Holly's eyai Yuletide story
(archiving for unravels)
~
I surface briefly from a pile of crumpled tissues to deposit a gift for ariastar! This is based on fahye's awesome original eyai story and the many wonderful spinoff stories it inspired, most of which can be found linked here.
This story is set before the Iron Revolution, and deals mostly with characters from fahye's "Three Bags Full." Thanks for letting me play with them a little! It also probably asks more questions than it answers, because I am evil. :D
Many thanks to NJ the uber-beta, as always!
Catalyst
Pru hadn't told Tee that she kept in touch with a few of their colleagues from Mettray, but only because he hadn't asked. It seemed perfectly harmless at the start; she had liked her friends there, and it would have been a shame that she couldn't have a drink now and again with 'the girls' simply because they were no longer sharing an office. The number of attendees dwindled, though, and drinks with the girls turned into just coffee or a quick tea at the place around the corner from Blacksheep, because Pru's workload was quickly overcoming the social life she could spare time for between sleeping and downtime with Robin.
"I do love it, though," she insisted every time she and Gretchen, at last the only person persistent enough to keep seeing her, met for a drink or a chat or just a chance to see a face that didn't belong to a co-worker. It was wonderful, in some ways, to work with her husband. In other ways it was... difficult.
"I know you do," Gretchen would reply, but there was always that hint of hesitation in her perfectly made-up face that betrayed a lingering uncertainty in what she said.
"I do," Pru protested in the familiar pattern once again. They were meeting this morning for coffee before going to work; easy enough for Pru, who liked mornings implicitly, and not so easy for Gretchen, judging by the light purple under her eyes that her concealer didn't quite cover.
"I know you wouldn't settle for anything less," Gretchen said, oddly distracted. She glanced out the window for what felt like the tenth time since they'd arrived. "Pru, I'd like to get your opinion on something." There was something akin to discomfort in her expression, and Pru leaned forward in concern. "There's someone I want you to meet."
This was unexpected. Gretchen rarely shared anything more intimate than her shortbread with Pru, and even that only very occasionally.
"Oh," Pru said amiably, containing her surprise. "All right. Who?"
"A friend," Gretchen said. There was something in the way she said it that implied that this was not just 'a friend.' This was someone quite important to her, which only increased Pru's curiosity.
"A boyfriend," Gretchen confessed, and Pru only gaped at her. Gretchen wasn't the type to use such a term, to say nothing of the oddness of asking Pru's opinion. "He should be meeting us here, actually."
"He's coming here?" Pru repeated, still a half-step behind. It certainly wasn't forbidden, just... surprising.
"Yes," Gretchen confirmed, and as if on cue, a young man, tossing stylishly too-long reddish hair out of his eyes, emerged from the crowd by the counter and tiptoed up behind her as she turned to look out the window once more. He put his hands playfully on her shoulders, then leaned down to kiss the top of her head.
"Peter," she said, tilting her head up and grinning. Oh, Pru thought, in a wistful and affectionate sort of way that she couldn't immediately place, she's smitten.
"Hello, my angel," said Peter, grinning down at her with the same smitten look - slightly guarded as well, but he wasn't fooling Pru. She smiled back, indulgent, and Peter crossed to take a seat at another of the table's four sides.
"This is my friend Prudence, that I was telling you about," Gretchen said unnecessarily as Peter glanced Pru's way, then held out an elegant hand. His smile was brilliant and infectious; Pru couldn't help but return it.
"A pleasure," Peter said. "Gretchen's friends never fail to be nearly as brilliant and fascinating as herself."
"Well, then, I'll have to work on my presentation," Pru replied, slipping easily into the role of Gretchen's less-brilliant sidekick. It wouldn't do to stand out in any significant way; she had just met the man, after all. She hadn't been brought to Blacksheep because she was incautious, though there was there was nothing about Peter that struck the wrong note with her. The thought crossed her mind just in time to stop her from interrogating her instincts.
