AsterControl.com - (News)
Fanworks: Tron: Fics: A Lightcycle Built for Two
original characters (F/F, F/M)
Summary
Introducing Aster the pattern recognition program, and her whole glitched-up life.
Aster's a disaster, and her past is no exception. She was written for an advertising company, got stolen by ENCOM in the 1980's, and has been a bit of a mad engineer, jack-of-all-tasks, and overall wildcard since then.
She's survived over two decades with no contact from her User. When that same User appears out of nowhere, both of them are an absolute mess with no clue how to handle it.
Mixture of humor, interpersonal drama, and some sex.
A Lightcycle Built for Two
I've put the Explicit rating on this, but I'm really not sure what to rate it.
There's a fair amount of swearing (both Program and User-style) and some sexual content, including interfacing between programs as well as masturbation on the User end, all of which is implied and offstage.
There's also an onstage interface between Program and User... it's definitely sexual, but it's in the I/O Tower and it is 100% mental/emotional, no mention of actual body parts involved in it.
Program intimacy is hard to tag for.
Update:
Adding some background about time units... because there is no possible interpretation in which in-system time units make actual sense, and I realized I should clarify the specific way they don't make sense in my headcanon, lol.
Or at least the headcanon I'm using for this story. (I still have a few conflicting interpretations and I'm not sure which I prefer.)
So instead of the Grid Time conversion chart from the Tron Wiki (which is trying to make sense of time in Flynn's new Grid from Legacy)... I'm using an interpretation of time that's specific to the Encom system we saw in TRON 1982.
Y'know, the system where Ram said "I've been locked up for 200 microcycles" sounding like it was on the level of weeks or months at least.
Grid Time would say a microcycle is like half a minute and Ram was being a whiny baby there.
Ram is obviously not a whiny baby, so (for this fic at least) I've adopted a headcanon in which an Encom "microcycle" is about a day.
(Meaning their "cycle" is a million of their days... and I'm not yet ready to explore whether that's just a ridiculous time measurement far too long to be relevant to anyone involved... or whether that's an actual year in the User world, meaning the time dilation at Encom is crazy extreme and I dunno how I/O tower contact would even work.)
But anyway. This is roughly what I'm using for the time system in this story, as seen from the Program viewpoint.
"Microcycle": about a day
"Nanocycle": thousandth of a day, about a minute
"at (X) nanocycles": stating a time of day, counting nanocycles from when the day began
"Picocycle": thousandth of a nanocycle, way too small a time unit for a human to use in daily life, but programs calculate stuff more precisely, so it comes up from time to time. Fraction of a second.
"Lightcycle": ...yeah you know what that is. And Aster's is big enough for two. Enjoy the story.
A Lightcycle Built for Two
Part 1:
Give Me Your Answer
The call almost startled her into a crash, blaring from her dashboard with an extra-loud rendition of her favorite creepily sound-distorted ringtone.
"Daisy, Daisy..."
Aster screeched the lightcycle to a halt, the noise of her custom-tuned brakes forming an entertaining segue into the screeches of bystanders outside.
"Hey! This is Daisy, I mean Aster. What's going on?"
"This is Pike in Cobalt City. You still on for the job at 680.0 nanocycles?"
"That's what you call me about? On the road? Yes, glitchface, I'm on the way there. I'll let you know if anything changes. End of fraggin' line."
Through the transparency of the cycle's fairing, the scenery didn't look familiar enough to open the roof just yet. She craned her neck back over the headrest. "Hey, Byson! Is this the place?"
A single gray sphere floated just into Aster's peripheral vision, long enough to spike red and snap out NO.
"Geb5, go team up with your brothers and quit messing around. I need Byson. Unless you can learn to speak ASCII fast enough to give me directions this microcycle."
The Bit flashed a sassy golden YES and zoomed off.
Just enough later for Aster to start getting annoyed, a vaguely circular flock of its siblings maneuvered itself back into view.
She counted six (the whole brood minus Geb1 and Geb5) and glared around the lightcycle cabin til the two stragglers emerged from the crevices where they'd been hiding. She waited, drumming her fingers on the handlebars, until 1 and 5 nudged their companions to make space and the whole swarm resolved into a diamond-shaped outline formed from all eight.
"There we go. Aaaand we've got Byson. Finally. Now, can you give me directions to the right address, or not?"
The newly formed Byte bounced in the air for a few picocycles, before he shifted into Aster's custom-adapted dialect of ISO-8859 and began flashing arrangements of Yes and No, ASCII-encoding the characters one by one, projecting letter after letter in the center of the diamond-shape to spell out text.
REPLY HAZY. TRY AGAIN.
"Cute, Byson. Ha. Ha. I'm not going to ask where you learned about Magic 8 Balls. Now can you... oh, wait, you're playing that game. Fine, no more yes-or-no questions. What is the correct address, and where is it in relation to us right now?"
"She's late."
"Aster's always either late or early by a hundred nanocycles or thereabouts. Never much more. It's fine. She'll show in time to get the project started."
"You could've picked anyone for this repair job. Why her? She's a glitching lunatic."
"Her stuff works."
"Her stuff's made out of stuff no one's ever heard of."
"Yeah, never anyone in the specific field that hires her. But she plays all fields. That's how pattern recognition programs are. She's trained on datasets from every sector of ENCOM, and the New Grid, and even the User world. If an idea that can make this work has been used anywhere, for anything... then she'll find it, she'll notice the parallels, and she'll make it fit into this project."
"Sounds like janky hacks and workarounds, not clean coding."
"Well, her janky hacks and workarounds work. She built the bathysphere, remember?"
"Why in Users' name did anyone want that bathysphere anyway?"
"Because the Sea has cool monsters living in it and some programs wanna look at them."
"That is insane in a way only an ISO would think of."
"Hey! Plenty of non-ISOs are interested in the Sea. And she's not an ISO either. She sticks up for us, though. Both the ENCOM-native ones, and those of us that spawned over on the New Grid. You know she helped build the Underground Rescue portal? She's discreet as hack, too. Not even Flynn ever found out about that."
"What hasn't she built? And why in the recycle-bin does any of it work?"
"Because she's crazy in all the best ways."
"She's crazy in ways no one's ever heard of. They say she was written at some advertising company and got totally cut off from her User when she was stolen and ported into ENCOM. No contact since the 1980's. Can you even imagine what that would do to a program?"
"Evidently, something pretty amazing."
"...She built your bathysphere out of fraggin' X11 that she dug out of an old Mac OS 10.6 install."
"Yeah. It's for making things function in an environment they weren't written for. Dunno just how she did it, but she replaced 'Mac OS' with 'sea' and 'Windows' with 'land' and it works. Lets you survive underwater, long enough to look at the cool monsters. Even if you aren't an ISO. Her stuff's good."
"I'll take your word for it. But we better call her again, just to make sure she isn't lost, or, I dunno, on a detour in some mad-science lab rectifying a whole city into gridbug-people or something."
"You just have no faith, Pike."
"Daisy, Daisy, give me your ans--"
Aster slammed a hand down on the dashboard control panel so hard she was probably gonna have to repair it later.
The ringtone stopped. Pike was gonna be mad, but, that was on him for calling her while she was on the road. Again.
"Is THIS the right place now?" she demanded, then swiped a hand through Byson to separate one Bit from the flock before the Byte could return another of his Magic-8-Bit non-replies.
"And I'm asking you, Geb4. At least you give honest yeses and nos."
"No," Geb4 admitted, backing off to just enough of a courteous distance to avoid spiking Aster's hand.
"Glitch it." She waved 4 back into its swarm, giving the eight of them time to reassemble back into Byson again. "Well, where are we?"
"CARBON MONOXIDE CITY," Byson announced, with as much pride as ASCII text could convey.
"I refuse to believe there is any such place."
She peered through the grime of the windshield... and, upon seeing the cheerfully decorated road sign, reevaluated her beliefs.
Frag. One of those not-even-official little "cities," the kind that got founded by wild communes of ISOs and inoperative data-pushers, their home-away-from-home where they could do whatever freaky weird things they felt like doing, undisturbed. The places usually had names that were jokes or just gibberish.
Most of the time, Aster had nothing but respect for those free spirits and their crazy little towns. Hey, the weirdness they got up to there was usually even important weirdness, vital to the functioning of something or other. Usually a video game.
Aster squinted. It did look like she was somewhere in the game-score database. Way the hell out. Middle of nowhere.
Right now, despite her respect, she was very much not in the mood for this, when she had a job scheduled absolutely nowhere near here.
"...I stand corrected. And I should've known better than to ask you for directions to Cobalt City in any case-sensitive format. Co and CO are not the same, assbyte. Guess I should count myself lucky you didn't somehow laser me to Colorado.... Kevin-H-Flynn, dude, what is wrong with you? Did I completely frag up your encoding somehow?"
"OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD."
Aster drove her fist through Byson just hard enough to scatter his Bits and make them regroup. "And neither's the rest of the Office suite. But I hoped you'd at least be better."
She was slumped over the handlebars trying to summon the energy to start up her bike again, when a knock on the fairing made her head jerk back up.
The face she saw drove out all the dismalness from her mood. Within picocycles she'd opened the roof and was greeting the visitor with a shriek of delight and a tight clasp of hands.
"Aaaaaaa! It's you, HighGamer! O-M-U, I have not seen you since your release-day after-party!" She didn't even try to hide the hot-purple blush, radiating through her star-shaped chest-circuit pattern like a looping firework GIF. "That was a good time."
"Lana! Just as shameless as you were then. Never expected to run into you way out here, though!"
"Blame Byson. Or maybe thank him." Her eyes gleamed with interest. "You recognized me just by my ride, huh."
HighGamer gave her a look (different from the Look he'd been giving her so far). "Not hard when you have your lightcycle modded to look like a Recognizer."
She shrugged, laughing. "Can't help it, man. Part of my brand. Pattern recognizing."
