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ph_logs2025-01-07 04:38 pm
2onostromo) wrote in ph_logs2025-01-07 04:38 pm
Catching Trains & Walks Through Dark Forests ( OTA )
Who: Ellen Ripley & YOU!
What: To ride a train, or not to ride a train, that is the question.
When: Early January
Where: Train, Lockwood Forest
Warning(s): N/a, tbd?
All In a Day’s Work
Perhaps mining isn’t the kindest labor Ellen Ripley could have chosen for herself, but she doesn’t care. She needs something. A purpose on this cold, unforgiving rock– if Pumpkin Hollow can be classified as such. It’s dubious her new home exists on any celestial body she’s familiar with, and yet she finds herself pitching eyes upward to probe the clear black sky. For clues, for hints of life elsewhere, for the star systems who’d raised her. Nothing. How lonely.
Into the mines, then. To be swallowed by a new, impenetrable dark. A starless void of dust, rock and precious ore. The maternal drone of an intelligent computer is replaced by the rhythmic clang, clang, clang of her’s and other’s tools. Star systems replaced by a maze of intravenous tunnels. Hauler ships worth multi-millions, responsible for carrying several billion tons of crude oil in their breast-shaped modules, reduced to archaic mine-carts. The drone of men around her– that much hasn’t changed a bit. The utter lack of advanced technology stumps her at first, borne of a time long before her own. But she adapts. Hard not to. What else has she but time, after all?
Her work takes her all the way to Cranes Ridge, a sprawl of dry mountains tucked deep within Lockwood Forest.
When she rises out of the ground, caked in dust and smattered in ore and oil to catch the train home, she finds the sun has gone down. Not unusual, given her long work-hours. But nevertheless perturbing.
The train welcomes her by unhinging its sliding jaw, allowing her entrance into a narrow yet comfortable cabin. It kicks up sparks as it leaves the station. Coughs clouds of black smoke into the still night air. You find her seated in one of several empty rows, wiping her face with a grey cloth.
All in a day’s work.
ALT. No Way Home
Up, up, up out of the ground she climbs. Hauls her belongings to the foot of the train station. She awaits its arrival; a squeal, a kicking of sparks and cough of black smoke clouds as it slows to greet her. She waits. Shuffles from left foot to right. Drops her bag, picks it up again. She spends a great deal of time looking at the stars. They eye her knowingly, pulsating their yellow aura. Speaking their unintelligible language. A deep frown cuts Ellen’s face horizontally.
She waits.
No train, no sparks, no smoke.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
Wrenching her bag from the ground, Ripley starts with an irritated fervor down the stairs and into Lockwood Forest. She’ll see her own way home…
BONUS. Wild Card!
Hit me with whatever you've got!
What: To ride a train, or not to ride a train, that is the question.
When: Early January
Where: Train, Lockwood Forest
Warning(s): N/a, tbd?
All In a Day’s Work
Perhaps mining isn’t the kindest labor Ellen Ripley could have chosen for herself, but she doesn’t care. She needs something. A purpose on this cold, unforgiving rock– if Pumpkin Hollow can be classified as such. It’s dubious her new home exists on any celestial body she’s familiar with, and yet she finds herself pitching eyes upward to probe the clear black sky. For clues, for hints of life elsewhere, for the star systems who’d raised her. Nothing. How lonely.
Into the mines, then. To be swallowed by a new, impenetrable dark. A starless void of dust, rock and precious ore. The maternal drone of an intelligent computer is replaced by the rhythmic clang, clang, clang of her’s and other’s tools. Star systems replaced by a maze of intravenous tunnels. Hauler ships worth multi-millions, responsible for carrying several billion tons of crude oil in their breast-shaped modules, reduced to archaic mine-carts. The drone of men around her– that much hasn’t changed a bit. The utter lack of advanced technology stumps her at first, borne of a time long before her own. But she adapts. Hard not to. What else has she but time, after all?
Her work takes her all the way to Cranes Ridge, a sprawl of dry mountains tucked deep within Lockwood Forest.
When she rises out of the ground, caked in dust and smattered in ore and oil to catch the train home, she finds the sun has gone down. Not unusual, given her long work-hours. But nevertheless perturbing.
