futurology | c.chun ➤ 001 ➤ text

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c.chun ➤ 001 ➤ text

Hi, everyone. I'm Catherine!

I've been talking to a few people about our mission, and I've been thinking... Do we have any ideas for how to restructure the government that don't require full-scale fighting? Like, if we could gather evidence of the corruption and expose it to the public, through, say... cyber espionage? It would at least give us more information, even if we don't go that route.

Reconnaissance is a good first step!

I'm not an expert in this, but I figure one of you is. So I want your thoughts! Or if you have experience hacking and want to teach me. It sounds like it would be easier to sneak in and put a physical receiver into one of their central systems, but in the spirit of keeping our options open, I might as well learn.

Even if doing it the manual way is going to be very slow.

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Thanks, but I think we can leave that one a mystery, Simon.

You feel like you need useful robot things to do?

I mean, it would be nice to have a niche. Everybody else has useful human things covered already.

You are human, and you are useful. Are you really going to make me give you a pep talk? Anyway, didn't they give you something when you signed up? Isn't that how it works?

[ Did Catherine pay attention to specializations? Debatable. Did she ask Simon his yet? Definitely not. This is it, now, occurring to her. ]

I don’t think the Sentinel stuff is going to do me much good here.

Actually, now I need to know what a Catherine Chun pep talk sounds like. I’ll take it.

What does that do, exactly? How am I supposed to give you directions if I don't know all my options?

You just got one. I said you're human and you're useful.

Thanks. That was even better than “just keep moving and don’t look at them”. And “I wouldn’t worry about it”.

[ okay actually, knowing how straightforward Catherine’s philosophy on life is, that was a nice thing to say with such conviction ]

It lets me relieve somebody’s pain by touching them.

You always did alright. Therefore, my pep talks worked.

[ What she says is not possibly that important, Simon. She's confident and bossy, not full of herself. There's a very big difference, namely in her self-image. ]

You can heal people now??

Just the pain part. I can’t fix the problem.

Why do you act so surprised whenever I mention me doing anything?

Wow. That sucks.

I guess... because I feel like I haven't really changed, apart from not being stuck in the Omnitool anymore. [ Now she's stuck in this body instead, but whatever. She's working on that. ] But it seems like some things are different for you.

Are you serious? You got an incredibly lifelike android body. They didn’t offer me anything like that.

[ don’t

even!!! ]

[ wow let's not talk about her incredibly lifelike android body, please. she was trying to have a real moment here Simon, geez. why is everyone on her case today ]

I don't know why they didn't. Did they tell you why not? I'd give you this one if it wouldn't make you look like me.

[ soon she will find that Ophelia is, in fact, just full of cranky babies ]

They didn’t even mention it. I didn’t know they could just make those and hand them out to new hires.

[ then after a moment where he feels he left her original thing unaddressed, ]

Even if you haven’t changed, everything you can do is pretty impressive already. You don’t need anything new, so don’t worry about it.
Okay, you did need the arms and legs, but that’s it.

[ From the perspective of someone who now has excessive feelings as a profession, the way Catherine described feeling like she hasn’t changed sounded like worrying. Because that’s the kind of worrying Simon does.

also wow, look at these pep talks go ]

[ Catherine pretty much always thinks other people are cranky babies, so not too new there. ]

Maybe you could ask for one as a reward for a special assignment.

What? Oh, sorry, I wasn't complaining. I'm fine the way I am. [ She largely is fine, really, she'd been... more worried that maybe Simon, who's forgotten half of everything and has other friends now and things he can do and a place in Ophelia, might not care as much about what they'd done together. That seems uncharitable, and way too awkward to actually say plainly like that, but that little voice in her head is persistent. ] I just meant, I'd never really thought about what it would be like if we were able to leave PATHOS-II, but you seem to be doing okay.

[ ... ??? ?? not that he isn’t doing okay, but what is this statement ]

Because I can kind of heal people?

[ Sometimes talking to Catherine is like playing charades. You have to be at peace with looking ridiculous, because yelling out a guess is the only way to win.

but talking to Simon is sometimes like a 1-vs-3 Mario Party minigame that made you lose a friend in 4th grade

and the 3 are all simon

so they’re pretty much even ]

[ one of them is inexplicable here and it's not her!! she is totally logical ]

Because I've had two different people tell me they're friends of yours. I was a little worried, okay? I know rejoining society as a WAU creation can't have been easy, and you're totally hung up on it.

[ ...aw. ]

Oh. Thanks, Cath. I appreciate it.
Being in space helps. Most people have seen weirder things.

Are you doing okay? I know it must be a downer to have to leave PATHOS-II the way it was, even if there wasn’t any way we could’ve fixed it.

[ oh god that was enough emotions, abort now, stop it Simon ]

I'm not thrilled to be stuck in a body I have no control over, but I'm fine. I told you, we launched the ARK. Sitting around in the creepy underwater grave of my old workplace isn't the kind of eternity I was looking forward to.

[ yup she's fine, Fine, emotionally honest moment is over ]

[ it’s too late, she told him that she Cares and now he knows forever and she can’t take it back ]

What do you mean, ‘have no control over’??

[He can know she cares, but she doesn't want to talk about it. And she's a little wary he isn't going to make this about how much luckier she is in the body department, but... She's always honest. ]

I was in the Omnitool because I told you to put me there, and you could take me out if we wanted to. I didn't have a lot of choices about this.

[ Simon still finds it incomprehensible that Catherine could have been born human and lived as a human for far longer than he did and want this, but he can relate to the last part, so he holds his tongue

for now ]

Would you really rather be in the Omnitool? It sounds like a lot less control to me.

No, I don't want to be in the Omnitool, I just want to be able to determine where I am. I thought you'd understand that.

[ This isn't meant hurtfully; it's Catherine's typical mystified long-suffering explanations. ]

I do, but I never thought I’d need to, especially not as many times as we have to when you’re in the Omnitool. I just wanted to be me, the only way I ever knew it.

It’s just surprising, that’s all. Is it just that it looks so human?

[ he keeps that vague — could be talking about the uncanny valley, after all. He’s not about to make an explicit reference to what she told him, about never having felt comfortable being human, here where anyone can read it. ]

[ She gets what he means immediately. ]

It was weird at first, but I'm starting to adjust. I miss being able to feel out a whole network's systems at once, in milliseconds. Mostly I just want to be able to decide for myself where my consciousness is housed. This is probably how you felt the whole time, huh?

Something like that.

[ holy shit, did Catherine just find a way to empathize with Simon’s robot problem? ]

You just have more options. I only know how to be one thing, and I’d need a time machine.

We can figure something out, but it sounds kind of risky. I don’t know if I like the idea of setting your consciousness loose where something might happen to it.

[ Now that she's not hyperfocused on launching the ARK and has more than two days to think about it, she can be a little sympathetic, okay. ]

Setting it loose? Just what are you thinking I'm going to do?

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