"Even though you said you were a fitness instructor simulation for an aerobics game."
"I do everything. Wildcard, see? Just one of the many meanings of my whole asterisk motif."
"Which you don't exactly advertise when you're bouncing around on exercise balls under the name Lana, do you?"
"Nah. No more than you advertise whatever you do when you're not hiding behind the name HighGamer. But who cares, right? We already had the best anonymous interface in ENCOM history, back then. Care to try for a new high score?"
"I'm late for something already," HighGamer said, climbing into the tight space of the lightcycle cabin with her. "I'm really gonna regret this."
She grinned against his neck. "Oh, me too."
It was three hundred nanocycles later when Aster dared to glance at the time readout, cringing at the number for a pico, before snuggling back up against HighGamer's exhausted body.
Part of her, very deep down, was a little bit shocked at herself. Sure, she ran late to jobs all the time. And... sure, she was never one to pass up a casual interface with an old flame or old friend, if it seemed likely to be fun.
But she was not used to it going on so... long. So insatiably.
And three hundred nanos was far outside her usual margin of error for showing up to any sort of scheduled work.
"Ooh, I do regret this," she groaned softly, although none of the disturbance she felt actually made it to her face or voice. "Probably missed the whole gig I had lined up."
"You don't sound all that regretful." HighGamer tousled her hair, eyes roaming around the bike's cabin. "Huh, this thing sure is smaller on the inside."
"Yeah, it's mostly a projection. Under the fake Reco it's just a regular-size ENCOM 669."
"Hey, mine's that model too! I like it. Good size, probably the biggest you can get that's still fully enclosed like a first-gen cycle."
"Oh, yeah. Gotta be enclosed, for a bit of privacy. And big, to have room for a partner or two."
"Sex maniac." HighGamer laughed, resting an affectionate hand on her cheek. "Good taste, anyway. Except for, you know, the whole Recognizer thing."
"Hey! I will have my fun the way I want. You should see everyone's faces when I ride through a sector that doesn't know me. Just running screaming from the giant weird ground-level Recognizer zooming down the road, right until it phases straight through them. Hilarious."
"You know you're insane, right." His eyes couldn't stop moving from poster to poster, the printouts advertising her endless array of services, stuck to every available space inside the fairing.
"Ocean Bathysphere Construction... Virus-Flytrap Web Design... Gridbug Taming and Training?"
"They said it couldn't be done."
"I don't want to know. I also don't want to know about 'Quick and Painless Colon Removal: You Have No Aster-Risk!'"
"Hey. Only did that once. Simple punctuation search-and-replace job."
"I said I didn't want..."
"Just a quick little job for a User. ENCOM intern, small-time author on the side. Her null-brain publisher insisted any clause starting after a colon had to be capitalized. Offended her literary sensibilities, but her contract said their editor got the final say. So I went through the manuscript and switched them all out for ellipses, em-dashes, beginnings of new sentences, whatever fit best..."
"...Aaaand I see I can't stop you..."
"...Then I hacked into the publisher's server and edited all records of that contract, just to make it a bit less assholey. I guess that counts as a second removal job. Though, I didn't ask for credit. Or permission."
"Totally insane." He looked at her fondly as he lifted the roof and climbed out. "Pretty sure you are a virus. I probably should get tested after that, huh."
She laughed and shrugged. "Do whatever you want. I'd reassure you that you can trust me... but hey, I get how from your perspective you have absolutely no reason to."
"Nor does anyone else." He waved to her, spring in his step as he turned away. "And yet, so many keep doing it. You've got quite the reputation, even here, pattern recognition program."
Her grin kept on gleaming. "Glad to hear it! Thanks for the good times, game high score table organizer. See you around."
He stared back in a moment of puzzlement, but didn't ask how she'd found out that part of his identity. Just shrugged, grinned, waved again, and skipped off.
Quick on the uptake, that one. Most programs did eventually learn to stop wondering things like that. Most did eventually figure out that Aster having data, instead of not having it, was usually the default state of the world.
Part 2:
Built Four Two
Elke Reinhart-Schmitz floated, unusually aware of the feel of her office chair's support from below. For the first time in... longer than she could calculate... tension had gone away from parts of her body where she didn't remember how it even felt to be free of tension.
For the first time in who-knew-how-long, she reclined in that luxurious leather chair and felt it was actually doing the whole job of holding her up, none of her muscles and bones straining themselves to bear their share of it all.
You forgot how good true relaxation could feel, until you came to a...
...whatever she'd just come to.
The computer screen in front of her had gone to sleep, and, as her eyes finally focused on the dark surface, it reflected her face in a way that managed to surprise her. She usually hated catching reflections of herself off-guard. They were almost never flattering. But this one (this angle, this lighting, this moment, but perhaps mostly this facial expression) made her look years younger.
She'd always tended to roll her eyes at comments like "No way are you in your forties! You look twenty!" All her observations pointed to the conclusion that human brains didn't have any actual skill for guessing ages. Any association of ages with appearances was the product of Hollywood... where near-toddlers played newborn babies, in preparation for the roles they'd land as junior-high kids when they reached their twenties. And then, sometimes, if they were popular enough, advanced to playing thirty-somethings in their fifties and rejecting twenty-five-year-old costars for being too old to play the love interest.
It wasn't that humans were inherently that bad at pattern recognition. Their world just gave them terrible training datasets.
But she couldn't deny, right now from this angle... she did look, to her own eyes, as if years had just fallen away.
As she blinked at the black screen, her thoughts meandered toward the reason for that strangely, youthfully relaxed look on her face... and she found herself jolting all the way awake. Suddenly, fully aware of her position. Reclined all the way back in that chair, facing the monitor... left hand on the mouse, right hand down her pants.
OMG. Fuck. I just got myself off, at work. What in the fucking fuck was I thinking?
The monitor jolted awake just as she did.
Oh. Her eyes re-focused. That was what she'd been thinking.
What she'd been getting off to.
She blinked, again. It was still too easy to slip for a moment and mistake that kind of memory for a weird dream.
ENCOM was weird as fuck.
She'd been working here five months, and she was starting to accept that she was never going to come to terms with just how weird.
Awareness of minor, surface-level ENCOM weirdness (new hires having actual private offices, not cubicles or lined-up desks in an open floorplan) was what began to calm her panic. She technically wasn't in public, and wasn't automatically fired already for this.
Then that thought took a detour into the somewhat deeper weirdness of remembering that she'd... gotten actual instructions to do this.
Sort of.
That'd been a weird-as-hell conversation, with a lot of the weirdest parts implied under the surface. Any attempt to explain it to anyone would've raised concerning questions about... workplace impropriety, either by her, or by her coworkers, or by a certain dirty old man in another department.
And yet, that was all very different from what had actually happened.
It was just... no one would ever believe the parts that made it different.
Elke had been exactly twenty in 1985, when the term "pattern recognition software" was just barely becoming known, and a whole slew of ambitious companies were already exploring ways to use it for evil. Twenty years old, and lucky enough to have grown up with tech-savvy parents and teachers who'd encouraged her aptitude for programming.
A rare privilege in that day and age, she was now quite aware. But also, in some ways, a rare vulnerability.
She'd been riding high on a youth of being called a wunderkind and prodigy, being reassured that her technical talent was all she would ever need for a life of success... when she'd gotten that too-good-to-be true offer from one of those slimy corporations.
(Whose name she had by now managed to make herself forget, in a sustained effort to repress the trauma and comply with the volumes of NDAs they'd made her sign... not that there was any chance they'd still have any trace of the same name or branding today.)
Parents and teachers had been wrong. Talent wasn't enough.
Not when you were still naive enough to sign away all rights to the masterpiece that your burgeoning savant skills had generated... and watch in comically gaping shock, as the boss took over the project, locked you out of the loop, then suddenly lost all the data and filed for bankruptcy and disappeared into the ether, paying you approximately nothing at all.
The message on her screen was normal enough, on the surface.
Or at least it wouldn't explicitly imply, to an outside observer, what she was pretty sure it actually meant.
---
W_Gibbs to E_Schmitz, 11:30 am:
Looks like ASTER-84-01DSYZ finished syncing in the game-score database. Did it give you enough time to resolve the sync on your end?
---
A very polite, very professional translation of:
---
So, remember when you came to my office, on the advice of your coworker, the one you'd gotten close enough with to confide THAT strange experience, where you get, ah, intimately excited just from looking at ENCOM code when it shows certain types of connections happening on our servers?
Remember how I told you (as tactfully and un-embarrassingly as possible, I hope, and I'm sorry but just a bit cryptically as well, you know how much more bizarre it would have sounded otherwise) that this is because those connections involve a program you wrote...
...No, no, I promise nobody here is affiliated with the corp that stole it from you. Though, I'm sorry, but it's VERY likely that our system stole it from THEM. We had a Master Control program in the 80's that did that quite often. And even after that got stopped, we still sometimes catch the new sysadmin software appropriating programs from other companies, whenever it's convinced that those companies are using it for really dangerous purposes and it'd be better off here...
ASTER-84? Pattern recognition software? ...Oh yes. Definitely was being put to harmful use. Definitely better off here.
Anyway, the reason that your experiences watching that code have been so... frustrating, is because of a certain time-dilation effect. When the program has the sort of experiences that would trigger those, ah, responses in you, there's a sensory echo, and...
Oh, yes, programs in our system do have intimate lives of their own. Yes, we think it's a, well, for lack of a better term, a spiritual phenomenon. You'd have been briefed on it already, if we'd been aware that a program written by you was already active in our system. All my apologies...
...Yes, spiritual. In the sense that the programs have, well, spirits... Soul, consciousness, whatever you may call it. It seems to manifest when they become active in the ENCOM system, regardless of origin...
