Ficlet: Symbiosis
Title: Symbiosis
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Tosh, Mainframe
Rating: G
Spoilers: Hints at the events of Greeks Bearing Gifts.
Summary: Torchwood Three has the most advanced computer system on earth. Mainframe is both a mystery and a priceless treasure to Tosh.
Word Count: 864
Written For: My genprompt_bingo square ‘Hardware And Software’.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.
Torchwood’s Mainframe is the most advanced computing hardware on the planet, indeed the most advanced in the entire solar system. Even UNIT don’t have anything comparable. Torchwood One thought their system, cobbled together out of alien technology from half a hundred worlds, was state-of-the-art, but it was still primitive compared to the wonder that inhabits the caverns deep beneath the Torchwood Three Hub. After all, One’s computer was still a thing of wires, and circuit boards, and augmented silicon chips. Mainframe is at once both less and more than that, because she’s alive.
It’s not biological life, not entirely, although there are elements of that, but neither is it mere machine intelligence. It is perhaps a combination of both, with additional elements that defy explanation or understanding, but refined beyond anything humans could hope to construct at this stage of their evolution. People just aren’t smart enough; they don’t have a good enough grasp of biology or technology to even begin to comprehend the basics of her construction. The science behind Mainframe won’t even be a theory for another few millennia, never mind a proven fact. Yet she’s here, now, thousands of years and unimaginable light-years from wherever she had her origins.
From Torchwood’s records, painstakingly compiled and collated by Ianto from the dusty reports stored away in the depths of the archives, Tosh knows that Mainframe was less than a tenth of her current size when she first arrived on earth more than a century before. Back then, nobody knew what she was, they just stored her away in an empty room, out of sight and out of mind. Even Torchwood One were uninterested since they could see no conceivable way in which she could be used as a weapon to defend the Empire. It wasn’t until decades later that people began to take an interest in her, trying to fathom her nature and her purpose, and by then she’d grown, spreading tendrils out into the bedrock, learning about the world that had become her home.
She’s still growing, inch-by-inch, year after year, increasing not only in size and complexity, but also in her capacity to gather, memorise, and store information. She learns constantly, but she teaches too. Tosh understands her better than anyone else, and yet even she has barely scratched the surface of what the semi-organic computer can do. She could lose herself forever in the intricacies of form and function, and never grow bored, always, endlessly discovering new and unexpected wonders to delight and confound her.
Sometimes she feels that she’s just part of Mainframe’s software, a programme plugged in to do the things Mainframe’s hardware can’t do for itself. She can disconnect and go places while Mainframe must remain always in the cool caverns that are her home, her domain, her sanctuary.
Tosh sits in her chair, draws her keyboards towards her, and effectively plugs herself into another world, a world of computer code, and data streams, information clusters and encryption algorithms, a world she finds more understandable and more comforting than the real world of people and relationships and messy emotions. Computers make sense in ways that people never will; they’re calm, and honest, and logical, and they behave in predictable ways. They don’t lie to you, or hurt your feelings, or break promises. They can be relied upon to follow instructions without complaining, growing bored, or getting sidetracked.
Mainframe’s soothing hum wraps around her like a comforting pair of arms, or a soft blanket, a salve to her raw nerves. Computers don’t trick you, or betray you, or hold a knife to your throat. She wipes a hand across momentarily damp eyes, readjusts her glasses, and pushes thoughts of recent events from her mind, focusing once more on the lines of code that make up her translation programme, knowing that much of the work she’d done on it will now have to be re-done because of the carelessness of her colleagues. It’s one of the most important pieces of software she’s ever worked on for Torchwood; it could be vital in first contact situations with unknown species and her heart aches at the thought of the hours she’d put into it, and all that has been lost through a plug being kicked out its socket before she could save her work.
Line after line of code fills her screens, scrolling down, and she blinks, her heart skipping a beat, then another. The programme is there, all of it, not just what had previously been saved. It isn’t possible, and yet it’s really there, snatched from oblivion by an invisible hand, waiting to be returned to her once her system was rebooted. It must have been Mainframe of course, reaching through the wires that connect keyboards and monitors to her complex, mysterious self in order to protect precious data from being accidentally erased.
“Thank you,” she whispers, fingers flying over keys, saving everything properly before continuing, although she has a feeling that she couldn’t lose any of her work if she tried, not on Mainframe’s watch.
Maybe it’s her imagination, probably it is, but it seems to Tosh that the warm and familiar hum is saying “You’re welcome.”