The train welcomes her by unhinging its sliding jaw, allowing her entrance into a narrow yet comfortable cabin. It kicks up sparks as it leaves the station. Coughs clouds of black smoke into the still night air. You find her seated in one of several empty rows, wiping her face with a grey cloth.
All in a day’s work.
ALT. No Way Home
Up, up, up out of the ground she climbs. Hauls her belongings to the foot of the train station. She awaits its arrival; a squeal, a kicking of sparks and cough of black smoke clouds as it slows to greet her. She waits. Shuffles from left foot to right. Drops her bag, picks it up again. She spends a great deal of time looking at the stars. They eye her knowingly, pulsating their yellow aura. Speaking their unintelligible language. A deep frown cuts Ellen’s face horizontally.
She waits.
No train, no sparks, no smoke.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
Wrenching her bag from the ground, Ripley starts with an irritated fervor down the stairs and into Lockwood Forest. She’ll see her own way home…
BONUS. Wild Card!
Hit me with whatever you've got!
no subject
CT 'counts' on her fingers. "50 agents in the actual experimental program," less than forty by the time she left, with how they kept either dying in action or being killed off by the program, "a couple companies' worth of standard soldiers; air and spacecraft pilots; armour, vehicle and weaponry technicians; ship technicians; command's intelligence analysts; command themselves; medical personnel; standard support staff..."
She could go on. With that amount of roles to fill, it doesn't take long to cross the thousand and above mark. The ship was alive and chaotic at all times but those long, silent slipspace trips.
"I only really knew the other agents. And only those I worked with." Not a lot of time for socialising outside your squads. She shrugs, sitting up and glancing back out the window as the train slows. "Our ship AI was nice enough, but Dumb AI usually are. Smart AI is where their personalities start becoming— well, different."
no subject
An obscenely wealthy one, if she were to guess. In Ellen's experience, spacefaring organizations are one of two things; government sponsored or full capitalist war-machines. It turns out these two dogma's aren't so different in practice. Whatever experimental program CT's involved herself with ( the phrase causes Ripley to raise an inward brow ), it must be important. Enough to garner an armada.
That's her guess, anyway. Really, being a hauler isn't comparable to most large-scale flight expeditions. It's foot soldier's work, on par with the Department of Galactic Waste Management; astronauts who skate across the galaxy's edge spitting shit from their colossal, cube-shaped vessels.
The train heaves a tremendous, industrial sigh once it's fully stopped. Light from the station spills in through the windows, coloring her and the other woman a dozen shades of amber.
She crosses the isle to gather her things.
"Funny you say that, I don't know if our Mother ought to be the dumb or smart kind. Smart in that she knew how to keep us alive, dumb in that she did whatever she was programmed to, at the detriment of us. No real way to get past that. Scary, if you ask me."
Like Synthetics. They do what they're told, no exception. Their apathy, human in shape and action, is scarier than any super-computer.
no subject
"The military spares no expense," CT says, about half-sarcastic. It's both true and not—the UNSC and ONI have spent countless credits on experimental programs and technology, but supporting the colonies and people it has martial rule over is another matter. "At least, they don't in the art of active warfare."
CT stretches, languid and loose, then pulls herself up to her feet. She adjusts her winter coat, flipping up the hood and casting her face back into darkness where the light was catching it moments before.
"Sounds like in my universe she'd be classed as a Dumb AI—pre-programmed, designed for a set purpose they don't deviate from come hell or high water. Smart AI can learn. Make choices of their own. Mostly they obey orders, but..." she shrugs, and there's an odd feeling behind the thin smile on her lips, cast in shadow. "When you can think for yourself, obeying orders is just as much a choice as disobeying them."
She doesn't elaborate. She steps towards the train doors, expecting Ripley won't be far behind.
no subject
Active warfare is a nasty business. She's lucky to have never seen it.
A hood comes up, curtaining CT's eyes and leaving only her thin smile. What's a human without her eyes? Impossible to gauge. A domino. Ripley looks into the cast shadow and anchors to nothing. Feels unnerve work down her spine, and is struck by the recollection that she doesn't really know this person. Doesn't really know anyone.