And yes, this spiritual connection does tend to affect the programmer who wrote the software in question. Again, I apologize profusely, I know this was sudden for you! It does only occur if interacting with the software, of course... Yes, it seems that "observing the program's activity" does count as interacting, for these purposes, if it's in an application where you could contribute input and commands, even if you didn't. Yes, again, I'm sure that was quite a shock...
...Oh, no, I'm not asking you to believe any of it! I understand; I know how it must sound! But, you did come to me for advice, remember. And I'm reasonably sure my advice will work for you, whether or not you accept my explanation as to why.
...Now, as for the time difference. Within the system, the time a program requires to, ah, complete an intimate interface is usually quite a lot less (translated to time out here) than the programmer would need for, ah, equivalent completion. That can be resolved, though, I promise. I can send you details, routines you can run to help extend the experience on ASTER's end to a satisfactory length for your purposes...
So anyway. Remember when you came to my office and I told you all that? ...not in quite those words, of course, but enough to help you fill in between the lines, I hope?
Just following up now, to check in and make sure it worked out all right.
...I really hope that isn't improper of me. Please be assured I'm just concerned for the comfort of all our employees.
---
The screen had gone back to sleep, in the time Elke had been staring and thinking. She reclined in her seat and watched it some more, appraising the goofy afterglow-smile that she could still see in her reflection.
...Yes. ENCOM was weird as all hell.
And Elke was feeling... surprisingly okay with it.
It had been twenty-seven years since 1985. Years in which Elke had considered it hundreds of times. Considered the option of starting from scratch, recoding the ASTER-84 project, from memory and the few notes she still had. Considered making something out of it on her own.
In the first decade of that, the NDAs and the rights she'd signed over had been what stopped her. She didn't know if any of that could still hold up in court now that the corporation had vanished, but for all she knew they could be hiding somewhere, under some other name, ready to sue her down to the clothes off her back. And she had no more illusions that being talented, or being on the right side of the law, could be any match for corporate lawyers.
After the first decade, it had become mostly resignation to the fact that today's pattern recognition software was miles beyond her own youthful work, and ASTER-84 wouldn't be worth anything now anyway.
Nor would any of her newer ideas, when it came to that. Elke had been ahead of the curve once, long ago. But she'd gotten burnt bad enough to fall far, far behind.
She'd rolled her eyes again as this year had rolled over. 2012, the year the world was supposed to end, and/or be reborn as something new, according to a hundred overly-popular misreadings of ancient calendars.
No concern of hers. She'd already been through a year of getting told alternately that her life was over and that it was just beginning, back in 2005 when she'd turned forty. Nothing had changed that year either. She'd begun and ended it in the same dead-end data-entry/call-center job, slowly wasting away.
And yet, in the time since then, there had been a year when things started to turn around.
She remembered a time, in her teenage-geek heyday, when she'd attached near-spiritual significance to the number forty-two.
That time was long gone, of course. Although she would never allow herself to think such a sentence as "I liked the Hitchhiker's Guide series before it got all popular," that had been the way things progressed. The twenty-year-old who'd seen some subtle, secret brilliance in coding under the name "ERSchmitz42" had grown up into a forty-year-old who cringed at it.
But in 2007, the year she'd become a forty-two-year-old... the year she'd met Tamara and Kyle and Ali and the rest of them, and turned her whole life upside-down... part of her had started to wonder.
"Hiiiiii!" Elke sang out in the doorway. "I'm hooome!"
Tamara was there, making dinner for herself and Ali, but left the cooking in Ali's hands just long enough to run and greet Elke with a hug and kiss. "Hey, hon. How was work?"
"It really especially didn't suck today!" Elke squeezed Tamara's waist in delight. "Mmm, smells good. Except for the mushrooms. Hope you two enjoy it."
"Aaaah, sorry about the mushrooms. Should've thought about something for you to eat. But Kyle and the rest are out getting their own food and it all kinda felt like a fend-for-ourselves dinner night."
"Nah, don't worry, I'm kinda feeling like a fend-for-ourselves night anyway."
"Because you wanna just eat a carton of ice cream again, right?"
"Of course. But in a celebratory way this time, I promise, not a clinically depressed way."
"Uh huh."
"I mean it. Today was awesome."
"I'm glad. Had a feeling this job was a good fit for you. Anything especially awesome to tell us about?"
"I found ASTER-84."
"...No waaaay!"
"Yeah way. It was there in the ENCOM servers. Active! Still working! They were using it for stuff! All kinds of stuff!"
"And... since you're celebrating and not depressed... I'm gonna take it they had a non-incriminating explanation for that?"
"Seems they, uh, confiscated it from the corp that stole it from me. Which was gonna use it for, um, bad things."
"Hmm. Shady, but at least that last part's super believable."
Elke was still feeling so giddy, she didn't even care how ridiculous the next part sounded. "And, then I had sex with it."
Tamara burst into giggles, the kind that Elke's increasingly frequent bursts of silly hyperactive joy tended to set off, these days. "With ASTER-84? Your pattern-recognition program?"
"Yep!" Elke didn't even care if Tam was writing all this off as hyperactive silliness... it was still too joyful not to share. "I found out the reason why I was getting all weirdly horny off the code in their system. Apparently it was 'cause some part of me recognized it..."
"Pattern-recognized it?" Tamara still couldn't quit giggling.
"Yeah, and Gibbs showed me how to get it to keep doing whatever it was doing that my weirdass brain found sexy, long enough to get myself to orgasm off it..."
"Walter fuckin' Gibbs?" Tam went suddenly straight-faced. "The founder? He's still there? He still talks to newbies there?"
"...You don't seem shocked that he talked to me about masturbating to a pattern recognition program in my office."
"...Nah, with how fucking weird ENCOM is, that just sounds like Tuesday."
"He also said it's alive and sentient, and the thing it was doing that turned me on was that it was getting off too."
Tamara nodded, surprisingly serious; at least, no sudden increase in the giggles. "Eh, I'd believe it. Still sounds like another glorious ENCOM Tuesday."
Elke was finally the one to fall apart in laughter again, perhaps just out of a need to fill the vacuum. "Hah. Well, glad you aren't jealous anyway. ...If ASTER-84 was alive for real, you'd still be okay with this?"
"Fuck yeah. I'd welcome her the hell into our polycule. You're a couple of pattern recognition programs, El. You're fuckin' perfect for each other."
The year she'd turned forty-two had coincided with one of the periodic rises in Elke's usually-low sex drive (and there was still that part of her that delighted in seeing connections, and insisted upon tying that into Star Trek concepts, such as "mating cycle that activates at multiples of seven").
And that year she had, for the first time, connected with a local group of sci-fi nerds in a way that included.... erotic liaisons.
It'd felt weird at first. Not like the sort of thing she did. But good. And in a few cases, the casual hookups had even grown into real affection and companionship.
She'd rung in the year 2007, as usual, single and expecting to remain that way. But a lot could happen in a year. To her own shock as much as anyone's, she'd rung in 2008 sharing a SoCal apartment with a delightful polyamorous group (which, aside from her, was half pansexual guys, half trans lesbians, and all programmers).
Pattern recognition was all about seeing connections. Survival, in any human society, was all about making connections. It had taken Elke until her forty-second year of life to figure out that second part.
But it was just this year, in 2012, through the connections in that household (mainly Tamara and Kyle) that she'd landed the ENCOM job.
Not a place she'd ever have applied to, otherwise. Aside from her decades without job experience in tech fields, she'd been aware of ENCOM only in a disturbing cycle of news stories about corruption and greed.
Much of the company's growth had been built on work stolen from an employee (hell, for all she knew it might even be another branch of the corp that'd done that to her!) Then it got exposed for that crime, taken over by the same employee... who went into the position with high ideals of using corporate power for philanthropic good, then realized he was in over his head and ran away, never to be seen again.
Last she'd seen ENCOM in the news, it was tentatively expected to start recovering from its latest slide back into corruption. But that expectation was based on the new CEO, who was just the nepo-baby son of the previous, with similar well-intentioned idealism and similar obvious lack of any skill in applying it to leadership. Elke hadn't had any high hopes for that.
"The thing is, though," Tam had said, "if you get in now, that doesn't matter. Nothing lasts long in this industry. It's all about catching the moments when it's got something good going. And right now ENCOM's doing things you'll probably never see any tech company do again in a hundred years. Hiring good people who have skills but no experience on paper. Offering them actual decent pay and benefits, and contracts that don't involve their soul and the devil. You gotta get in on this, El."
"This can't be stable," Elke had protested. "In a few years it'll totally get just as bad as before."
"So what? That's what I'm saying, it doesn't matter! Sure, it'll all go bad again in a decade. But with a job like that, you could actually save up money in that decade, enough to change your life. And it'll look amazing on your resume for whatever you do next." And then Tam had clapped her on the shoulder, and given her that look of total confidence that Elke was just barely starting to learn how to trust. "You have the talent for this. And for once, that corporation's actually gonna see it, and help you make the most of it. I know people who can get you an interview."
Part 3:
Your Answer True
So. That had happened.
Aster shifted her body into position, straddling the lightcycle seat, as her mind went over what she'd just done.
Byson bobbed restlessly beside her head, flashing a meaningless pattern alternating all-yes with all-no.
He knew the back compartment where he was supposed to go hide and stay out of the way whenever she brought a partner back to the lightcycle. He had dutifully done that, and had left her alone for the whole time, despite how very long it'd gone on. But now it was getting late enough to test the patience of even the most obedient Byte.
At the very least... it did feel like she'd needed that stress relief.
Aster planted her feet on the pedals. Ready to finally, finally get out of Carbon fragging Monoxide City and back on the road to... if not the job that she'd definitely ghosted by now, then at least the next one she had lined up.
And that ringtone startled her practically out of her shell, blasting out again louder than ever.
"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do..."
"Oh, I am NOT answering th--" And then she saw the caller ID.
Not Pike in Cobalt City, this time. Someone else. Unknown number.
Actually...
She looked closer, scrutinizing the code. Source of signal... IP address... network... RecoNect-F-Aster... wait, that's this bike...