Peter laughed, an unmusical guffaw that put her a little more at her ease. "No need," he said, waving a hand. "You've made an impression just by what little Gretchen's told me, so I already know. She's very enthusiastic." He reached out and gave her hand a loving squeeze.
"Peter's a new coder at Mettray," Gretchen explained. "He's developed some really amazing logical progression matrices."
"Just some little quirks I added as a debugger," Peter said modestly, but Pru was impressed despite herself.
"Must be pretty good quirks, if they let them stay in the code after you'd debugged it," she said.
"Oh, they took it right out," Peter said, again with a hint of that unmusical laugh. "They just put it back once it had gone through a couple of revisions by the higher-ups. And you know, as a debugger," he confided, "pretty much everyone's a higher-up."
"That, I remember," Pru agreed, and a little more of her guard slipped away as Peter climbed to his feet.
"I'm just going to get a drink," he said, and shuffled off toward the coffee bar with a lingering, thoughtless trace along Gretchen's arm. The girls nodded as he left, then turned toward each other for the ritual discussion of the Man At The Table.
"So. What do you think?" Gretchen asked, still bearing the lingering traces of Peter's spell.
"He's lovely," Pru said loyally. "Perfect, I'd say, and I'm a tough one to impress."
Gretchen beamed at her. "You know, Pru, I really think that--" She was interrupted by the insistent beeping of the text relay at her belt, and glanced down.
"Oh, damn, the secondary server is playing up again. Always causes a panic. I'll call you; I really want to know what you think." She looked up apologetically, and Pru could see Peter crossing back from the bar.
"No rest for the weary, it seems," he said while Gretchen gathered up her things.
"No," she agreed, a disgruntled frown beginning to mar her features. "One of these days, Pru, I'm just going to declare to their faces that I'm fed up with that place."
Pru privately disagreed, at least as long as Peter was working there, but only made a sympathetic noise. "It's fine; Robin will just have to deal if I'm back a little earlier than I'd planned. Kick his mistress out, hide the drugs, all that."
"Right," Gretchen said, nodding distractedly. "Sorry about this, again; drinks on me next time, yes?"
"Absolutely." Pru air-kissed her cheek and, quickly, Peter's. She wasn't certain, even afterward, what it was that made her glance down as she did; perhaps just a natural fall of her eyes. Whatever it was, she saw as clearly and plainly as the red tint to his just-too-long hair: at the back of Peter's shoulder, an empty lock.
She stood straight again in shock. He was looking at her, a strange and secretive glance that said I dare you to say something as clearly as if he'd spoken the words aloud. He'd meant for her to see, that was clear enough; it would have been easy enough to hide it, and Pru's shock made it obvious that she had seen. But she said nothing, and Peter and Gretchen both waved, hurried out, and Pru simply stood there in the middle of the coffeeshop over her pricy half-drunk latte and stared after them.
A few numb seconds later, she picked up her own cup and threaded her uneven way toward the door.
**
"And what happened to you?" Tee demanded from his usual perch in front of his screen, the moment she walked into the room.
"We've got competition," Pru said grimly, and told him everything.
**
"We've got competition," Tee announced once the others began to trickle in.
"Good," Steph said, with every appearance of taking this in stride. "I was starting to get bored; it'll be good to have someone to crush under the bootheels of our collective genius."
"We don't know who it is," Tee added, but he was putting on a brave face and looked almost calm. "Only their work."
He described the model, his tone taking on an authority and the removed, technical language that Pru hadn't been able to manage. Even only half-listening, Pru realized that as Peter was described, she may as well be listening to a description of Julian - except for the hair and the fantastic little details, faithfully repeated, of the eyai's smile. She watched him closely as Tee went through her description. No - Julian's smile looked as though it had been watered down with gin, while the eyai's had been everything that Julian's promised plus a cherry on top. Its grin had been wildly infectious; two rows of shining white teeth just short of perfect; its memory and facial .app were impeccable and its movements smooth and untraceable. No wonder, she mused, that the person to fail to notice the lock in his shoulder was the last person she'd have expected. A coder. A good coder. Impossible that he had her fooled; Gretchen had to know... didn't she? Who held Peter's key? Who had built that beautifully complicated, meticulously flawed code of affected love?