She follows her out through the door, onto the station platform.
"If Smart AI can learn, can make choices, how do you differentiate between it and humans? Wouldn't you want to keep it dumb? Isn't that what all power would like of its citizens? One wrong move and the world's under the leadership of God knows what."
no subject
CT's lip quirks and she huffs an empty sort-of laugh. Isn't that what all power would like of its citizens, indeed—she likes this one, Ripley seems like she has a good head on her shoulders.
She turns to walk her way out of the station.
"They're strictly controlled. Or at least, they're meant to be." She doesn't elaborate on that point, sidestepping easily back into a more technical explanation: "We need them to do the kind of work that both humans and Dumb AI are too limited to handle. Slipspace plotting, running multiple complex computer functions at once, combat analysis in the blink of an eye... they think faster than a human mind will ever be capable of. But they're entirely digital, holograms running off crystalline data matrixes. They're not supposed to get bodies. So. Ordinarily, there's very little they can do without human infrastructure and they're always decommissioned after seven years function, where their processes start becoming more... unpredictable."
Everything that happened at the Project is unprecedented. It never should have happened. No AI should ever have had the power to hand-deliver a pair of tomahawks into her soft tissue, but the Director never did care about the rules.
no subject
The air outside is cool, clear.
They're meant to be; Her own— loyalties; In the art of active warfare; A very long couple of years; brush strokes that begin to paint a larger picture. Ripley can close her eyes and see it take shape; a catastrophe to rival Hieronymus Bosch's Hell; clay landscape teeming with war, blood, fire. Men fight men, men fight machine, men fight men who are neither men nor machine but a third, unstoppable thing. And at the Judecca, shepherding death in seismic waves for their own benefit, whatever company or organization poor CT's found herself in the lap of.
She must have been through Hell and back.
And even that might be an understatement.
Truth is, she doesn't know. The picture isn't as clear as she'd like it to be. Not now, at least.
"In other words, their processes start becoming more human. That's why we make machines in the first place, isn't it? Replace the human who's either too stupid, too slow or too unpredictable with a machine that covers all three. When the machine breaks, find the manual that tells you exactly how to fix it. You can't do that with people, even if they might like to think so."
no subject
"Mm. In technical terms, it's caused by the limitations of their matrixes. After seven years, they start running out of space, their processes start overlapping... but that manifests in the form of discovering more human-like, disruptive emotions, so. Yeah. Pretty much."
Only a few years ago, she wouldn't have understood half of what she's saying. Some of it the Project taught them, standard classes about AI ahead of agents' imminent implantations, but far more of it learned in her own time as she sought to understand everything wrong at the program.
Where, exactly, Texas fits on the scale is... hard to say. The AI herself can't have been around more than a few years, yet she was so remarkably human in her ignorance of her non-humanity. Even the violence can't be said to be anything but human at its core.
"There's a theory that an AI that makes it through rampancy might... stabilise, turn out as close to human as a digital mind can get," CT says. She glances back at Ripley, then toward the turning that leads toward her neighbourhood with a breath of a laugh. "But that's a whole other theoretical science lesson not quite suited to happening in the middle of the street."
no subject
And he'd replaced their previous Science Officer two days before they'd left the mining planet Thedus...
Christ, it's so obvious.
She feels stupid for not realizing until it was too late.
It begs the questions; how long had Synthetics been in development? How many walked among man, and how many men knew none the wiser?
Well, she'll never know now. Maybe that's for the better.
She stops on the cobblestone road, peering over her shoulder. A smile, wry and a little crooked, spreads across her face.
"Right, maybe next time. Thanks for the chat."
no subject
CT makes a noise of quiet agreement. "It was nice meeting you, Ripley. I'm sure I'll see you around town soon enough."
Whenever she gets out of the office enough to swing by the pub again, at least. The siren song of the workaholic lifestyle is always singing her tune, but even she can't keep going indefinitely—a lesson she learns over and over again, not that it ever stops her pushing it.
With a wave, she heads off toward Meadowlark Lane.