, imagining that his steps would well be masked by the sound of their retreat. He slowed again as the darkness settled in, not liking the difference of the atmosphere that settled thereafter. The sharp sound of metal colliding with rock had him wince as he staggered to the side of a blunted stalagmite.

Tony barely avoided running him over in the dark, the sound of the collision his only warning to pull his own brakes and still bump up against Cal's back with his free hand finding a hold under his arm. Quickly then, he was feeling up to wrap around Cal's mouth, pulling him back against his shoulder and into the breeze of his shushing under his breath. The sound of the strange retreat hadn't stopped; it had changed. Tony could still hear it, whispering away from them, but in its place was an air pressure change, pressing against his ears, making him very aware of that growing warmth. He wasn't claustrophobic by nature, but he was sure then that he was trapped, teeth in the dark already poised to bite down around them.

No wonder Cal said that the AI had felt afraid. The slightest brush against something they might have been looking for had been replaced with a black hole. At least they had found the problem.

It was unsettling, how heavy the stillness felt, and Cal stood very still as Tony held him, eyes futilely scanning the darkness for signs of anything.

He didn't need the Force to know he had a bad feeling about this, the wrongness left in the wake of things. What he wasn't quite sure of was whether something was still there or if it was the environment itself that turned hostile the moment something intruded where it shouldn't.

Standing there didn't seem like a great idea, but aside from being held back, Cal wasn't quite sure pressing ahead in the dark was any better.

Cautiously, Tony drew his arm back to tuck against his side, just holding the fold of Cal's cape yet to keep track of him in the dark. He should have been getting used to it by now. Instead, he was sweating, and felt the urge to reach the other hand out toward the wall, gingerly searching for where he thought it must be. One of them had to break the silence eventually, but Tony kept it to a low murmur as he hoped, "Maybe they'll come back."

Tentatively, Cal stuck out his foot before remembering he was still carrying that ridiculous sword. He slowly moved it about at foot level to try and circumvent any more roadblocks as he started forward. He wasn't even sure there had been a real path through this, they hadn't had a great look of the place even when it was briefly lit up.

"Maybe," he quietly considered. "...would that be a good thing?"

Tony started to take a breath, then cut it off to shrug; a rustling of his cape and subtle shift of air in the dark. "The light was nice," was the most conclusive reply that he could provide. "Can't you, you know--" he tried to ask with another whisper of movement, and faint chiming of his fingers ringing together up near his temple.

Cal looked over in his direction, barely able to make out the movement but for the sounds that came with it. He shook his head.

"It's not quite working the same way here... unless..." He frowned thoughtfully. If Venidelosia was able to generate actual emotions, maybe there was something to work with within...well, however one defined a computer's subconscious. There was an awareness there, so perhaps there were also some responses to the intruding code even when the AI herself wasn't quite aware of it.

"I was trying to focus on more basic senses since it was throwing me off not sensing things like the guards at the wall," he explained, sounding like... wait, was he? Yes, yes he was. He was sitting himself down on the floor.

When Cal first demurred, it had made immediate sense and Tony was ready to acknowledge that psychic powers probably didn't work in a simulation. Everything else felt so vivid, the sweat down his back and the shimmer of the metal as it shifted over his shoulder, that it took the reminder that these weren't real senses to make him nod and start flapping a hand to recalibrate. By then, though, Cal's voice was dropping, not lower but physically, drawing Tony's chin down onto his chest, then eyebrows raised as he tried vainly to search around above them like he might make eye contact with a judgmental passerby. "If you need a nap we can, I don't know, come back..." he prodded.

"Venidelosia's becoming more aware of herself, somehow. Almost like becoming alive, if that's even possible. I wouldn't be able to sense her frustration and fear otherwise, but something to her programming and the system itself seems to be advanced enough to allow for this. Maybe there's something more to it that we don't know, but..."

Cal folded his legs, closing his eyes as he settled into place.

"If there's that much of a response, then maybe I can try to narrow things down. Let me know if anything changes, just in case."

This time when Tony glanced around, still hovering protectively close to Cal and not eager to step any further away in case he lost the kid in the dark, it was both an anxious search like those changes might happen immediately, and a thoughtful scan. "Don't you feel those things from BD?," he wondered. Cal spoke about this development like he hadn't even considered it a possibility. "He gets scared, he gets annoyed. Of course synthetics can feel. It just happens backwards, you know, you can out screaming and then had to learn the math..." It only occurred to him then that maybe Cal needed to concentrate and not everyone worked as well as he did with the constant sound of his own voice. There was only a brief pause before he was filling the dark again, "They can lie, too, of course," then he was sucking in a sharp breath to press his lips together in a sort of apology. Even that didn't stop the restless drumming of his fingers on the metal plating of his armor.