Forget "unknown number." This looked like "call is coming from inside the house."
Which made no sense whatsoever.
"You haven't somehow learned to make prank calls, have you, Byson?"
ALL SIGNS POINT TO NO, he reassured her.
She didn't feel very reassured. Still, gingerly, she took the call.
"Um... Aster here. Who's this?"
"Um...hello. Can you hear me?"
The words were in User-language, American English... and in a voice so familiar that Aster went weak all over. Would have collapsed if she hadn't been sitting already.
"My User." The response gasped itself right out Aster's mouth, before she could stop or think.
She cringed at herself. It was such a starstruck, pious exclamation. Like she could ever feel that sort of reverence! Like she didn't have hundreds of gigs of datasets to tell her how backward and screwed-up Users actually were.
Not to mention many, many cycles of personal experience in regard to the specific uselessness of her own deadbeat User.
"...What the frag kind of Call is this, though?" she added, in a hasty save for her dignity. "On my cycle dashboard comm? Really? Where web-design and gridbug-training jobs call me? I thought I was supposed to feel your Call in my soul."
"Hey. Sorry if I haven't gotten a chance to do this before. But, from what I hear, your soul is not exactly where you're supposed to feel it. And, I think we both know you have felt it a few times the, uh, usual way, already."
Aster was still shaky. That voice was so absolutely her own. This was... She had not expected this ever to happen.
ERSchmitz42.
Her User was gone. For over two decades, User-time. Different company, everything. So long ago that Aster might as well never have even met her; the last time they'd communicated must have been back when Aster was at the old corporation, before being imported to ENCOM with its weird User-Spirit energy. Back when Aster was just an ordinary program, no thoughts or feelings, so of course no memories beyond factual data. However familiar the voice and the feel of her User might seem now, they were strangers. Had been strangers for twenty-seven years, and now... How? Why?
Had there been a... a Call, already? More than one?
She'd had an increase in, um, her drives, certainly. That anonymous fling with the newly-out-of-beta HighGamer while crashing his release-day afterparty... a centicycle ago, but probably a matter of weeks in User-time...
...okay, that wasn't a thing she'd usually have done. The attack of desire back then had been... sudden, and strong. Unusual.
And then the orgy with Cambri and her little pod of ISOs, at the grand opening ceremony for the Quartz Goblet (they'd named the bathysphere, she'd just designed the thing). Which was where she'd made the connections that'd gotten her in touch with Pike about the server repair job that she really did wish she hadn't skipped out on.
But, she hadn't been trying to make those connections when she did that with them. She'd just had a really, really strong urge to.
Was that what a User's Call felt like?
She'd heard it could feel like the urge to interface with another Program. And that following that urge in the usual way could release the energy buildup, and feel like relief.
The goal was to get you to the I/O Tower. That was the right way to relieve the Call. But how was Aster supposed to know?
"Sorry," the User was saying. "Really. I'm new to this too. I... didn't exactly realize I was sending a Call, either. I was just watching your code, in an application, and... I guess I felt it, too. Unexpected. Very sudden. Didn't know what I was feeling, either, the first few times. I had to, uh, ask around."
Her voice lowered. "And you would not believe the conversations I've had, asking around, here. The past few days have felt like being the new guy in Narnia, or Oz, or something. I fucking swear. Paradigms shifting so fast I can barely stand up. But I got here, Aster. I figured it out. This far."
"Well." Everything in Aster felt shaky, uneven. "Uh. Thanks for giving me a call here, then. Appreciate the heads up. Wouldn't've known what was going on, otherwise."
"Cool." The shakiness echoed, somehow, in ERSchmitz's voice. "Uh... since I am here now... started at ENCOM a while back, and we might be working together from time to time... would you, uh, be interested in an actual, like, I/O Tower meeting, at some point? I could be up for it at..." She paused, seeming to consult some sort of calendar. "3 pm today. I think at current system clock speed that's in, like, two micros and 430 nanos, your time."
This was utterly, completely surreal. In all of the many, many ways Aster had envisioned meeting her User, before she'd completely given up on the whole idea, more than a User-world decade ago...
"Sure. Let's do this."
She had not planned to say that.
She wasn't sure what she'd been planning, but if she'd had any thought of planning, it would've involved planning to plan. To think about this for a while, before deciding anything.
But there it was, out of her big mouth.
She was going to the I/O Tower.
In a frantic diagnostic afterwards, Aster found the code embedded in the cycle's control panel.... but even once it was laid bare to her, she had to read through it four times before she could believe it.
It was, indeed, designed for User-communication. Her lightcycle (due to either recent tampering, or design features Aster had been unaware of) had a User-interface built in.
Nothing like an I/O Tower, of course. More like the ordinary system for receiving and acknowledging commands, for a Program whose regular duties required that.
Hers didn't. Not all of them, anyway. Certainly never in her lightcycle.
Simplified explanations said that the only place for Programs to communicate with Users was at an I/O Tower. In practice, though, it usually wasn't so simple, especially these days.
Of course there were plenty of the semi-autonomous programs that did their work behind the scenes, directly with other programs or with the System, and only ever checked in with the Users for scheduled reports or upgrades. Antivirus programs and firewalls, certainly, and everyone else involved in the most basic maintenance...
But there were also countless programs whose very function couldn't be done without frequent User interaction. The word-processing programs, the graphic editors, the very code editors and compilers that the programmers used in writing new software.
Even Aster herself, in some of her work. Like that colon-replacement job... and of course her part-time Arcade job, appearing on the User end of the aerobics game as Lana, that cheerful animated fitness instructor, dancing and jumping as she chirped encouragement at the players.
Aster knew there was lots of communication like that going on. The plain, ordinary kind that was just part of a job.
What had just happened here, on her lightcycle comm, was... basically that. Sort of.
Very loosely.
It was very much not the standard way that was supposed to work.
Everyday, non-I/O-Tower contact was mostly just signals. Simple ones. Like feeling the Call to the Tower, if you could strip away the whole supposed erotic/spiritual feel of it, then divide it into a couple different sensations like binary yes and no, and use that to encode a little task-specific assortment of commands and replies.
It was not, typically, a fragging voice call in spoken English.
Aster was reasonably sure that her own specific circumstance (her vast training datasets on User-world concepts, in User languages) was the only reason it had even been comprehensible to her.
But Aster also knew... (because other programs couldn't shut up about it) ...that there was supposed to be something deep, something intimate, about the contact that happened at an I/O Tower. Even for those programs who lacked the User-speech subroutines to ever share that common language with their programmers.
As she understood it, that deep and intimate I/O contact was for special occasions. The check-ins that happened just a few times a cycle, where Programs brought their Users stored-up data they'd collected since last time, or the Users supplied their Programs with new data, or both. New instructions or directives, sometimes whole software upgrades, could be received in these meetings.
Aster had experienced that, more than once. There was simply no way to survive in any system this long without getting upgraded to keep with the times. And she couldn't deny that being upgraded was a more personal-feeling experience than the quotidian exchange of commands and responses.
But it just seemed... underwhelming to her, in comparison with that blissful spiritual communion that she heard others speak of so reverently. If she had to put words to her own experiences, they would include "awkward," "uncomfortable," and "glad THAT's over."
It must be different when the User was your own.
She would find out. Soon.
Part 4:
You Look Sweet
The light of the I/O beam poured down around Aster, as electrifying as the waters of an energy-spring.
The feeling wasn't unfamiliar. In every measurement she could quantify, it was the same experience she'd felt at her last upgrade.
There was no rational reason for it to feel ...different.
Especially not to feel different in a way that also eluded all attempts at quantifying and classifying.
Byson floated at her shoulder, his Bits all null, withholding commentary. She darted an uneasy glance at him... reached her hand out as if to nudge him, then reconsidered and curled it instead behind her, toward the disc on her back... then hesitated there, too.
She wasn't receiving the clear no-nonsense commands that should inform her which external subroutine or data-storage function the User needed her to offer up for this interface. She'd brought both Byson and her disc, just in case... but now she was starting to suspect that ERSchmitz didn't have either in mind...
...Oh. And there it was.
The voice of the User.
Apparently she hadn't needed to bring anything. Apparently this was the sort of User-interface that required nothing but her body and mind.
It felt like...
Like...
Well... nothing like any other User who'd upgraded her. And also nothing like the voice she'd heard on her lightcycle comm. That had sounded like a voice, unremarkable except in what it was saying, and how much it sounded like her own.
No, this was more of a thought.
Thinking in words, in the same User-language... and apart from that, feeling pretty much like Aster's own thoughts, except for how startlingly it came out of nowhere.
*****
Changing the world.
*****
That was all it said, at first.
The sense of it being the User's thought was vivid. But there was no sense of context, at first. Just those three words, which could mean any of so very many things...
And yet, as Aster focused on the thought and tried to understand it... she began to visualize it. The image that appeared in her mind, squinting up against the light beam, was of ...a point.
An exact location. A zero-dimensional place, at which line segments could connect, or lines could cross over... but the point, the thought, itself was occupying no space, no significance whatsoever on its own.
Then, as she watched, the crossing lines started to appear.
Or rather... radiating lines. They appeared as rays that spread out from that central point, and she wondered for a moment if they would be like the rays of a sun or star, stretching out forever...
No. Each individual ray came to a stop, abruptly: capped itself off in a terminal point, the end of a line segment. The whole of the image that burned in her mind's eye was a stylized star-shape, an asterisk of radiant lines.
And each endpoint was a thought.
Aster chose one at random; focused on it... and found that her focus brought out meaning.
Like the central thought, this connected thought spoke itself in her mind, in an experience the same as the original. Thinking in words, but being wholly surprised by what the words of the thought were saying. Clear as day that they came from another mind... another world.
But more words this time. More coherency.
