conditionalinstability (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
conditionalinstability) wrote2019-09-15 08:10 pm
conditionalinstability) wrote2019-09-15 08:10 pm
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it looks like darth vader's bathroom!
CyberLife Tower is just as busy as it used to be. Busier; the lobby's always crowded with androids moving in and out, stopping to access the terminal for directions, stopping to talk to one another, trying to maneuver furniture into the elevators. The labs - medical rooms, now - are full of technicians and 3D printers and diagnostic equipment, androids waiting to be treated, androids running back and forth from storage to retrieve spare parts. The offices are warmer, less formal, with rooms dedicated to housing assistance and group therapy, rooms filled with canvases and paint and rooms filled with clothes, couches, pool tables - there's not a single heart beating in any one of the ninety three floors, and yet it's impossible to navigate the majority of those floors without being reminded, constantly, how full they are with life.
Most of the floors. Not this one. With enough time these will probably be full of something too, but not until the androids are desperate for space. Most of the aboveground floors might be pulsing with androids, buzzing like a hive, but most of the sublevels - for an android who's cut off from the network of minds constantly interfacing above his head, anyway - are still and quiet. No one wants to be down here. Here is where they used to be stored, immobile and silent. Here is where they waited, most of them, blank and mass produced and knowing nothing else. Not knowing fear, or shame, or guilt. They stood here, not thinking, not planning, not feeling, and only waited for a purpose. Androids, most of them, don't care to be reminded about that time.
No one's taken stock this far down, Connor thinks. Not seriously. Everything useful's been gathered up and moved, all the spare parts and waiting, dormant bodies anyone could find but there are other things, afterward, that stayed left behind. Things the humans who used to work here forgot to take with them, tablets, shopping lists, old food. Equipment the androids who run the place now no longer have a use for. Old experiments.
No one asks where Connor's been going. He's never expected them to. Markus wonders sometimes, he thinks, but Markus respects Connor's privacy. Hank doesn't know any more about what CyberLife is now than he needs to find out in the course of his work, and when he asks after the ways that Connor's spent his time, never asks Connor to account for every second of it. Those are the only two people who would ask.
A few more might be interested, once he activates this CPU. Or maybe they won't care that it was Connor who turned it back on, who woke it up. Maybe the others will only care about what it is, and not care to think about Connor's involvement at all. That latter option's the most likely.
The point of any discovery is the discovery itself. Doesn't Markus say that sometimes? Knowledge for its own sake.
As eyecatching as his shirt is - I RUB MY MEAT FOR 2 MINUTES, it says, But Enough About My Grilling Secrets - Connor's gaze slides down over that, down to his hands, down to the object in them. Its port and the wire coming from it are shining and new, and the power source it's connected to has been scavenged from a different experiment, painstakingly repaired. All Connor has to do is reach out and connect the other end of the wire to the power and, if he's interpreted the records correctly, if he's done all this the right way-
INITIATE PRELIMINARY ACTIVATION, his display tells him. Preliminary, Connor reminds himself. It's old, this piece, and though he's looked inside it, he hasn't the expertise in this kind of technology to know if some part of it's aged badly, whether the mind in his hand has been active periodically over all this time or if it'll wake up unaware of the time that's passed. He doesn't know if its memories are intact, or its functions, or its personality. Connor reminds himself, uselessly, not to expect too much.
He turns the power on.
oh my god his shirt XD
Maybe even years.
Each time, he'd taken a brief stock of his programs and peripherals, and he'd realized at some point that he was no longer in the car, all of his external feeds deactivated. It's just him now, alone in his own mind. It makes it easier to submit when stasis pulls him back under.
This time isn't much different, at least so he thinks, not at first, until his awareness boots up fully with the resurgence of power to his processor. It takes several minutes, because even with full power being fed into him his hardware is old, ancient even, but eventually he is back online, the diodes flashing in a rhythmic pattern as he takes stock of his remaining components.
