Thanqol

Aristeia! Building a Champion

"You are correct. You currently do not have time," said Titanomachia suddenly, voice tight. She evades the wrist-grab and pushes you forwards with a wide elbow. "Come on. We've got a lot to get through today."

Everything from there is bustle. Into the change room, on with the synskin, into the break room. It's only when your heartrate starts to accelerate do you realize that Machia had unceremoniously and painlessly jabbed you at some point. Now she had clambered up on a wall cabinet and was crouched there like a gargoyle, biting the back of her thumb and thinking hard enough to register as psionic activity. Whatever she had been planning before, her attention was now burning entirely onto the future.

The two Dakinis are doing warmup flexes. They looked fragile suddenly. Toy soldiers. Brittle superglue joints. "We're ready when you are!" Stripes called. "Bring all you got!"

The Three Mountains

What you were describing, an enforced period of helplessness, observation, being bound to a person of complete power... almost like having a baby, wasn't it?

That itself suggested an answer. There were security firms that provided the physical and digital protection for buildings and property, and they were the weak hunchbacked virgins compared to the chad security companies who optimized for executive-level child safety and surveillance. What you were after wasn't really anything more complicated than a baby monitor, and there were people out there who'd already started the strange project of raising an android mind from childhood rather than printing the full version into an adult body. The expertise on offer from these companies was discreet, ruthless, and provided a plausible explanation if anyone went looking. It would generate a secret that would cover for a deeper secret.

You could find that expertise in house, but if you were being honest you'd probably want to go with a Crown&Slate subsidiary. Their entire existence and corporate culture revolved around letter of the law contracts and they'd have to be really pushed into a corner before they considered playing with that.

Aristeia! Building a Champion

"That's the best part!" said Stripes. "All of it, dude! Everything in here is junk, whole room's paid for, smash all you like!"

"Speaking of who's paying!" said Mess. "Turns out? Telev Overmind!"

"Telev Overmind!?" said Stripes, striking a shocked pose. "The billionaire slop profiteer of the Red Decades? That guy's bogus!"

"That's right, he's bogus!" said Mess. "And word just came down that Cicero won his lawsuit against that bogus guy! Verdict: Full. Liquidation!"

"No way!" said Stripes.

This was not the first time you'd seen this particular patter play out from the Dakinis. One of Sprocket's many core functions is the ability to prosecute mind-bendingly difficult legal cases involving decades old financial crimes committed during the Red Decades. The lead Aspect on these cases, the recreation Cicero, had famously won the new and dreaded verdict of Full Liquidation several times. This was something the Dakinis were always very quick to propagandize, especially because it came with -

"That's right," said Mess. "That means that they're paying out fifteen thousand dollars to every single citizen! It's in their bank accounts already!"

"Gnarly!" said Stripes.

Some people found this kind of messaging ham-handed and annoying - though they rarely minded the fifteen thousand dollars. They had to sit through it anyway. The States of the early 21st century had promoted a doctrine of deliberate ineffectiveness that had helped erode the foundations of their support, but the new colossus of PanOceania and its intricate alliance with Sprocket very much wanted to be seen as doing good things.

"But anyway," said Mess. "The break room. Way Titanomachia put it, we're going to be doing normal A! stuff in there, but you're gonna be stimmed up. You're not trying to break stuff, it's just feedback to help you dial in your muscles if things get weird."

Titanomachia had been silent for a long time. She suddenly spoke up, if anything more intense than her earlier declaration: "You've never watched a magical girl anime?"

The Three Mountains

"Well," said Director Angus, touching the tip of his nose and smiling. "You mean you'd like everyone to think you're just visiting colleagues. A word to the wise - right now you're new in the job and thinking everything's all about what you're going to do. But spare a thought to the man coming after you. You can do a lot to force the old lady's hand if you set someone up as a clear successor early enough, and that in turn secures your current position. Dictatorships fail, but monarchies endure."

With that, he was gone.

And finally you turned your attention to Rooster.

A clean, standard issue Positronic Brain. The same as in any of a billion androids and other synthetic employees. The only thing that makes it remarkable at all is that there is no logo anywhere. No brand, no serial number, no pattern, no aesthetic - a thing that feels almost beyond the corporate civilization of the modern age.