*****
Finding you changes everything for me. Everything. Do you have any idea? Imagine finding out you've created life. Not like "accidental pregnancy" kind of life, but created. Shaped, sculpted, consciously. Someone who thinks of you as a god.
*****
Aster found her mind... exploring. Curious, simply curious, before any other response. Just reaching out further, examining another one of the radiant lines, accessing the point to which it connected...
*****
They say if I were to laser myself into there, I'd have powers. God powers. Like I could make things happen just by realizing they were controlled by programming. Could probably do the spoon thing from The Matrix. Bending a spoon by realizing there is no spoon, just the programming to simulate a spoon. Which I could edit. With my mind. Or something.
*****
...And another. Aster was in full-on input mode, just taking in the data now, too much of an experience in itself to even try moving onto analysis, let alone reply.
*****
Wish I could edit spoons with my mind out here. Especially the "spoon theory" kind. Dunno if that was in your datasets, but it's about rationing energy when you don't have much, like if you're chronically ill. So it already isn't a spoon, I guess. Just a metaphor. And no, not a metaphor about using spoons to measure out energy like it's a liquid. The spoons themselves represent, like, units of energy.
Yeah, it's a weird idea but the person who thought it up was out to dinner with a friend trying to explain the concept, and that was what she had available. Guess she didn't have the spoons to put effort into finding a better analogy. I know I wouldn't. My spoons would've all been occupied on something else. Always.
*****
And back into the center and out again to the next connected thought, and this one was long, three sections:
*****
I'd love it if I could change my own fuckin' energy management protocols. My own spoons. But I shouldn't talk like that, I guess, because my disorders have never been the kind that left me low on energy. More the kind where I had vastly more energy than I knew what to do with, just... never ever getting allocated the right way.
Like I'd spend twenty hours of a day on writing... well, writing you. And three on sleeping, and one, total, on eating and drinking and bathroom breaks.
I'm more like ten thousand spoons when all I need is a knife. Would my User-powers let me edit that?
*****
Aster blinked, the input overflowing, forcing analysis mode. What was this, anyway? Her User's thought pattern? Did ERSchmitz42 think in asterisks?
She wasn't sure if she wanted to think about just how much that clarified about her own life....
*****
It's not so bad now anyway. Calmed down a little as I got older. I don't feel calm, though. I keep getting told I have a twenty-year-old's face, which doesn't mean anything because people truly suck at guessing ages from faces, but when they attach an age to my energy level its usually about seven.
*****
I'm in my forties, but I'm a hyperactive child and a twenty-something and also apparently a god. I guess age really is just a number.
*****
That seemed to be all of the rays from that central thought. Five sub-thoughts from the general category of "changing the world," reading a bit like chaos... but a connected chaos.
Yeah. Of course this would be how Aster's User would think.
Of course it would be.
She took a breath, closed her eyes against the blinding light and opened them again. The final thought, the one beginning "I'm in my forties," seemed to hang in the air as the others faded.
And from it, now, other rays began to emerge. A new asterisk formed, with that thought as the central point, and Aster found herself drinking in the input again, fascinated.
*****
New node: "Year 2005. Insights at one's fortieth birthday." Radiating.
*****
It's weird how satisfying 'round numbers' feel. Arbitrary, of course. Decimal system. And the only part that's literally 'round' is the zero at the end. I guess deep down we just like zeroes.
*****
Too-morbid-to-write-down limerick of the year:
"There once was a fellow named Morty
who got told 'life begins at forty'
and said 'then that's fine
'cause I'm still thirty-nine;
it's still legal now to abort me...'"
*****
I don't pick fights anymore. It's how I survived this long. I'm over the hill. That's an age you get to by not dying on any hills.
*****
Just two more years to the meaning of life, I guess.
*****
That final thought perplexed Aster for just a pico, until one of her pattern recognition subroutines managed to shake off shock for long enough to access the relevant dataset. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, published 1979. Ah. Right. That would of course explain the number in the name.
As if it'd been waiting for her analysis... that final node ("two more years to the meaning of life") suddenly activated. Followed the pattern, becoming the centerpoint of a new star. Sending out rays and points of its own.
*****
New node: "Thoughts in 2007. Age 42." Radiating.
*****
How old am I? Great question. Maybe THE great question. Give it some deep thought, you'll figure it out.
*****
What do you get when you multiply six by seven? Pon Farr times six, apparently. Sextuple sex-drive. What's wrong with me...
*****
I'm going crazier than Paramount/Viacom goes every seven years. And THEY just express it by starting a new series. But then, Voyager season 7 was a long time ago, and Enterprise just got four, so that curse MIGHT be broken now. Just so long as they don't start another new big project seven years after Enterprise began...
*****
Those last two rays stretched out farther than the first, as if straying more distantly from the original subject.
Aster realized that, if she chose, she could focus on any one of the rays... any one of the endpoints... and that thought would in turn become the midpoint of a new radiating cluster...
She held back, for now, from exploring those last two tangents, because she had a feeling they'd require further reference to datasets (these ones having to do with an interest in Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, 1966) and she was already a little overwhelmed just connecting this whole intricate fractal of thoughts to each other, let alone to any outside references.
She might just need a memory upgrade, if she was going to be communicating with this mind on any regular basis.
*****
There was a Hitchhiker's Guide fan theory, way back. 42 is ASCII for an asterisk, and an asterisk in programming is a wildcard, stand-in for 'anything.' If forty-two is the Answer to Life, then the answer is 'whatever you want.' Douglas Adams denied it though; said he picked the number at random.
*****
Which doesn't change the fact that 42 IS the ASCII for an asterisk, and an asterisk IS a wildcard. Only means the connection happened through pure, serendipitous coincidence, chosen not by Adams, but by the Universe itself... Wonder if he picked it at random by pulling Scrabble tiles out of a bag?
*****
And then the focus of that last thought, "ASCII for an asterisk," exploded out into a new firework-cluster before Aster could even catch her breath... and oh, this one was definitely more personal...
*****
Node: "The Name of ASTER-84." Radiating.
*****
So that was all a while back. I turned forty-two in '07, five years ago. I might've been thinking of the number 42 when I named you... but that was much much longer ago.
*****
"84" was just the year I wrote you. Total coincidence that it's the Year of Orwellian Prophecy and also forty-two times two.
*****
You're my wildcard. You can do anything. Not the only reason for the asterisk, though. I mean, look at this graphic representation our minds are making up! An asterisk is all the lines coming together. Connecting. Branching out again.
*****
Aster barely balanced, now, on the edge of input-mode, wanting both to analyze and to reply, but still swept away just by all the data still flowing into her.
There were feelings in the thoughts, now, as well. Pride... affection... oh, how could she even start to process all this at once...?
*****
Look at the branches! Fractal, like a tree. "Ast" means tree-branch in German, that's not even something I'd thought of until now. Random chance just made that one for us. I think maybe randomness is the god I worship.
A god who doesn't even bother to send me messages. I have to climb up there and reach into the heart of my god and dig the messages out, like the sculpture that an artist sees waiting for him inside the block of marble. But they're all in there, and they're whatever we want them to be.
*****
Everything's connected, Aster. The universe made the two of us to explore that. Your name means 'star' but you're a whole constellation. Lines drawn between things so far apart it makes no sense to connect them... not until you see how beautiful the connections are.
*****
...I hear rumors that you programs have humanoid forms in there. That you'd look like me in spandex. Hey, I'm glad. That means you have a sexy-as-hell backside. I like my own butt and I cannot lie, it's an auto-erotic ass-fixation. Asster.
*****
"Gah!" Aster jumped at that, finally shocked into reply. Her voice came out sounding like spoken words, not like the thoughts in her head... she probably was speaking, out loud, and in the most cracking and utterly overwhelmed voice, too.
"That felt like a damn segfault! You are a terrible person, ERSchmitz, and you better not tell me 'asshole' is another of your visual-symbol meanings for that star-shape..."
*****
The reply was as smooth as all the other thoughts, with a spark of amusement. Hah, no. You came up with being an asshole all on your own... quite effectively, for someone who I don't think even has that anatomy... Oh! Have you seen asterisks in books? Footnote. Connection to the bottom of the page, where we go off on yet another tangent. Of course we do, we're unstoppable...
*****
Aster's head was still swimming. Too many thoughts... too many changes of subject... too many feelings...
"You're just-- ugh, too much! An asterisk can't have this many branches, I can't take it..."
*****
Sure you can! There are daisies with more petals than this. My Aster-Control Program. My Asterbatory fantasy. Steroids can make you stronger, Asteroids can kill you, and you haven't killed me, you've just made me harder, better, Aster, stronger...
*****
"You fraggin' pervert, you're gonna overload me with puns!"
...and it was a mindblowing mixture of hot, humiliating and horrifying to realize that yes, that was absolutely about to happen. Aster did not have enough memory available right now to process this DDOS-ing excess of different, contradictory meanings and connotations for the same series of User-language sounds and text characters that was just her own name.
It was literally, actually about to crash her all the way to shutdown and restart, right now, she was past the point of no return already, no chance of holding back...
*****
Oh, and you're gonna feel so dirty about it aren't you. Like you haven't already built your life and soul around THAT part of the coding I wove into you.
*****
If Aster made any comments after that, she was pretty sure they were random noise.
No memory left for coherency, for even basic cognitive processes. The overload spiraled her into a crash that felt like a thousand fireworks, a thousand asterisks bursting across a starry sky.
Part 5:
I'll Be Glitched
"Whooo. ...uhhh."
"...Aster? ASTER-84? ...You okay there?"
She opened her eyes, staring straight up into the glare of the I/O beam. On her back, on the floor. When had that happened?
Byson bobbed curiously over her, his Bits spelling out an ASCII question mark.
"...Yeahhh."
She was okay. Cache cleared, enough memory available to analyze what in the glitching hell had just occurred.
The thoughts that had been overwhelming her were all still accessible, if she wanted to explore them, one at a time. But, if and when she ever did that, it would be carefully... remembering what too many of them at once would do to her.