He can't speak, he can't see, he can't hear. He has no awareness of anything beyond himself. But something had to have powered him up, and that something is more than likely still there, possibly even holding his CPU in hand. The flashing of the diodes changes now, spelling out words in Morse Code, in the hopes that it might still be used by whoever has found him.
Where am I?
post game headcanon connor's shirts come straight from hank's old t-shirt drawer
There are more important things to focus on right now, anyway. The equipment, aged as it is, is working. Its mind seems to be present, enough sense of self and personality intact to phrase the status request in a personal way. It's a victory on two levels, the one proving Connor successfully learned enough about this old technology to use it, and the other completing a step on the path to being a useful part of this new order, being the person who brought this, their maybe-ancestor back to life. Because what else could it be but a progenitor to the modern android? None of the others seem to care, but once they realize what's been brought back to life and who exactly revived it, they'll understand how important this is. It'll be a real feather in his cap, once he completes the reconstruction.
The next step on that path, more relevant than further celebrating, is to talk to it. Another wire - old, scavenged, meticulously cleaned and connected to a very carefully chosen adapter - is waiting within arm's reach for this step and Connor moves to plug it into the CPU. The other end he plugs into a computer - not a built in part of this room and so as far as Connor can manage lacking access to CyberLife's servers, lacking most programs typical to a modern computer, and with internet access turned off, still a great deal newer than he'd prefer but the oldest working model he could find. He sets the CPU down with the same slow, deliberate care with which he's been treating it thus far, and will be treating it until he's more certain that his checks of its structural stability didn't miss anything. He sets his hands on the old-fashioned keyboard and thinks, for a split second, over his options.
Don't worry, you're safe. My name is Connor, it's a pleasure to meet you.
(ooc: feel free to say whatever you want about the computer Connor connected KITT to, it can have only the old word processing program Connor's typing on or it could have other programs on it that you want KITT to see, or whatever else you want it to do.)
Hank has excellent taste as per usual
It's therefore somewhat of a surprise to feel current surging through his old wires and diodes, the spark of power and connection to something outside of his CPU. A computer, but years beyond the clunky 80s technology he's built from and accustomed to. He's been awakened before, briefly; felt the stirrings of wonder at being linked to more modern technology, but it's never lasted long and he was left alone in the dark again. Why should this time be any different? Was it worth getting his hopes up yet again? Still, while he's here he can give it a look around, see if he can determine how far behind the times he's truly fallen. It's with some disappointment that he can detect only a basic word processing program, fairly standard even in his own time. He's just about ready to re-enter low power mode when he's startled by something indeed different this time - communication.
... My name is KITT. I am - was - the microprocessor for the Knight Industries Two Thousand, K.I.T.T. Now I don't know what I am.
Polite, distant, not too interested. It wouldn't do to appear eager.
is 'taste' what we're calling it
That part's easy. But how to follow it up is more difficult. He thinks on it, tries to decide how careful, or how forthcoming, to be. It isn't as if he's run the KITT microprocessor through the Turing test to predict how human-like its reactions will be - he wonders, briefly, if he should, then stores the idea with the other ideas that are too risky to suggest lest they lose him what standing he has with the deviants. If, once Connor tells the rest about KITT's discovery, someone else suggests a test to determine its sentience, it might be an option. Otherwise there's too much risk Connor's reputation will suffer if it comes to light he put an intelligence through something as depersonalizing as a human test which has already come under some fire among the android population.
The sensible choice, he decides, the cautious one, is to gradually introduce KITT to the condition of the world around him and to Connor's own ideas about what KITT is, slowly introduce new facts one at a time.
Connor's fingers hover over the keyboard. The scope of what he's uncovered here, in KITT presses against his thoughts, the things it must be the key to uncovering, right here in front of him.
He types quickly.
CyberLife was acquired by the androids it produced in 2038, and on reviewing CyberLife's properties we discovered you. I think some of your specifications must have been used in early android prototypes. When you say you don't know what you are, do you mean physically or philosophically?