"Not exactly. Droids can emulate emotions, learning how to respond to certain situations and stimuli. But unfortunately they're not connected to the Force since they're manufactured. I think that's part of why they were used by the Confederacy against the Republic and the Jedi, since they can't be sensed in the same way." Droids didn't give anything away with their calculations and protocols.

Cal fell silent, his slight smile unseen as he heard Tony continue to fidget, not that he could blame the man. The stillness was unsettling, and aside from Tony, it just felt incredibly blank, here in the depths of an alien ship. But there was a kernel of something, like a faint pulse.

There wasn't any argument against how the concept worked practically, it clearly must not have just been Cal with a strange magnetic blindspot, but the rationale still had Tony unsettled. He couldn't quite bring himself to move away yet, so the pacing that he was compelled to was more like a rocking, shuffling side to side where he could still sense Cal nearby. That was no force sense; it was warmth, or air pressure, or something very tangible that Tony could measure about a person being nearby. It didn't always translate to synthetics, either.

"We kind of learn to respond, too," he still argued. "Baby isn't scared of spiders until you tell her to be." Other emotions were maybe harder to articulate in this theory.

"Machines aren't natural creations," Cal said. "The Force is an energy field that binds and exists in all living things."

The pulse could have been his imagination, or perhaps Tony's clear anxiety. It really was hard to make anything out with the man there, and harder still to concentrate when he was engaging in conversation. After a moment longer Cal sighed, opening his eyes, not that it seemed to make much difference, and it didn't appear as though the light had come back.

"I'm not getting anything."

Maybe that was a relief. The AI being something else, not a machine, not a 'natural creation', felt like a larger problem than purging a few bugs in the code. Should they have called a doctor? Tony let out a slow, measured breath like he had been holding it and not talking the entire time, then finally let himself turn around on the spot, hoping to make some new direction out of this dead end in the darkness. "What if a man made himself more machine?" he still ventured as he scanned. "Replaced the parts, until he wasn't limited anymore by biology. Would he still be connected?"

Cal still felt the AI was still more machine than...whatever it was becoming, or discovering it had the potential to be. Requesting bugs to be taken care of in this manner was still more of a technical response, even if the presentation was...unusual.

"Then how much of the actual man would there still be? Is his mind still organic? That's edging more into something philosophical, isn't it? At what point do we stop becoming a person?" He got to his feet, picking up his sword again with a faint scrape of the blade off the floor.

"The connection isn't physical, it's more...ephemeral."

"They are people, though," Tony replied. That kind of language wasn't useful to this question, he thought, when he could declare, "Cayde is a person. York is a person." He was less confident in sharing how much he thought the less human-shaped synthetics should have been considered people. That might have been for when he was feeling less vulnerable in the dark. "So, it's something else. Whatever it is that becomes a ghost, or a demon," he was willing to venture, though he wasn't about to go as far as claim this element must have been a spiritual one, like a soul. He just had never seen a robot demon.

The Jedi tilted his head in Tony's direction, eyebrow arched. "I don't know about that. A demon?" He'd heard people to be described as fighting as such, used more of a descriptor than anything else.

"It's alive. It exists in plants, it distills into the kyber crystals that we use to make our lightsabers." He wasn't sure if he should bring up that he didn't really sense anything from York, which made it more obvious for what he was. Cayde was a different story and Cal wasn't sure how that one worked, but different worlds brought different people.

"Not exactly finding our bug problem though," he had to prompt, still looking as he started again in the direction opposite where they'd started. They hadn't been so quiet for a time now, so maybe that was the other problem.

It took Tony a beat to work out that those sounds meant Cal was on the move, and did his best to follow them, taking his turn to finally bump into that protruding rock and giving it a bow of apology when he went hurrying by. "Your sword isn't more alive or a person than BD," he pointed out. It was only after he had said it, sure that he had made a challenging point about what the force actually was, that it occurred to Tony to ask cautiously, "Is it?" Some people really did have that kind of relationship with their weapons, and Cal didn't sound so convinced about the demon thing. Maybe he didn't sense their connection to the force, either, and they were something else again.

"Not the sword, the kyber inside of it. The heart of a lightsaber," Cal said. "It resonates with us. When we're younglings, we're taken to the caves of Ilum, where the kyber crystals form. We have to seek out the one that's ours, that we can hear alone. And we're tested..."

He breathed a laugh. "It's...not a fun test. I went through it twice, the last time most recently because I had to rebuild my master's saber and really make it my own." Nearly froze to death too, if not for BD-1.

The distinction wasn't very meaningful to Tony, who only grimaced at Cal's back in the dark for what sounded like the defense of a rock's humanity over his friend's. It only waned slightly as he considered that it might have been reasonable that Cal felt more strongly about this rock that talked to him.

"Couldn't you, you know, get a transfer credit, or...?" Tony muttered, without much context for what this test could entail. These rocks were high maintenance, too.

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