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.
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?