The End
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Tosh, Mainframe
Rating: G
Spoilers: Hints at the events of Greeks Bearing Gifts.
Summary: Torchwood Three has the most advanced computer system on earth. Mainframe is both a mystery and a priceless treasure to Tosh.
Word Count: 864
Written For: My genprompt_bingo square ‘Hardware And Software’.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.
Torchwood’s Mainframe is the most advanced computing hardware on the planet, indeed the most advanced in the entire solar system. Even UNIT don’t have anything comparable. Torchwood One thought their system, cobbled together out of alien technology from half a hundred worlds, was state-of-the-art, but it was still primitive compared to the wonder that inhabits the caverns deep beneath the Torchwood Three Hub. After all, One’s computer was still a thing of wires, and circuit boards, and augmented silicon chips. Mainframe is at once both less and more than that, because she’s alive.
It’s not biological life, not entirely, although there are elements of that, but neither is it mere machine intelligence. It is perhaps a combination of both, with additional elements that defy explanation or understanding, but refined beyond anything humans could hope to construct at this stage of their evolution. People just aren’t smart enough; they don’t have a good enough grasp of biology or technology to even begin to comprehend the basics of her construction. The science behind Mainframe won’t even be a theory for another few millennia, never mind a proven fact. Yet she’s here, now, thousands of years and unimaginable light-years from wherever she had her origins.
From Torchwood’s records, painstakingly compiled and collated by Ianto from the dusty reports stored away in the depths of the archives, Tosh knows that Mainframe was less than a tenth of her current size when she first arrived on earth more than a century before. Back then, nobody knew what she was, they just stored her away in an empty room, out of sight and out of mind. Even Torchwood One were uninterested since they could see no conceivable way in which she could be used as a weapon to defend the Empire. It wasn’t until decades later that people began to take an interest in her, trying to fathom her nature and her purpose, and by then she’d grown, spreading tendrils out into the bedrock, learning about the world that had become her home.
She’s still growing, inch-by-inch, year after year, increasing not only in size and complexity, but also in her capacity to gather, memorise, and store information. She learns constantly, but she teaches too. Tosh understands her better than anyone else, and yet even she has barely scratched the surface of what the semi-organic computer can do. She could lose herself forever in the intricacies of form and function, and never grow bored, always, endlessly discovering new and unexpected wonders to delight and confound her.
Sometimes she feels that she’s just part of Mainframe’s software, a programme plugged in to do the things Mainframe’s hardware can’t do for itself. She can disconnect and go places while Mainframe must remain always in the cool caverns that are her home, her domain, her sanctuary.
Tosh sits in her chair, draws her keyboards towards her, and effectively plugs herself into another world, a world of computer code, and data streams, information clusters and encryption algorithms, a world she finds more understandable and more comforting than the real world of people and relationships and messy emotions. Computers make sense in ways that people never will; they’re calm, and honest, and logical, and they behave in predictable ways. They don’t lie to you, or hurt your feelings, or break promises. They can be relied upon to follow instructions without complaining, growing bored, or getting sidetracked.
Mainframe’s soothing hum wraps around her like a comforting pair of arms, or a soft blanket, a salve to her raw nerves. Computers don’t trick you, or betray you, or hold a knife to your throat. She wipes a hand across momentarily damp eyes, readjusts her glasses, and pushes thoughts of recent events from her mind, focusing once more on the lines of code that make up her translation programme, knowing that much of the work she’d done on it will now have to be re-done because of the carelessness of her colleagues. It’s one of the most important pieces of software she’s ever worked on for Torchwood; it could be vital in first contact situations with unknown species and her heart aches at the thought of the hours she’d put into it, and all that has been lost through a plug being kicked out its socket before she could save her work.
Line after line of code fills her screens, scrolling down, and she blinks, her heart skipping a beat, then another. The programme is there, all of it, not just what had previously been saved. It isn’t possible, and yet it’s really there, snatched from oblivion by an invisible hand, waiting to be returned to her once her system was rebooted. It must have been Mainframe of course, reaching through the wires that connect keyboards and monitors to her complex, mysterious self in order to protect precious data from being accidentally erased.
“Thank you,” she whispers, fingers flying over keys, saving everything properly before continuing, although she has a feeling that she couldn’t lose any of her work if she tried, not on Mainframe’s watch.
Maybe it’s her imagination, probably it is, but it seems to Tosh that the warm and familiar hum is saying “You’re welcome.”
The End