[open] arrival

[cactusy]

Who: Sameen Shaw & OTA
What: August 2024 TDM prompts, getting bearings
When: Mid- to late August
Where: Milton and the surrounding environs

arrival / you lying next to me TDM prompt

It doesn't make sense for this to be real, Shaw thinks, because reality rarely involves falling asleep in a New York City flophouse and waking up completely alone in the middle of nowhere - but it also doesn't make sense for it to be a simulation, because the simulations hadn't worked like this, either. That means that this is more confusing than unsettling - and all that confusion does is make her angry.

No enemies are in sight, which is a bust for her; it means she can't jump right into a shootout, take down some kidnapping bad guys, and get some answers. She does keep her handgun out and at the ready as she walks along, keeping up a brisk and steady pace in an attempt to ward off the chill that she can already feel seeping through her tight jeans and leather jacket. It just figures that this crap had to be pulled on her when she was woefully underdressed for winter weather - but she can at least count herself lucky that she'd passed out fully dressed. As much as this sucks, she knows it would be downright impossible if she were barefoot and wearing PJs.

Luckily, she spots the far-off lights of town in a matter of minutes, which spares her from having to cross her fingers and pick a random direction to walk in. She has no illusions that this place is going to be either safe or full of friendlies, but considering the lack of immediate options at her disposal, she can't afford to be picky. She'll sneak over and scope it out, do some recon, and get a feel for what's going on before she makes herself known. Whether she approaches as a civilian or as an agent going in guns a-blazing will depend on what she finds.

Or that's the plan, anyway. What actually happens is that she tromps across a small frozen pond that's been completely hidden by drifting snow, and the ice underfoot only makes itself known when it cracks unceremoniously under her feet, depositing her into two feet of slushy, marshy, freezing water.

Methuselah's feast TDM prompt

One way or another, Shaw will find her way to Milton. Maybe whoever helps her out of the water takes her there directly, or maybe they warm her up elsewhere and she makes her way to town on her own later. Either way, she eventually ends up in a free bed in the Community Hall, where she'll crash for ten or twelve hours straight.

Shaw herself isn't sure how long she sleeps, but it's comparatively warm, and there's no immediate, obvious danger, so she'd guess that it's a good long while before the smell of fish stew wakes her up. After that, barely a minute passes between her opening her eyes and dropping herself down into an empty chair at the feast table. Questions later. Sustenance first. She's halfway through with her bowl of stew and plate of grilled fish before she looks up for long enough to turn to one of her seatmates.

"So - where are we, and what's with the old guy?"

hot springs

Freezing cold water is fine for sponge baths and washing clothes, but for someone who just recently took an accidental bath in a pond and isn't looking to repeat the experience, the hot springs sound a lot more enticing. Shaw makes her way there a few days after her arrival, the blanket from her bed wrapped around her shoulders (she'll want a way to dry off and warm up before redressing, she figures). Once in the cave, she sets the blanket aside, the strips down bare and walks directly into the water, letting out a heavy, relieved sigh as she settles herself down on the rocky bottom and sinks in almost to her nose.

"That's more like it," she murmurs, more to herself than to anyone else that might be nearby. After a moment or two, though, she does glance over at her fellow bather. "Guessing the conditioner in town's all out, though."

[OOC: Feel free to reply with either prose or brackets; I'll match format!]

Comments

[cactusy]

She waits, without any real hope, for an aching sense of loss when she hears those words - things that so easily could have been said by Finch or John, both lost to her now. The best her body gives her is a renewed awareness of the emptiness inside her, bottomless and yawning. That's her version of grief, she's started to realize. It's featureless and empty, but it has depth.

"Mm, I used to have a job like that," she murmurs, her gaze flicking back to the fire. "I guess... someone or something realized I needed something new."

[thedreamer]

He hasn't really accepted that he's simply trapped here — he could never accept actually being trapped anywhere at all, not when he's lived his life moving across space and time at the pull of a lever. But he can accept that he's here for now and while he is, he's needed. He can and will be of use. The very fact that others have been pulled here at the moments of their death tells him whatever force is at play here is powerful enough to potentially disrupt fixed points in time. Unless they weren't truly fixed points at all; the universe they exist in now hasn't started to collapse yet, after all, and that would have begun already.

All that he does is make a soft sound under his breath, though, to acknowledge, to agree.

"For both of us, it seems. And if I ask after this job of yours, will you tell me or shall I put a pin in it for a day when you didn't fall through ice?"

[cactusy]

If this place is real, Shaw tells herself, then the need for any sort of secrecy is irrelevant: she could say I'm a presumed-dead former government agent who secretly worked for an artificial superintelligence, and it wouldn't matter, because what could he do with that information here? And if this place isn't real, it doubly doesn't matter, because Decima already knows everything anyway.