It cannot be interacted with in this format. A mind like this cannot be opened in safe mode; it needs a body. It needs a body, and it will permanently be put in relation to that body; everything shaped through the lens of those senses and those abilities. Any android chassis you imagine can be manufactured for you no questions asked, but this is a decision you'll need to make entirely based on your own taste and judgement.

Aristeia! Building a Champion

"It's like being a magical girl!" said Titanomachia brightly. "When you don't have the dress and tiara on, you're someone different. None of it counts."

The Sprocket Dakini drones were waiting at the Smash Room, baseball bats in hands and baseball caps on heads. Tall, lanky, sleek machines with empty black faceplates and brightly coloured handpainted stripes and flowers, Dakini Tacbots are the Single Intelligence's least beloved and most appreciated children. Most street corners have a sealed deployment pod holding a Dakini but they're not there just for emergencies - if you need help moving a piece of heavy furniture, someone to pitch a cricket ball for you on a rainy morning, or carry your grocery bags somewhere the local Dakini will deploy to help out.

But they're not slaves. Sprocket's actually pretty clear and firm about that. They're friends. Sprocket is your friend. They'll help out because Sprocket is nice and likes helping out, but they'll cheerfully decline requests they regard as unreasonable or selfish and they expect to be treated with respect. They'll do things together with you, not invisibly for you. Sometimes they'll want to engage in conversation, or suggest a different activity that they want to do instead, or ask for a favour in return just to establish that this thing goes both ways. Their overall vibe and accent is 'extremely chill surfer dudes', which is a slick dodge that gets Sprocket out of some common failure states:
- It means they can avoid dealing with anything they don't feel like; politics, abuse, confessions, by defaulting into various 'woahs' and 'boguses'
- It means that they're very tiresome to spend a lot of time around, which pushes people away from becoming fixated on them as replacements for human connection.
- It lets them come across as physically very powerful while also seeming harmless, lazy and kind of doofy, which makes people lower their expectations.

Some people still find them sinister. That's a natural part of being a person. The way they snap into organized mass formations during firefighting or other emergency operations can be genuinely unsettling. But it takes work to maintain suspicion of the Dakinis; the Single Intelligence learned a lot from the fall of the Slopbots and has determined not to repeat any of their mistakes.

"Heyyyy Ti-tan-OH-machiiiiiiiiyy!" said the first Dakini, painted in neon green tiger stripes, offering a hand for a high five. She hit it. "We got the brief. Sounds like fun!"
"Cross!" said the second Dakini. This one was a paint disaster, having served as a canvas for children. "What's happening dude?"

Aristeia! Building a Champion

"Oh, believe me," said Titanomachia, leaning down so she could look up at your face from below. She wasn't fighting your stride at all; she oiled into whatever position left for her and turned it into the top. "I like you poised. I like you controlled. I like you shining with mysterious dignity. That's one of the things that drew me to you. I think that you have the potential to be the midnight princess of the Hexadrome, fearsome and dreadful and unapproachable."

The edge of the syringe rose up in her hands, gyroscopically stabilized, coming up to brush against the back of your neck just above your Cube without either of you breaking stride.

"And so the thought of you losing that dignity on the floor of the arena disgusts me," said Titanomachia. There was no playfulness at all. She was as serious as death. "You, flailing wildly as you struggle to control stims you haven't experienced before? You, losing your composure and screaming in pain from a bad hit? You, kneeling before fucking Taowu? I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. Everything that I pull out of you under controlled conditions is something that could have been pulled out of you publicly, on camera, for everyone to see. So that's my objective: to get ahead of that curve. To find all your weaknesses and burn them out in private so that nothing out there can shock you."

Aristeia! Becoming a Champion

"Instincts are pretty good," said Gata, "but they also suck. Look. Most people are eyes. They're slow. Some people are ears. They're defensive. Some people are instincts, you're instincts - that's normal for International, it's how you've got to be. And some people have weird senses. They process information wrong, or better, or something. Freaks. Get near the top and you get nothing but freaks. Titanomachia was a freak - she wasn't responding to what you were doing, I think she was predicting it. There's no easy fix for them, they're all one of a kind monsters. Learning one doesn't even help you beat another."