A low, impressed whistle; it was a moment before Pru realized that Tee had stopped talking and the whistle had come from Dom.
"Not playing around, are they? An eyai that can mimic affection like that? She must have ordered it special."
"She doesn't seem the type to make an order like that," said Pru. "Uncomplicated girl, no dirty past that I know of. Or any that I suspect, even," she added quickly, before their imaginations could take hold.
"She's working for Mettray, though," Tee put in with a teasing glance at her. "And they say it's always the quiet ones." Pru only hmmmphed at him.
"Anyway," he continued in that slow way that meant he was thinking about something very, very closely, "what makes you so certain it was mimicry?"
Pru stared at him. "Theodore. Don't be stupid. It's not like that can just be written into the code."
"Why not?"
Pru looked for help to the others, who seemed equally perplexed.
"It's not as though it hasn't been considered," Agatha finally ventured. "But that isn't what people want from an eyai. It's too expensive a piece of equipment to be so arbitrary; you want it to latch on to one person and stay there."
"Sure, it's not desirable by most clients," Tee agreed. "But what I'm asking is whether it's possible."
"It's not," Pru said firmly. She didn't want to look at Robin, in case he disagreed. "There's no way to code something that complicated into a machine."
"It's only chemical reactions," Tee pointed out. "Electrical impulses. It wouldn't be that hard." His eyes had taken on a faraway look, as though they could see the potential of such programming. An eyai that could make decisions of its own. A mystery to its owner. A mystery to him.
"You can't just make emotions that way," Pru said, her voice hard.
There was a long, echoing pause as the team considered this, and as Pru watched, discarded the hypothesis.
"Well, they're off at six," she finally said. "He knows that I know. I'll bring my equipment and find out."
"With your equipment," Steph said, disbelief in every syllable.
"Maybe," Pru said, looking into each face, "I'll just ask him."
~
I surface briefly from a pile of crumpled tissues to deposit a gift for ariastar! This is based on fahye's awesome original eyai story and the many wonderful spinoff stories it inspired, most of which can be found linked here.
This story is set before the Iron Revolution, and deals mostly with characters from fahye's "Three Bags Full." Thanks for letting me play with them a little! It also probably asks more questions than it answers, because I am evil. :D
Many thanks to NJ the uber-beta, as always!
Catalyst
Pru hadn't told Tee that she kept in touch with a few of their colleagues from Mettray, but only because he hadn't asked. It seemed perfectly harmless at the start; she had liked her friends there, and it would have been a shame that she couldn't have a drink now and again with 'the girls' simply because they were no longer sharing an office. The number of attendees dwindled, though, and drinks with the girls turned into just coffee or a quick tea at the place around the corner from Blacksheep, because Pru's workload was quickly overcoming the social life she could spare time for between sleeping and downtime with Robin.
"I do love it, though," she insisted every time she and Gretchen, at last the only person persistent enough to keep seeing her, met for a drink or a chat or just a chance to see a face that didn't belong to a co-worker. It was wonderful, in some ways, to work with her husband. In other ways it was... difficult.
"I know you do," Gretchen would reply, but there was always that hint of hesitation in her perfectly made-up face that betrayed a lingering uncertainty in what she said.
"I do," Pru protested in the familiar pattern once again. They were meeting this morning for coffee before going to work; easy enough for Pru, who liked mornings implicitly, and not so easy for Gretchen, judging by the light purple under her eyes that her concealer didn't quite cover.
"I know you wouldn't settle for anything less," Gretchen said, oddly distracted. She glanced out the window for what felt like the tenth time since they'd arrived. "Pru, I'd like to get your opinion on something." There was something akin to discomfort in her expression, and Pru leaned forward in concern. "There's someone I want you to meet."
This was unexpected. Gretchen rarely shared anything more intimate than her shortbread with Pru, and even that only very occasionally.