"It was... weird," she says, her gaze fixed on the fire. "We saved people. But not in a big, consequential, stop-the-terrorists way, most of the time; we helped individuals."

Even now, years after being brought on by Finch, she says it like she's still trying to wrap her head around it.

[thedreamer]

"If you helped anyone at all, even just one life, that is big and consequential." He doesn't mean to be contrarian about it, but he comes from the perspective of every life being important. Less often, he acknowledges every life can't always be helped or saved (he loathes that) and that is a dark day for him, but it is always, always worth trying.

"As is your life itself. Big and grand and important." He smiles a bit himself, leaning forward to stoke the fire. "Who were the people you saved — anyone and everyone?"

[cactusy]

If you helped anyone at all, even just one life, that is big and consequential. It's such a Finch-like thing to say that she can almost hear it in his voice. Or maybe see it in the Machine's, scrolling across a monitor in big block letters.

"Anyone and everyone in New York City," she says, then clears her throat. "There were, uh-- a couple classifications. Relevant and irrelevant. The government got the relevant cases; those were the ones with the potential for big consequences. Irrelevant cases were supposed to be discarded, but my boss wanted to pick up the slack."

[thedreamer]

"And what you were doing, no doubt it caught the attention of those who would seek to harm rather than to help," he surmises, working to try and connect that back to what she'd said earlier, how she'd been kidnapped. "There are always those sorts, the universe over. You help and you do all the good that you can, and they, well — they never stop."

It's not in his nature to say they're always a step ahead or they always win, because even in the face of brutal loss, even when he hasn't always won (when there sometimes isn't any winning possible at all), he is ever the optimist. He also realizes he may be speaking only for himself.

"Who hurt you, who took you?"

[cactusy]

"Someone with a different idea of how to save the world, through more... extreme control and surveillance than what my team used. We were Big Brother lite; they were Big Brother on steroids."

She says it with an air of neutrality, not disgust or horror. It's hard to design a perfect system, and there were things about Samaritan's methods that she'd seen as unequivocal wrongs, just as there were things about the Machine's less heavy-handed methods that she'd seen as pointless or inefficient - but she hadn't necessarily been opposed to the broad idea that humanity couldn't be trusted not to have an AI overlord controlling everything from the shadows. After all, it wasn't as if the species hadn't done a decent job of running the planet into the ground when left to their own devices; maybe less freedom (and, as a consequence, fewer opportunities to recklessly innovate and consume and slaughter) was the way to go. Ultimately, her staunch opposition to Samaritan had been 75% unwavering loyalty to the team who'd scooped her up first, 25% stubborn unwillingness to give in to people who thought kidnapping her and holding her hostage was a fine and dandy thing to do - and 0% because she suffered from the same moral conundrums and existential angst that had plagued Finch and Reese.

She's pretty sure she knows where this guy would fall on that scale, just based on what he's said already. And if he's familiar with space travel and time travel and all that sci-fi crap, the concept of warring artificial superintelligences is unlikely to be too much for him to wrap his head around. So she clears her throat, leans forward towards the fire, and gives him a little more.

"Say you've got two all-powerful AI systems. Both of them have the same capabilities, but one of 'em is all about giving humanity the information they need in order to make decisions for themselves - about who to help, who to kill, and when to stand back and do nothing instead of intervening. The other one thinks, 'Hey, I'm the one with the intel and the objective big-picture perspective, so I'm the one who should be calling the shots, not those monkeys'."

She shrugs.

"They were computer programs, not androids with bodies. When it comes to the physical world, neither of them could take action on their own. But both of them had people who believed in the cause enough to devote their lives to it, and Big-Brother-on-steroids' agents were a lot less willing to take no for an answer than we were. Doesn't really matter now, though. They're both dead, and so are all the people I know of who could build anything like them again."

[thedreamer]

Without having lived through or experienced this particular reality on Earth that she's describing, he can't know exactly — down to the smallest detail — how those systems behaved, though she paints a clear enough overarching picture and he's seen it play out time and time again in different permutations. There's so much overlap of the worst things in the universe, but just as much of the good as well. It'd make for an interesting venn diagram.

"Well. I've never seen or heard of anything like that happening anywhere else in the universe." In abrupt contrast to his often persistently jocular tone, this is completely deadpan. It's not to make light of it, though, despite what the words and his tone might suggest; if anything, it's just reflecting for a moment his long years of seeing and hearing too much of the same. But Shaw and her team were helping, doing what they could. He doesn't need or expect everyone to be some sort of flawless hero by any stretch, but he always, always admires the do-ers, the ones who step up however they can. Bravery and courage go along with that, but he also just admires those who speak their minds, who are resourceful and clever and — oh, far better than him.

"— or far too much, unfortunately," he notes quietly. "All the people who built them — those you worked with as well."