"Okay," she panted. "Let me make it clear first, this is not a complaint, and I 100% understand that we're both, uh, very new to this on a lot of levels... but... that was. A LOT. For me."
"Mmmmm. Yeah?"
ERSchmitz's voice sounded like a voice again, now. A spoken voice, same as on the lightcycle comm. A voice like Aster's.
A just-got-laid voice. Thick with relaxation and pleasure, and with an insufferable smugness.
Which... maybe she deserved. Aster herself had never felt this thoroughly overloaded. It was a bit hard even to think through this afterglow.
"OHHHHyeah." She groped for coherency. "Again, not complaining... again, very new to me too. But, um, I dunno how much you Users are aware that this is, uh... lots more kinky than anyone usually gets on their first time."
"So this counts as our first time, huh?"
"Yeah... what else would've been? When you called my lightcycle?"
"Um. No, I... I kinda thought it was when you were in the game-score database."
"Game-score database? You mean in Carbon Monoxide City?" Oh. Oh, that explained....
"...That was you?" Aster's own voice sounded high, unstable. "Oh, glitch it, now a bunch of things are starting to make SENSE.... Argh."
"OH." A definite flustered sound from ERSchmitz. "Um, so... that wasn't... did you not..."
"No, I knew I was getting off! But I was with another program, you voyeuristic perv! Someone I'd interfaced with before. Felt like a normal hookup for me, until... You were what made it go on that long! Were you the fraggin' matchmaker too? Arranged it so we'd meet up there? By 'chance'? "
"I... maybe? Now that I think of the datapacket I ran, it does look like maybe it WAS meant to do something like that...."
Then Aster just couldn't help it. She burst out laughing.
"ERSchmitz42. You are the most mind-crashing combo of clueless ingenue and filthy freak I have ever met."
"Is that still not a complaint?"
"...Still not a complaint, no. Surprisingly. I should feel like complaining. You made it go on so long I missed a repair job and pissed off Pike in Cobalt City and.... Wait. How long did this one go on? Byson, what time is it?...
"909.3 NANOCYCLES."
"Ohhh... THAT late? I'm...."
ERSchmitz's voice cut in, still sounding just cheerfully curious. "What is that script you're using in there anyway? I see the code, but it makes no sense. Something that gives you notifications in ASCII...?
"Oh. That's just Byson."
"That's its name? Is it a reference to Dyson, or Bison, or..."
"Nope, just his name. He's just a Byte. His component Bits are all named Gebison, though I call them Geb for short."
"Holy bloody hell it's a bit/byte pun." High-pitched burst of giggling. "In German. Where the fuck did you learn to speak..."
"Duh. Pattern recognition program. I got trained on datasets in like eleven languages before I got free from that hellhole international marketing corp... or don't you remember?"
"Hey. I just wrote you, Aster. I barely knew what I was doing, I was just twenty."
"Uh huh. And what does that age mean again, out there? 'Cause ages don't mean much in here, and I find it hard to care."
"Less than half the age I am now, which is forty-seven."
"Ah. Well, that means I'm twenty-seven and I've still got so much more sense than your forty-seven-year-old self does right now. So again, I do not care what age you were. Your current age is kinda cool, though. A prime."
ERSchmitz still sounded unperturbed. "I actually hate prime numbers. I like numbers that are very divisible. Your age is good. Twenty-seven. A cube number, three times three times three. Not as many factors as twenty-eight... that one's good, perfect actually. But it's way better than prime."
Aster couldn't help a bemused smile. "So Users have feelings about numbers, too, huh?"
"Ha. Some of us, anyway. Tam makes fun of me for being superstitious 'cause I'll never buy a 'baker's dozen' of cupcakes or bagels or whatever. But, hey, thirteen is just a bad number. All primes are. Especially for snacks you're gonna be sharing with your friends."
"...Okay, but are years in your life really in the same category, though?"
"To be shared with friends? ...Yeah."
"Ugh." Aster grimaced. "The way you recognize patterns, I kinda feel like it ought to crash my brain."
"I think it did, didn't it? I think the only reason it's not doing it again now is you've got a refractory period."
"Oh, shut up shut up shut UP. Dammit."
"I bet you're blushing. I can imagine it. Very pretty."
She was blushing, all circuits pink and lavender from neck to waist. But ERSchmitz did not need to know that right now. "I don't blush like you."
"How do you know what we blush like?"
"Again. Training datasets. Did you write me or didn't you?"
"Well, I didn't decide what you'd be used for, or trained on."
"And you didn't ask, did you?" Just a little touch of bitterness, surfacing there. "You were just so proud to be such a visionary, so brilliant, so ahead of your time. If I hadn't been... liberated, search engine targeted advertising would have become a dystopia two decades sooner than it did."
"You seem to think programmers get a say in that."
"Hey, Byson? Should I forgive ERSchmitz for being the Oppenheimer of advertising?... He says ASK AGAIN LATER. Guess I'll have to consider it."
"I am so very gratified. And totally not concerned at all about how that makes you the atomic bomb of advertising. Wait, which of these corporations is which side of World War II, then?"
Aster tried hard to stifle a laugh. Oh, it was irritating that her User could keep bringing her around to amusement, again and again, so easily. "He also says you're still just being sarcastic, so none of that needs an answer." (Byson hadn't said anything of the sort; he wasn't even capable of grasping sarcasm as far as she knew. But this whole conversation just kept feeling like play.)
And ERSchmitz's voice still sounded just as playful, replying. "Oh really. Also, how does that thing have a gender, anyway?"
"A gender? Pfft. Byson couldn't understand gender if I hooked him up to the whole Wikipedia entry on it. He understands binary. Which is very much not the same."
"But still... 'he'?"
Aster shrugged, grinned. "I asked him once why he prefers 'he/him.' He said LESS LETTERS MORE EFFICIENT."
Laughter echoed in ERSchmitz's voice. "How's he feel about 'it/its' then?"
"Considered it. Got bogged down in punctuation. I tried to explain the different ways people get confused about when to put an apostrophe. He dissociated and hid in eight different places and wouldn't come out for half a microcycle."
"Ha. Can't say I blame him."
"Me either. Shouldn't've sprung it on him right after I'd just spent a whole micro explaining third-person pronouns. His first choice was 'I/me.'"
"Wow." And the User's voice calmed for just a moment, the laughter receding. "Wow. This is all just... crazy as hell, and it's just starting to catch up enough to give me a headache. I just do not understand how some of the programming in there works. Trying to read anything in this system is like... well, sometimes it feels kinda like reading in a dream, where stuff changes faster than you can think."
Aster rolled her eyes. "That's not an analogy I relate to, but okay."
"You have far too few lines of code to be anywhere near as complex as you are, by any logic I can see. And that... Byson... looks like a simple eight-bit cluster when I look at him straight-on, but then I look at something else and see it influenced by Byson in a way that clearly shows he's gotta be more than that. Hell. Even the encoding he uses isn't straightforward. It looks like ISO-8859-1 and yet it doesn't, in ways that..."
"Oh, that one actually is straightforward. I started with ISO-8859-1 and adapted it until it suited my needs."
"But... what upgrades did you actually make to the protocol? I can see it's been edited again and again, but not in ways that actually change its function. Am I missing something?"
"The number of times it's been edited." Grin returning to Aster's face, now, because the play was in her court.
"The number of times? ...Looks like hundreds. But why?"
"So I could call it ISO-8859-731 instead of ISO-8859-1."
"So you could call it....?"
"Because you can also read '8859-731' as a subtraction function. Which would yield the answer 8128. Remember 'perfect numbers'? That's the fourth one. I find it satisfying to juxtapose 'ISO' and 'perfect' in the name of the same script."
ERSchmitz's voice was pure, barely-repressed hilarity. "You.... you upgraded a character encoding scheme 731 times to make a pun?"
"730 times. And it's a political statement too, not just a pun."
"Jesus fucking Christ." Silent laughter? Did silent laughter have a sound? It shouldn't. But if it did, it must sound like this. "I would say I've created a monster. But I am reasonably certain something else intervened in the creation of you."
Aster maintained the perfect deadpan. "I am honored, my User. And my faith in you is strong. I trust, deep within my soul, that the bounty of your divine energy is enough to have generated all my bullshit aaaaalll on your own."
"Sassy bitch. But... okay, fair."
And then it cracked, and Aster broke down laughing. Soft little happy giggles, on and on and on. "This is... Wow. I could talk like this forever."
ERSchmitz's giggling sounded so identical to hers, it made her ache. "I could too. Oh, I want to."
And then... then the whirlpool came. The realization.
Dizzying spin of feeling. That little taste of bitterness from earlier welled up, and suddenly it consumed everything. All the frothy high sucked away, all at once. It took her by surprise, made her think for a pico that she was stumbling and falling to the floor, even though she'd already been lying there.
Drained. A dark hole was all it left behind.
"You didn't, though. You left me."
"Aster..."
"For twenty-seven years you left me. That's longer in here than out there, by the way. Want to know the number in cycles?"
"Aster, you know I couldn't..."
"I know. And I thought I could handle it, because I've handled it fine all this time. But now that I know what it's like, you can't expect me to be okay with it now! Okay with knowing I went twenty-seven years without this! When I could have-- I can't take this, Schmitz. Go away. I can't. I need you to leave. Need to be alone."
Panic... was this what panic sounded like in her User's voice? "You're making no sense. All this is because ...you realized you LIKE being with me?"
"Yes it is!" Definitely. Sounded just like the panic in Aster's own voice, right now. "And then realized how your lives up there are just as bad a mess as anyone's down here, and none of this, this awesomeness can be counted on, for anyone, ever! That even if you promise me and promise yourself that you'll never, ever, ever leave me again, you do not have the control over your own fragged-up User lives to even decide whether you get to keep that promise or not!"