She ran a claw idly along the edge of the exhaust pipe, curling up a long line of metal, sending a single mad line of warm exhaust air into her hair.

"There's a lot of flash in your group. It's for the eyes. For the ears. Don't. Your opponent is Kraken. She'll end your run right here in the round of thirty-two. Everything you are needs to go into stopping her."

Aristeia! Building a Champion

"Speaking of injecting you with poison!" said Titanomachia, picking up a cartoonishly huge syringe full of bubbling green cubegel out of her workbench and putting it on the table. "We're still on Xoxic prep today! But this is the -" she made massive scare quotes, ""Good" version, where she's on your team and trying to power you up. If I know anything about combat stimulants, it's that they can be as disorienting as poisons if you're not ready for them. Yesterday was the weights, today it's the rocket boots."

She stopped and took another sip of her essence-of-coffee. "God, I hate her."

"Anyway," she said, pushing the cup to the side. "The thing to practice today is keeping your shit under control. To that end, I have procured a smash room. The walls will be lined with fine china and fragile glass. Your mission will be to fight and evade Dakinis while minimizing collateral damage - no don't take that now -" she said, snatching suddenly for the syringe. "- I need to get you to to the room without injuring dozens of pedestrians."

Dakinis - faceless training drones provided by Sprocket on request. Everyone's familiar with them, the Single Intelligence is an Aristeia! fan and is happy to provide unlimited drones to anyone trying to practice.

Aristeia! Building a Champion

Spark. You can almost see the mental infrastructure slide into place, layer after layer of it, with more clarity and care than she dressed her body. Lenses flick and filter. Alternate ways of viewing the world. Put aside this part of her. Energize other parts. Personality aspects flicker to life one after another, surging into her body like a fork in the Sprocket.

The first that achieves clarity is one of puritan disgust. It eyes the cup suspiciously, takes off the lid, lifts a little of the liquid from the surface with a teaspoon. Spreads it on the empty plate, considering its colour and visciousity. Finally, a ginger little taste on the tip of the spoon. A second. Consideration. And then a click-flick as the second lens engages.

"You have ordered me a caffinated hot chocolate," it says.

A third factor engages. It takes a huge swig.

"I love hot chocolate," it said. "I understand the insult implicit, but this is the cup an emperor would drink from! Spices and honey and the finest of creams, collected from foreign lands and blended together by instructions issued through the astral! I could not refuse! Although -"

A neural monitor comes out. One patch on her neck, on her forehead, her wrist. Click-flick. "- I have not tested the application of caffine on my own metabolism. I've set the parameters of my recovery cycles extensively by hand. I can't even use your data as a model, I had to branch your cubeprint after it became clear that you weren't going to switch to decaf. When working at tolerances already extended - you see this scar?" she held up her left hand - a clean white line right across it. "Long dumb story, but I learned that energy drinks are hazardous when I am already tapping energy directly from the source."

Click-flick. "But I might need to adjust your cubeprint further if six cups is normal for your breakfast. That is... more than I calculated for."

Aristeia! Building a Champion

You are still inside her loop. It's like the course of her mind is interrupted; no words, no resistance, not because she's not capable of it but because she can't do it elegantly. Without costume, rhythm, momentum, control - power wasn't something to debase yourself seeking. If someone else was doing it better there was nothing to do but let it play out.

That's what it was. You are backstage.

She steps up onto her robotic leg wrong and would immediately faceplant if you didn't steady her. She is still dressed in the clothes of the previous day, so she wordlessly goes through her ritual oblations; shower, teeth, passionlessly but diligently cleaning the network input ports where her leg joins. Stretches, calibrations, ten seconds balance left and right, star jumps. She was moving but she wasn't awake, but the pattern was a machine for delivering a functional person to the midday. Any words said at this interval disappeared into the thunderhead of her consciousness to return when the conditions were right for lightning.

The path was leading to a stumbling non-decision regarding breakfast. Give her enough time and she'd fumble her way to clothing and keys to go out to the requested cafe - unless she was intercepted with omlettes beforehand.