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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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.

Cal chuckled a little. "Non-transferable, unfortunately. Actually, it's pretty terrible, having a bunch of kids wander icy caverns alone. We're on a time-limit too. To get in, the ice had to be melted from the entrance. It slowly starts icing over again. That on top of having to face our fears, and learning just how strong our trust in the Force is... It's a lot."

He shook his head. "Seemed a lot harder the second time around. I was almost ready to give up. BeeDee saved me. I don't know where I'd be without him." A faint breeze filtered towards them, perhaps marking the threshold of the next chamber.

"He's my friend, after all."

The sound of a short inhale came from behind Cal, and the windchime clatter of Tony's waving hand as he prepared to say something glib, then evidently reconsidered. The second time should have been easier, when Cal's faith was such a physical thing. It didn't take Tony long to land instead on, "Losing him must have really..." with another tinkling wave, this time without the words for what might happen to anyone's faith after a tragedy like that. The idea was more alien to Tony than these VR halls.

"Losing...?" Cal started to ask, but he halted again, bringing a hand up to stop Tony although he wasn't quite sure how far the other was behind him so he might have ended up smacking him in the process.

He said nothing by way of explanation, but that was because the breeze had seemed abruptly cut off the moment they'd taken the next few steps. The light from before seemed a far presence, hidden by more shadowed obstructions. The heat had returned, settling over them like a physical thing.

"What is that...?" he wondered, frowning into the darkness between them and the light before glancing up...and freezing.

"Uh. Tony? Above us."

At a glance, the cavern ceiling above was dotted in glowing red, which seemed far too numerous until one grouping and then another moved, suggesting that clusters belonged to singular entities.

The gloom that Tony had hardly noticed seeping into their dark hall was just enough to make out the shadow of that gesture before he had to physically walk into it. He still took Cal's raised hand in response, drawing it down with an equally measured, slow exhale as he tracked a similar search across this new space, trying to get a sense of the proportions of it somehow between the shadows. Those calculations had to run in the background as Cal directed him upward, and after a beat, Tony could only really offer optimistically, "Red's a good colour. One of the best." The optimism was not nearly enough to make him eager to test these lights the same way he had the last ones; they just couldn't stand around waiting for the other one to make a move. Tony didn't have the patience for that. This time, he didn't take aim for the glow, but slowly lifted a hand toward the wall, keeping his focus on those red points while he tapped his ringing fingers against the stone lightly.

"Friendly advice if you ever see someone with a red saber? Don't engage."

Cal had to wonder if that applied to the above, the attention unsettling enough even without being able to actively sense any intent. He stood still, hand tightening around his weapon, eyes flicking over in the direction of the sound once Tony brought it in contact with the rocky surface. He looked up again just as the forms above them shifted almost in unison along with an echoing clatter, the red glowing brighter, enough to start faintly making out the individual shapes that contained each cluster of eyes.

Tony gave a small pout, ready to argue that red probably looked really cool, actually, until he managed to make out the shadow of too many legs to match those too many eyes, roiling to make that clattering noise. Right now, red was not making a good case for itself. They came roiling toward the vibration that Tony had sent singing through the wall, making him recoil, hands up tight to his chest with daintily spread fingers, grimacing at the impression of centipedes or cockroaches rushing toward him.

They crashed into each other, becoming a tight knot of chaos that was suddenly a pulsing, lurid glow with all of them trying to press into the same edge of the doorway. This close, in the intensity of the light, those eyes looked like they oozed, rubbery and distorting in the crush of the bodies. "Do you think they can come through the wall...?," Tony wondered, not well enough convinced of the security of that layer between them to lower his defensive hands. He only realized then that they seemed so perceptively wet because his skin was immediately slick with sweat in the crush of heat that rolled off of them.

The sound alone was enough to make Cal cringe, stepping back. "Don't know what good that's going to do if they're already in here," he pointed out. How many of them were there? And would the weapons they'd been granted actually work against them? It was a little disconcerting not to be very certain of either.

"Is it weird to think that they weren't actively hostile until now?" He paused. "...or is this not hostile yet?"

"They're..." Tony tried to answer, completely at a loss and ultimately landing on, "curious." It felt reasonable then that they might reflect some of his curiosity, after all, which was enough to bring Tony a little closer to where they seethed again, even with his pinkies still raised. Getting closer didn't make it any easier to discern where one creature ended and another began, though, and only made Tony squint in the light that they gave off. He raised a hand to give another experimental tap to the same stone, light as plucking a guitar string. It felt like the whole room heaved in response, Tony's mouth going dry in the stifling burst of heat, his squinting becoming rapid blinking that made the cracks that splintered through the stone appear like a low framerate render.

"Are they?"

Cal wasn't so sure, but the weight of the atmosphere was incredibly stifling then, making him gasp.

"...wh-what if...the blue light is encrypted data, and it gets pushed back whenever an external source attempts to access it. By these things...

"But continuous poking in an attempt to get to that data eventually triggers a harsher response. Like when it zapped BeeDee when he tried to scomp in and track the changes..."

A harsher response was a good way of getting attention. While Cal was putting it all together for himself, Tony muttered, "Way ahead of you," and didn't give him the chance to rationalize any further before Tony was hauling back to slam a heel into the splintering crack in the wall. It didn't quite go through, but the structure gave a groan of protest that ran through the floor under his still planted foot, and it was enough of a destabilization for whatever was seething underneath to burst through.

More light. More...bugs? Cal wasn't sure anymore, but he backed up all the same, grabbing Tony's shoulder to drag him back with him as the crack gave way.

The red-eyed things exploded into a frenzy, breaking whatever semblance of formation they had as they converged towards the rupture and the two intruders, some dropping down from the ceiling. The floor beneath their feet suddenly started rippling with seemingly abstract patterns, circuitry-like lines radiating briefly in the dimness.

"Was that part of the plan?" Cal not quite shouted as he contended with the growing noise that filled the space.

Tony went hopping back still on one foot as Cal tugged on him, not trusting how to put the other down as one of the invaders enveloped itself around it and gave Tony an immediate appreciation for just why they were wrapped in slippery armor. Its thousand legs scrabbled across the metal, leaving furrows in it where they dragged, the metal sheering off like embers crackling out of a fire and winking out of existence. Tony had to grab back at Cal blindly for balance so he could throw himself forward with driving force in his captured leg, stomping the bug under it, crushing it into the pool of more of them that had oozed out of the fissure onto the ground, blotting out those geometric patterns with their void-black bodies. "Always," Tony shouted back, then used his hold on Cal to shove him back down the hall, insisting, "Get out of here!" He'd think of a better plan when Cal was outside of the threat range, probably.

Were these the things they were supposed to get rid of? Cal windmilled his arms as he was shoved back, turning to do so, if only for a few steps before he looked back to make sure Tony was following. He splayed his hand out after them for a moment, only to remember that what he wanted to do probably wasn't going to translate into the system.

So instead he swung his blade at the skittering things that came closer, practically scraping the floor with its tip as he tried to clear them away from their feet.

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