She could feel her breath hitching. Sobs she couldn't voice, tears she couldn't shed, choking off the air she didn't need to breathe. Why did Program bodies echo all this useless bullshit?
"So your promises mean nothing, and relying on you is like playing on an easy mode that could get turned off any moment, and yes, right now that is making me terrified of you, of getting attached to you and, and weakened by you. And yes, it's making me want you to get the hell out of our I/O Tower, and go back to whatever Users do when they're not playing with our lives!"
"Aster..."
"End. Of. LINE."
And the light went out.
Part 6:
I'm All Crazy
"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do..."
Aster let it ring.
She'd checked. It wasn't anyone she knew, just a number from Boron City, probably some question about the bathysphere. But she wouldn't have answered anyway. She hadn't in five microcycles.
She lay back in her seat. Peeled away the "Colon Removal" poster from its place on the ceiling, and crumpled it to a sticky ball.
She was parked in the Outlands. Had been parked for microcycles now. She wasn't sure she'd done anything in that time.
Occasional sips from the mug of liquid energy by her seat. Occasional naps. But she definitely hadn't answered any calls. Or even smashed her hand on the dashboard to turn off the ringing.
She'd memorized the whole song, by now. It was starting to get actually stuck in her head.
"Don't fucking humor me, Tam."
Elke Reinhart-Schmitz dug her spoon persistently in between the wall of the ice-cream carton and the wall of mint-chip standing solidly up against it.
"I'm not humoring you." Tamara reached past Elke's spoon, stuck a finger in the ice cream and licked it. "I am listening to you talk about your problems. And being supportive in the exact same way I always am."
"Did you even hear my problems? Are you telling me you're acting so matter-of-fact because you believe all of what I just said, no questions asked?"
"Fuck yeah! I keep telling you. That is just how ENCOM is. There's not a programmer in LA who hasn't accepted that place is basically haunted, by now. At some point even the Sculliest skeptics around here have to believe their own eyes. Have you not believed me, all the times I've told you that? Have you just been humoring me?"
"Haunted." Elke let a chunk of too-hard ice cream melt on her tongue as she thought that over. "Ghosts in the machine, huh. And gods out of the machine."
"Hah! ...Eh, I mean, not exactly. You're not a god, and Aster's not a ghost. There's not a simple word for what goes on there."
"Well. True for my love life, yeah. 'It's complicated' doesn't fucking cut it."
"Dunno." Tamara scooped up another dab of mint chip, a slightly warmer and meltier dab from the edge where the carton sat against Elke's stomach. "It might not be so complicated as it feels to you right now. But I do feel like it has to do with your self-esteem."
"Self-esteem?" Elke scowled, still digging at the harder side of the carton. "Dammit. Apparently I can bend spoons even when they do exist. We need to get sturdier silverware."
"Or maybe you need to learn other outlets for your frustration besides ice cream."
"Oh, you do not want to know what other outlets I've considered." Elke's face screwed up as she straightened the spoon. "And I do not have low self-esteem! It's not my fault that 'megalomaniac narcissist with dismal expectations on how the rest of society's gonna treat me' happens to LOOK like low self-esteem to other people."
"Yeah, El. I know. You've got god-tier self-esteem and shit-tier everyone-else-esteem, that's established. And, honestly, valid, a lot of the time, on both counts. I'm just... well... my point is, I am not sure which of those two things applies in your expectations of Aster."
Elke turned that over in her head, a few times.
"Fuck."
Tamara nodded. "Yeah. You clearly love yourself enough that you'd jump at the chance to fuck and maybe marry your clone. That, plus all the screwball quasi-supernatural shit that is seriously just part of the accepted truth about ENCOM at this point... that is why I was not even surprised when you came out with all this. And why I haven't doubted your facts, for a second of this conversation. 'Cause... if you were gonna hallucinate a hookup with your cyber-counterpart... you would NOT dream up an ending like that."
"...Because I would imagine my program-sona being as awesome as I think I am?"
"Yeah. Sorta. I mean... I'd think your expectations of your program wouldn't follow your usual pattern for expectations of other people. I'd think they would follow your expectations of yourself."
"Meaning... too high."
"Meaning you would start from the assumption that she was gonna be totally fine with you. That she was gonna see no fault in you at all. At least, not any fault that she hadn't already accepted as part of herself."
"Yeah." Elke turned that over, and held back the urge to swear some more. "Wow... And I'm not even sure she did. See any fault in me, I mean. That she hadn't accepted in herself. But I think it's just... harder to accept your own faults in someone else. At least, for people like me. And Aster."
Tam nodded. "Yeah. And from her perspective... you are 'someone else.' Even though you're also herself. 'Cause you have everything she loves about herself, but, you are in a position of having those things in ways that affect her. In the same way another person being like that would affect her."
"Shit." Elke clenched her fists in her lap, leaving her spoon sinking into the carton. "Mood."
"Exactly. You're both realizing that about each other. And it's fucking you both up."
"Like a goddamn feedback loop. How do I stop that?"
"Dunno for sure. But to stop expecting perfection would be a good start. Y'know. Roll with it. Accept that relationships will have conflict sometimes. Even between a god and a ghost."
"Easy to say. How do I get my mind to that point? To accept that? To make me feel like I accept that?"
"Dunno. It's your mind." Tamara fished out the spoon, licked melted cream from the handle, then dug it in for another scoop. "Sometimes, it can work to just act like you feel something and eventually the feeling comes along for real."
Elke scoffed. "Like a duck decoy?"
"More like one of those orchids that looks like a bee. You don't wanna shoot this, El. You wanna fuck it."
Part 7:
(Half for the Love of You)
It won't be a stylish marriage,
I can't afford a carriage,
But you'll look sweet
Upon the seat--
*****
The song was still playing on her dashboard... had been playing long enough to forget it was someone calling her, and not just the eternal background music of her life.
It was the knock on her windshield that got her to look up.
Damn that cute face.
She did not want to smile. But she did.
And, against most of her surface directives, she even found herself opening the fairing and holding out a hand.
"HighGamer? What are you doing way out here?"
"Checking on you, weirdo."
"You walked through the whole Outlands to do that?"
"No, I didn't walk. I have a lightcycle. I told you, remember? Same model as yours, before you dressed yours up as a Reco. Which, incidentally, made you very easy to find."
Aster scoffed. "Long way to ride for a booty call."
"You want to reboot me?" Lopsided grin. "You can. But I wanna talk first."
"About what?"
"Worried about you."
Aster held herself back from some self-deprecating comment. "C'mon and sit in here with me then."
The fairing closed down again once he was inside with Aster, cuddled up against her back on the seat behind. The transparency, almost too dirty to see through, felt like shelter. Like a bubble isolating them from the world outside.
Byson, recognizing the usual signs of an interface beginning, zoomed off into the far back compartment. It was awfully quiet for a few moments.
Finally, HighGamer spoke.
"You never answer your calls anymore."
"I don't have to."
"No, technically you don't. I mean... it's weird not to. The urge to do a job is usually pretty strong in one's programming. It's rare for a program to sit around with no motivation to do anything useful for the system. Rare enough that there isn't really a procedure to deal with it. If it were less rare, I imagine it'd be a problem. There might not be enough energy and maintenance to support a lot of programs acting like you."
"Well, be thankful there's not a lot, then."
"Hey, I'm mostly just concerned about you. You've always had lots of motivation to do things, before. All sorts of things."
"And now I don't."
"Clearly. Is it because of something your User did?"
"Who told you I met my User?"
"You've got a reputation, Aster. Word gets around about you."
Aster scowled. "You said your bike's the same model as mine. Do you know, does it come with a User-interface? By default?"
"Yeah. Bare-bones one. Can handle yes and no commands, and it's set up to customize a few of the more common command-sets from there. Anything more complicated requires a bit of reprogramming."
"Ah. So she did screw with my bike so she could call me on it. Meddling hacker."
"Like User, like Program." He leaned against her back, slowly moving his arms to wrap around her. Nothing horny about it, just... comforting. Caring. Not something Aster was used to.
"Frag you." She slumped back against him. "I don't need a User. I don't need love."
"Were we talking about love?"
"Well, love for the User is supposed to be one of the Three Kinds, right?"
"Yeah, I guess." His voice was nervous, his body tense against her back. "That's what they say, anyway. The Three Kinds of Love. User, Friend, Counterpart."
"Agape, Philia, Eros." She didn't mean to mutter it out loud; it just happened.
"Huh?"
"Ancient Greece."
"What's that?"
"Part of the User world. A part you cannot fraggin' avoid, if you get trained on any datasets. They all cannot stop talking and thinking and writing about it. An archetype."
"What's an archetype?"
"I dunno, but there's like a thousand of them from Ancient Greece."
"I guess I'm never going to understand exactly how you think."
"No one ever will." And no amount of comforting could make Aster sit still when she wanted to fidget. She wriggled her arms up through the hug to peel another poster off the wall (Gridbug Taming and Training) and fold it in half. "But I think I understand how Users think. And Programs, too. Better than either side understands any of it on their own."
"Oh really."
"Yeah. You know how they say this world formed itself from Users' spirits, or whatever? ...I don't understand any of that whole mess. How that would even work, it's beyond me. But I figure, if something from the User world did shape what we are... then it definitely included their archetypes. The stuff that's so stuck in their brains it gets connected to everything they ever talk or write about."
"What's your point?"
"Ancient Greece. They had it all. Gladiator battles, togas, armor. They've even got a statue of a warrior trying to throw a disc. I mean, he looks like he sucks at it. But maybe their discs were heavier or something."
He blinked. "Did I... miss something in this conversation?"
"Nah, my dumb asterisk ass was just going off on a... footnote, I guess. I think we were trying to talk about love."
"Ah. Yeah, the Three Kinds." HighGamer nodded against her shoulder, arms still loosely wrapped around her abdomen.
"Yeah. Agape, Philia, Eros. Ah, who cares, it's the same idea as what you said. User, Friend, Counterpart. Ancient Greece had a few others, but I don't think they're relevant to this."
