2019-02-02: Annul and Dispose
- Cutscene: Annul and Dispose
- Cast: Emeralda Kasim
- Where: Solarian Black Lab
- Date: 2019-02-02
- Summary: Emeralda dreams.
Emeralda dreamed.
While she dreamed, there were voices.
The voices meant nothing to Emeralda. They spoke only Solarian, a language that she wouldn't have understood even if she had been listening. But she was not; her mind was fully involved in processing thousands of years of idle data, unable to tell what was real input and what was her own mind, having been trapped in a half-shutdown state for an eternity. Nor did she realize where she was: a laboratory in Solaris, where she had been brought immediately after being 'recovered'. Her eyes were open, but she didn't react to what she was looking at. She merely sat where she was put, her mind turned inward.
Two scientists were nearby, the source of the voices. The only thing unusual about that was that there were only two; a technician who had been there every day for more time than he wasn't, and the scientist to which they all reported, who was there only rarely. The technician reminded her of someone; many of the things she did tugged at her dreams, but she couldn't think of who or why or when she would ever have known them. Maybe she never had. They spoke in front of her like she didn't exist. To them, she didn't, or at least not as anything more than a machine or tool.
"So. Day eight. What have we determined?"
"The subject is an ARM," the technician said, referencing his notes, visible on a computer screen. "It is a nanomachine colony in the shape of an immature human female. When it was first delivered, it had an almost mannequin-like appearance, but after forty-eight hours outside the strong magnetic field it had been trapped in, it was beginning to adjust, and after seventy-two hours it had a more natural, organic look."
"I have eyes," the scientist replied, slightly sharply. "I don't need to know what it looks like. What can it do?"
"Physically..."
Emeralda stirred, slightly, as the technican ran through the results of physical scans. The stirring was barely visible to anyone else, and neither of the Solarians noticed it. That was her, she thought. Yes. That was her. She was... She was Emeralda, and they were talking about her. The technician droned on for several minutes, showing page after page of scans, before reaching the end of his explanation.
"...We have taken samples once a day and allowed her - it, sorry - to rebuild them with raw materials. We now have raw nanomolecular samples totalling about ten percent of the ARM's mass, which has been passed on to the other team. Unfortunately it seems to have progressively more difficulty recreating it, perhaps due to inbuilt limitations, and useful samples are increasingly difficult to take. We got sixty-five percent of that mass on the first day."
"Not unexpected," the scientist allowed. "What about mentally? What is its coding? What does it do?"
"...nothing," the technician admitted, shifting a page of data to a new screen.
"Nothing?"
"If this subject was human, we'd call it catatonic. It doesn't react to most stimulus even though it's able to see and hear, except for really automatic processes like avoiding walking into walls. Some of the team thought it was a linguistic problem since it certainly doesn't parse Solarian, so they fed the sleep-learning tapes of the Lamb's language into it. Even with that data it still doesn't respond to any verbal commands - we're not sure if it can't process it or just doesn't respond. You can guide it into doing things, but it can't operate independently and apparently has no self-awareness."
Emeralda actually had received all that linguistic data. She just had not finished processing it yet along with everything else. But it was getting closer, and when she was done everything, she could wake up. If she thought about anything, she thought about that. A half-remembered memory crossed her mind; she reached for it, but could not yet hold it as anything more than an image of a man in a labcoat, viewed through curved glass. He had wanted her to wake up, too.
She stirred again, a bare shifting of her eyes from one part of the room to another. It was more than she'd done in a week, but she did nothing else afterwards, returning to idleness. She still dreamed, but more fitfully. There wasn't much more to go before she could wake up...
"We even put it in a Gear to see if it had automated systems, and it managed to interface with Crescens' nanomachines of all things, controlling the wings even without any Ether response - and we tested for that, too. Zeroes across the board. We could designate a target for it by highlighting it in Crescens' combat computer, but as soon as we stopped that, it just sat there."
"So what's your conclusion?"
The technician shook his head. "It's broken," he said, sadly. "This is an impressive display of engineering. I would have loved to see it in its prime. But being stuck in a half-deactivated mode at minimum power for thousands of years broke it - wiped whatever programming it had, and it's not something we can recover. It's unusuable except as a source for recovering nanomachines, and we have enough now that we don't actually need it for that anymore. You might be able to get some useful piloting data out of it based on how it interfaces with Crescens, but that's all. It's a shame."
"Headquarters agrees. They have a use for it, apparently - it has some kind of use in one of the military's projects. It's not expected to survive the use. They're orders from Lord Krelian directly, though, and they're legitimate. He wants to see the doll himself, tonight, before they use it - as a historical relic, I suppose. You'll be walking him through the same explanation you gave me. Congratulations on your promotion." The scientist reached forward, bringing up a new line of text on the monitor with a few keystrokes. Emeralda was facing exactly the right direction to read the words, though they were as meaningless to her as everything else she'd heard.
Data analysis complete. Annul and dispose.