"Oh," Pru said amiably, containing her surprise. "All right. Who?"
"A friend," Gretchen said. There was something in the way she said it that implied that this was not just 'a friend.' This was someone quite important to her, which only increased Pru's curiosity.
"A boyfriend," Gretchen confessed, and Pru only gaped at her. Gretchen wasn't the type to use such a term, to say nothing of the oddness of asking Pru's opinion. "He should be meeting us here, actually."
"He's coming here?" Pru repeated, still a half-step behind. It certainly wasn't forbidden, just... surprising.
"Yes," Gretchen confirmed, and as if on cue, a young man, tossing stylishly too-long reddish hair out of his eyes, emerged from the crowd by the counter and tiptoed up behind her as she turned to look out the window once more. He put his hands playfully on her shoulders, then leaned down to kiss the top of her head.
"Peter," she said, tilting her head up and grinning. Oh, Pru thought, in a wistful and affectionate sort of way that she couldn't immediately place, she's smitten.
"Hello, my angel," said Peter, grinning down at her with the same smitten look - slightly guarded as well, but he wasn't fooling Pru. She smiled back, indulgent, and Peter crossed to take a seat at another of the table's four sides.
"This is my friend Prudence, that I was telling you about," Gretchen said unnecessarily as Peter glanced Pru's way, then held out an elegant hand. His smile was brilliant and infectious; Pru couldn't help but return it.
"A pleasure," Peter said. "Gretchen's friends never fail to be nearly as brilliant and fascinating as herself."
"Well, then, I'll have to work on my presentation," Pru replied, slipping easily into the role of Gretchen's less-brilliant sidekick. It wouldn't do to stand out in any significant way; she had just met the man, after all. She hadn't been brought to Blacksheep because she was incautious, though there was there was nothing about Peter that struck the wrong note with her. The thought crossed her mind just in time to stop her from interrogating her instincts.
Peter laughed, an unmusical guffaw that put her a little more at her ease. "No need," he said, waving a hand. "You've made an impression just by what little Gretchen's told me, so I already know. She's very enthusiastic." He reached out and gave her hand a loving squeeze.
"Peter's a new coder at Mettray," Gretchen explained. "He's developed some really amazing logical progression matrices."
"Just some little quirks I added as a debugger," Peter said modestly, but Pru was impressed despite herself.
"Must be pretty good quirks, if they let them stay in the code after you'd debugged it," she said.
"Oh, they took it right out," Peter said, again with a hint of that unmusical laugh. "They just put it back once it had gone through a couple of revisions by the higher-ups. And you know, as a debugger," he confided, "pretty much everyone's a higher-up."
"That, I remember," Pru agreed, and a little more of her guard slipped away as Peter climbed to his feet.
"I'm just going to get a drink," he said, and shuffled off toward the coffee bar with a lingering, thoughtless trace along Gretchen's arm. The girls nodded as he left, then turned toward each other for the ritual discussion of the Man At The Table.
"So. What do you think?" Gretchen asked, still bearing the lingering traces of Peter's spell.
"He's lovely," Pru said loyally. "Perfect, I'd say, and I'm a tough one to impress."
Gretchen beamed at her. "You know, Pru, I really think that--" She was interrupted by the insistent beeping of the text relay at her belt, and glanced down.
"Oh, damn, the secondary server is playing up again. Always causes a panic. I'll call you; I really want to know what you think." She looked up apologetically, and Pru could see Peter crossing back from the bar.
"No rest for the weary, it seems," he said while Gretchen gathered up her things.
"No," she agreed, a disgruntled frown beginning to mar her features. "One of these days, Pru, I'm just going to declare to their faces that I'm fed up with that place."
Pru privately disagreed, at least as long as Peter was working there, but only made a sympathetic noise. "It's fine; Robin will just have to deal if I'm back a little earlier than I'd planned. Kick his mistress out, hide the drugs, all that."
"Right," Gretchen said, nodding distractedly. "Sorry about this, again; drinks on me next time, yes?"