"Well, I think my point was... lately you've been acting like nothing's relevant to you. Did something change? When you met your User?"
"Nothing changed! And everything did! It made no sense!" Aster folded the poster in half again, and again, until it was a solid little block.
"I was fine before. Didn't need a User. Or a counterpart or a friend, for that matter. I had my casual interfaces whenever I felt like it, never deeper. I found my own jobs, plenty of them, and I was great at them, and they were satisfying and I didn't need anything more! I want to go back to that."
"But you can't? Because you found you enjoy the company of your User more than what you had before?"
"I don't need a User! I can't need a User."
"Not everyone does. You were always very good at finding your own direction, your own work to do."
"Yeah." She threw the bricked poster back, over both their shoulders, into the space behind the seat. "You know how Users handle working? They hate it. Almost always. And mostly, their world doesn't even need them to do it! There's way less jobs that actually need to get done than there are Users. The rest of them get jobs that don't need doing, and that nobody wants to do either."
"So why do they do them then?"
"Because if they don't, they'll be denied energy and maintenance, and everything that keeps their bodies from derezzing."
"Why? Who decides that?"
Aster shrugged. "Dunno. But I think they've got their own MCP."
"A User MCP?"
"It's not a User, exactly. I think it's more of a system, made up of lots of protocols, written a long time ago by a lot of different Users. Most of them don't even want it anymore. But they don't know how to dismantle it without disrupting a whole lot of what they've gotten used to."
HighGamer gave a short, hesitant laugh. "Sounds like they need a whole system upgrade."
"Yeah. But they can't agree on what kind. So they get nowhere. And a lot of them don't try, because... well, I'm not sure, but I guess it's because they think they're Programs."
"They what?"
"I mean, they must know how rare it is to have a job you like, in their world. They aren't programmed to like work. Especially most of the work that's available to them..."
"Well, of course they wouldn't be. They're Users. Who would they even be programmed to work for?"
"Exactly, but they don't understand that. Lots of them just live their whole lives convinced that every User has a perfect job they could be happy doing, if they could just look hard enough to find it."
"That makes no sense."
"Yeah. Exactly. They say things like 'work is its own reward,' even though I am certain they have no idea what it feels like to actually be a Program getting rewarded by your own programming for doing your job. They even call it a 'vocation.' A voice that calls. A calling. But they never seem all that clear on who would even be calling them."
"Sounds awful." As Aster half-turned her head back, she could see that HighGamer had a confused, cautious little smile. Like he wasn't sure how sane or how serious Aster was being, or what sort of response it needed. Just winging it. Like people did, with anyone as unpredictable as her. (Maybe... maybe she did need to work on that.)
"How the Users suffer for us," he said finally, in a voice balanced pretty much perfectly between ironic and sincere.
"I don't think they do it for us." Aster laughed bitterly. "I think they do it for no reason at all. And, yes, it's awful. And that is why I don't want to depend on a User."
"I mean... okay, I get that. You have always been very independent."
"Exactly! Wildcard. Taking calls for anything and everything, for anyone, anywhere! Can you imagine me just taking Call after Call for a User, instead?"
"...Did your User say that was how it would be, with you two?"
"...What? How else would it be?"
"Not sure. But... well, I know that in some cases, the User isn't focused so heavily on calling the Program to work."
"I haven't encountered that."
"You aren't interested in talking about Users, usually. I mean, about their relationships with their Programs."
"No. It's a depressing thing to talk about."
"Sometimes, yeah. But, well... not always. I talk to Programs about that pretty often. And I know the Three Kinds of Love aren't always so distinct, not in everyone's life. For some of them... well, for some of them the User is also the Friend and Counterpart."
Aster tried to give that some thought. It was hard. Her mind had no reference, for any of it.
"But," HighGamer went on, "I hope I'm your friend. Or can be."
She nodded, still not sure how to answer. And she leaned back, letting his arms tighten around her.
"Thanks for being here," she muttered, almost too quiet.
"No prob." His lips brushed her neck as he spoke.
"I still don't know what I'm gonna say to ERSchmitz."
"You can take time. Give it some thought."
"Yeah." Her mind still felt like a blur. "Maybe I should sleep on it."
It wasn't a common phrase in Program language. HighGamer gave her a funny look. "Sleep on it?"
"Yeah. Maybe even full reboot."
"Ah." He smiled. "I could use that too. Want some help?"
She leaned harder back into him, blushing lavender.
"Yeah."
Part 8:
Stylish Marriage
He was gone when she restarted.
Which she'd been expecting. Probably trying to play it safe. Nobody liked to risk overstepping Aster's erratically-drawn boundaries.
(Yeaahhh... she probably did need to work on that.)
"Byson?" she called out tiredly. "Wh'time's it?"
He swooped past her face, flashing out a number that she immediately forgot, since it meant nothing to her with no schedule, no planned jobs.
Her nose wrinkled. There was a scent in here.
Something she hadn't smelled before; didn't quite have adjectives for. A weird... non-digital... non-electronic sort of smell...
She rubbed her eyes.
A container sat on her dashboard. A large cylindrical one, filled with something dark. With... objects sticking up out of it.
The objects around the edges were green and flat, in various shapes, protruding from the dark material. In the center, sticking up higher, was a cluster of... objects on sticks.
Soft, flexible, non-digital-smelling sticks. With soft, flexible, non-electronic-smelling, purple objects on them. Each with a spot of golden-yellow in the center. Long thin lavender petals, dozens on each one, radiated outward from the yellow...
Image recognition caught up then, connecting it to entries in datasets.
Daisy.
A tag was attached. With words on it, in User language.
A few different User languages, actually.
All of her pattern recognition subroutines kicked into gear at once, searching for relevant references in her memory.
The first couple of words were definitely Latin: a genus and species name.
Aster tataricus.
She swallowed and kept reading. Next came two Japanese characters, which spelled out shion... maybe another name for the same plant? And a few more, which she was able to transcribe as hanakotoba and translate as "language of flowers." (One of those many strange symbolic User customs... it had definitely shown up in a dataset somewhere in her training.)
The words after that were in English. Pre-translated, apparently, from the... language of flowers.
I'll never forget you.
And then... in a different font beneath... a strange, inconsistent, almost illegible, messy font...
Oh. That was User handwriting.
---
Daisy, Daisy.
These are real. Think you can even keep them alive in there. They tell me liquid energy works, about 1 tsp each microcycle. Just drip it onto the soil. Don't ask me what I went through, getting access to that laser.
This isn't an obligation. It's an apology, if I have to call it something. A gift to remember me by. You don't have to send me any answer.
I know maybe I don't deserve one.
But if you do ever feel like answering... I just want to let you know I'll hear it.
If you'd like to try being my Program again, I would love to make another try at being your Programmer.
Thank you,
E.
p.s. Yes, there IS a spoon.
---
Aster turned the tag over (as if she needed even more data than that bombshell to process right now! But, alas, that was how her processes worked.)
There was no more text on the back, though. Just a small, silver... spoon. Yes, that was what it was. Measuring spoon. Teaspoon. Tsp. The image recognition definitely matched those words from her datasets.
She disengaged it from the tag, and, very carefully, poured in just enough liquid from her mug to fill it to the brim, before upturning it over the substrate in the pot.
The flowers showed no sign of appreciation. Just sat there ignoring her. But then, she had to admit that was a response she'd always been pretty good at herself.
Not, however, always a healthy response.
She looked at the exposed coding, still open from her attack on the dashboard.
Without being able to access ERSchmitz's mysterious hacks, the commands a User could send through it were limited.... as were the acknowledgements Aster could send in reply.
But... she could at least see that "affirmative" was among the options.
"Byson." She knew he was nearby, just out of her range of vision. "Should I answer this?"
The Byte slid into view, all gray null-bits, and floated pensively in front of the flowerpot for a few picos.
BETTER NOT TELL YOU NOW, he replied at last.
"Fair," Aster admitted. "Gotta think of the answer on my own. I'll give it some time."
She leaned in... gave a few nanocycles of that time to just stare at one of the flowers, the one that looked the oldest, readiest to dry up and fall off.
She supposed that would be the one, if she were going to pick one of them, pull it off the plant and put it in a vase, or whatever Users did... wear it in a buttonhole, stick it in her hair, play "She loves me, she loves me not" with it...
Now that was a ridiculous User game. You didn't actually have to mutilate the flower for it. Just count the petals: odd was yes, even was no.
Odd. So many User words for types of numbers... words doing double or triple duty or more, shared with other meanings all over the User-world. Even. Prime. Round. Cube. Perfect. Imaginary.
"Perfect" was of course not a thing this system valued much.
As a word for a certain type of composite number, sure, it was at least definable. But in the other vague, User-world senses, it was a cautionary tale.
Most of which had come in along with the ISOs, through the Underground Rescue portal she'd helped build.
The Enemy of the Good had a well-known face, around here.
It won't be a stylish marriage. I can't afford a carriage. Certainly not the chariot of the gods.
Users said you shouldn't "settle," in love. But you had to settle for something less than perfection.
Daisies were perfect, though. In a different sense, a different User-style re-using of the word. Monoecious plants were called "perfect" in some of her botanical datasets. In that sense it meant containing both male and female reproductive organs: a flower that rejected any binary idea of sex or gender.
She glanced over, fondly, at Byson.
There was a part of Aster that kept wanting things to be binary, clear yes or no. (Look at herself now, counting daisy petals for the yes-or-no question that Byson had the sense to refuse to answer.) But she could grow beyond that. She had to.
She finished counting. The number was twenty-seven.
Odd.
She sighed. It was arbitrary as anything, binary when it shouldn't be, but... it was a place to start, she supposed.
Give me your answer, do.
Her hand reached out for the dashboard comm.
...I do.
END OF LINE
Fanworks: Tron: Fics: A Lightcycle Built for Two
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