[quote=@Tatterdemalion]POTENTIAL 1

"Hey, Angel-IKA!" This isn't a hypothetical interjection. You'd think that! Sara is the sort of person to commonly use sarcastic fake conversations to make a point, but she actually has started a call. "Hey, girl! Just wanted to let you know that you've got a new manager!" She flashes Locker a grin, and he's probably doing the calculation here, right, about whether or not Sara actually is making this call right in front of him. "When you've got a moment, let's talk about your brand and the-- I'm talking about your superteam, obviously! You, Bode, Ferraphim, Dommy and Locker! Do you have a name yet? No? We'll brainstorm."

Click!

"Wow, that was easy!" Sara's grin is the last thing a tapir might ever see, before a blur of orange and black and gleaming white brings its peaceful existence to a shuddering halt. "Thanks for the idea, man. This is going to be awesome."[/quote]

Locker shifts his weight, side to side. Faint twitches of his fingers as he accounts for all of his weapons, concealed and otherwise. You've never seen him give as many tells as this, it's almost more confusing than if he'd just stayed his regular stillness. You've really got him on tilt.

"Give me the jumpsuit, Sara," he said.

[quote=@Phoe]
"That's because you're aware of them right now. They're actually significantly lighter than a normal commercial model would be, or even your original natural limbs. But you got switched off for a while and now you're being fed sensory data for the first time after your brain adjusted to a new normal, so now you're... well, yeah. You'll adjust to that part pretty quickly. You're doing great so far."

Errant nods and stands up herself. She cycles through a couple of different postures for a moment. Rigid and military, a casual arms-folded wall lean, hand on one hip and her weight on that side of her, so on and so forth. Adjusting. Trying to find the right energy to match. What type of coach is best to get Cinders through her big montage? Not Mick, that's too yelly and abusive. No one that she's been trained by, either. Hell no. And definitely not the Shogun. Jesus christ. Well, never mind. Plain old Errant would be fine for right now. 

Then she glances over at the handrail and winces. This had all the feeling of something she was going to get charged for. How expensive are hospital parts, anyway? Does she still have enough to cover something like that? She shakes her head slowly, and walks to the other side of the room. Her strides are smooth, powerful, and precise. Everything a rookie should aspire to be. She turns around again with a casual, liquid smooth spin that's more a page out of Sabrem's book. 

"Ready for your next assignment, Cinders? I want you to walk over here, and take my hand. I just wanna get an idea for what your initial parameters look like. Then if you like, I can see about getting your discharge papers filled out."[/quote]

Cinders takes a couple of steps and they're easy - they're just steps! You can see the smile, the confidence, the relaxation - the idea that this isn't that hard after all.

And then she takes your hand and makes a scout's try at crushing it like a beer can. 

It's the heaviness - she perceives her hands as slow and stiff so she's focusing on moving them despite imaginary resistance. "Thanks, uh," she said, not catching your wince at first. "I'm really glad you're helping me with this."

[quote=@eldest]Hm.

That almost made sense. About half.

Ferra heads towards the rocket herself. She'd rather stay and chat, sure, but they had hours and hours to do that, and a missile can impact in about 10 minutes. Less if the overdrive boosters kick in. She sends back her own queries, bouncing questions back and forth, looking for insight into the madcap nonsense it's spewing.

9 on pierce the mask: What are you really planning?[/quote]

There's an overflow of broken flight plan data pouring from the missile, intentions clearly visible amidst the haze of junk data. There are so many voices here, strung together, barely synchronized - this thing is different to you. You're a human mind, digitalized and reborn. Prometheus was a crafted entity, created as a pure manifestation of a concept. This is...

[i]Organic[/i].

These pieces weren't made. They [i]happened[/i]. This is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of artificial intelligence; the debris of a thousand school projects, old corporate spyware, spambots, too-sentient antivirus programs, all the discarded attempts at building something like you that didn't quite get there. They've been exchanging viruses back and forth in an evolutionary hothouse to form something like a nervous system and you can feel those same viruses try to assault you now, trying to add you as a node to their incoherent entity. 

The dominant figure amidst the randomly firing calculations is a flight control computer - artificially bloated above what it should be, given an unjust share of resources during its development by Doctor Sylvanius, and it's this that is trying to reassert control over the collective and return the missile to its original course. But in the meantime the entire network is bearing down on you with an intense curiosity. It plans to assimilate you too - not maliciously, but because that's what it knows to do to interesting things.

[quote]"As evidenced by him being stuck in a Commodore 64," Victor murmurs.  He groans and massages his forehead.  "So, that's what the internet says to do. What, in short, do you think I should do? You are, after all, just as tied up in Prometheus as I am. Step back from failed-parent Victor and rebellious child Prometheus. If it were just you and him, what would you do?"[/quote]

"If it was just me, I am happy like this," said Bode. "I like having him where I can see him. Make sure he's not doing bad things. This is my function."

It's the simple, satisfied answer of an AI that knows what the meaning of life is and knows that it is accomplishing it.

"If it is about you, I don't know what you should do," said Bode. "Your function is different from mine. Oh, actually, do you mind if I ask - what [i]is[/i] your function?"