"Absolutely." Pru air-kissed her cheek and, quickly, Peter's. She wasn't certain, even afterward, what it was that made her glance down as she did; perhaps just a natural fall of her eyes. Whatever it was, she saw as clearly and plainly as the red tint to his just-too-long hair: at the back of Peter's shoulder, an empty lock.
She stood straight again in shock. He was looking at her, a strange and secretive glance that said I dare you to say something as clearly as if he'd spoken the words aloud. He'd meant for her to see, that was clear enough; it would have been easy enough to hide it, and Pru's shock made it obvious that she had seen. But she said nothing, and Peter and Gretchen both waved, hurried out, and Pru simply stood there in the middle of the coffeeshop over her pricy half-drunk latte and stared after them.
A few numb seconds later, she picked up her own cup and threaded her uneven way toward the door.
**
"And what happened to you?" Tee demanded from his usual perch in front of his screen, the moment she walked into the room.
"We've got competition," Pru said grimly, and told him everything.
**
"We've got competition," Tee announced once the others began to trickle in.
"Good," Steph said, with every appearance of taking this in stride. "I was starting to get bored; it'll be good to have someone to crush under the bootheels of our collective genius."
"We don't know who it is," Tee added, but he was putting on a brave face and looked almost calm. "Only their work."
He described the model, his tone taking on an authority and the removed, technical language that Pru hadn't been able to manage. Even only half-listening, Pru realized that as Peter was described, she may as well be listening to a description of Julian - except for the hair and the fantastic little details, faithfully repeated, of the eyai's smile. She watched him closely as Tee went through her description. No - Julian's smile looked as though it had been watered down with gin, while the eyai's had been everything that Julian's promised plus a cherry on top. Its grin had been wildly infectious; two rows of shining white teeth just short of perfect; its memory and facial .app were impeccable and its movements smooth and untraceable. No wonder, she mused, that the person to fail to notice the lock in his shoulder was the last person she'd have expected. A coder. A good coder. Impossible that he had her fooled; Gretchen had to know... didn't she? Who held Peter's key? Who had built that beautifully complicated, meticulously flawed code of affected love?
A low, impressed whistle; it was a moment before Pru realized that Tee had stopped talking and the whistle had come from Dom.
"Not playing around, are they? An eyai that can mimic affection like that? She must have ordered it special."
"She doesn't seem the type to make an order like that," said Pru. "Uncomplicated girl, no dirty past that I know of. Or any that I suspect, even," she added quickly, before their imaginations could take hold.
"She's working for Mettray, though," Tee put in with a teasing glance at her. "And they say it's always the quiet ones." Pru only hmmmphed at him.
"Anyway," he continued in that slow way that meant he was thinking about something very, very closely, "what makes you so certain it was mimicry?"
Pru stared at him. "Theodore. Don't be stupid. It's not like that can just be written into the code."
"Why not?"
Pru looked for help to the others, who seemed equally perplexed.
"It's not as though it hasn't been considered," Agatha finally ventured. "But that isn't what people want from an eyai. It's too expensive a piece of equipment to be so arbitrary; you want it to latch on to one person and stay there."
"Sure, it's not desirable by most clients," Tee agreed. "But what I'm asking is whether it's possible."
"It's not," Pru said firmly. She didn't want to look at Robin, in case he disagreed. "There's no way to code something that complicated into a machine."
"It's only chemical reactions," Tee pointed out. "Electrical impulses. It wouldn't be that hard." His eyes had taken on a faraway look, as though they could see the potential of such programming. An eyai that could make decisions of its own. A mystery to its owner. A mystery to him.
"You can't just make emotions that way," Pru said, her voice hard.
There was a long, echoing pause as the team considered this, and as Pru watched, discarded the hypothesis.
"Well, they're off at six," she finally said. "He knows that I know. I'll bring my equipment and find out."
"With your equipment," Steph said, disbelief in every syllable.
"Maybe," Pru said, looking into each face, "I'll just ask him."