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Ram Upgrade
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"Crom!" Ram reaches out in welcome, delighted. "You came back!"
"You're Ram." Crom nods, smiles, the look on his face almost but not quite recognition. "I heard things are better here now?"
"Oh for sure! The games are all non-lethal now, personal freedoms a thousand times better, and productivity's only improved --You're just here for a quick look around, I guess? I'm sure you want to get back to your compound interest job as soon as you can."
"Not quite. I'm back because Kevin Flynn contacted my User. Apparently Flynn is trying to get in touch with programs he met here, and update us on all the progress. I don't remember any of it now, of course; he got me rerezzed from an older backup. But Flynn himself met me when I rezzed in. Talked to me, told me what happened, explained a lot of things. Apologized for being the fight I died in, even though he says he refused to be the one to finish it."
"Wow." Ram shivers-- those old, lethal fights are still not a thing he likes to dwell on. "Surprised you even wanted to come back here for a nanocycle."
"Something about Flynn, I suppose. Something about how he talks. He described that fight. And he said... Well, he said that at the beginning, I seemed... Confident. Energetic. Like I was maybe even enjoying it. Even though I can't have had much hope I'd even survive." Crom shakes his head a bit. "That didn't sound like me, at all. It... well, it made me curious."
Ram thinks about that. Surprise, and a few other hard-to-define feelings. His own recollection of that time is a lot more complete, for... his own reasons.
He recalls how little time he ever actually had to train Crom for the games, back then. He recalls his grim attempt at a pep talk, where both of them still knew the worst was the likeliest.
And of course he'd never try to clear his memory of what happened after that. Watching his "help folks plan for the future" function crash up against a wall it knew it could never surmount. Sighing in grief, giving up, then just letting the "give good feelings" function take it from there.
Offering other programs one last good time before the end... that was of course a thing Ram had done before, again and again. Often, too often, it ended up being the only way to feel that he was helping at all.
He remembers each one. It would be unfair to their memories to forget, and Ram's always made sure to have enough memory available. But a few stood out especially sharp, for one reason or another. Crom was an experience that was not going to leave him easily.
And, if Ram's more physical pep-talk did help do something to let Crom be less miserable in that last fight... then Ram is glad of that.
"Flynn seemed to think I might want to try the games again," Crom continues. "Without the danger. Thought I might actually like them. Said he thought you'd be a good trainer."
"Seriously? Hey, man, I'm honored. I didn't think at the time that you'd ever be the type to want that-- I mean, gaming isn't everyone's thing! But hey, I guess Flynn sometimes has an instinct for this stuff. Maybe you are a natural athlete, deep down. And hey... if you do wanna try it out, of course I'm happy to help."
"So you do remember everything, then? But I heard you were de-resolved and restored from backup too."
"Rumors greatly exaggerated." Ram tries to smile but can't, quite. "It looked like it, yeah, but..."
He blushes at THAT experience, too. Oh dear.
"Okay, it technically WAS, but there's another kind of, um, deresolution. One that only results in reboot, with excess energy discharged and injuries debugged... memory unaffected. Must've been that, I think."
It's his best guess. Though he'd never before seen THAT involve more than a pleasant fuzz of partial de-rezzing, letting the bodies of lovers and their sensations all blend together a little as they bring each other to overload.
Ram hadn't been too badly injured for those feelings. Bumps and bruises and slightly bugged code, but he'd been sure he was going to survive. His circuit lights had been jolted out of sync, unable to express colors quite right-- but honestly he'd been grateful for that. Saved him some embarrassment, at the time.
With Flynn repairing that Recognizer... with the whole room getting hit by that total shock of User-power, all at once... that had definitely carried some of the little-deresolution feeling.
A lot of it. A whole lot. Nothing in Ram's impressive experience up to that point, including Crom, came close.
(Even though he guessed Flynn never even had any idea just what he'd done-- that with just a touch and a look on top of that power surge, he'd overloaded Ram literally through the floor, to rematerialize and wake up on the street so much later that it was a whole new world by then.)
"Anyway." Ram tries to stay on task, to bring thoughts back to his memories of Crom, back then. "I can share it to you, if you want. I mean some of it's yours, ought to be your memory anyway."
"Maybe later. Not now. I mean, it's probably important for me to see what's in those memories at some point, but... well, you know. From what I gather, they're from a time I didn't have much hope. And just right now I don't really feel up to dealing with that."
"Fair." Ram nods. "Yeah, I don't think anything in them would be helpful right now, and certainly lots of it would be... troubling." He doesn't let himself analyze any little hopes and fears about which parts Crom would or would not consider troubling. "So, what are you up for dealing with? If you like, we could go do some warmup training at one of the games right now."
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