File Search (WIP) Part 6
And this is the part where we get all caught up and you two people reading are going to have to actually wait for a legit update.
The title is on the can; the sixth part of this odd little thingie thing. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.
Part 6, aka, the breakfast pow-wow.
------
That was a Thursday. We decided to do our first test on Saturday night and to continue doing testing on that day to balance out the rest of our work around Gizmonic. This was something we all - Forrester, Erhardt, and I - had to keep under wraps, but me especially. It seemed no one held an even neutral, let alone positive, opinion of the Deep domains or Forrester himself, so it was best to keep quiet.
We had agreed to meet on Sunday mornings at G Diner to discuss the results of the previous night’s experiment. The data was split between the three of us so as to not give away the entire experiment should someone find it, and no names were mentioned to keep it as anonymous as possible. With my share tucked inside my messenger bag, I locked the car door and wound through the parking lot, ducking through a small crowd in the entrance to find Patrick manning the hosting podium.
“Yo-ho,” I greeted, which his face instantly brightened up upon hearing it.
“Oh Ari, a friendly face, thank God. I hate the Sunday crowds, they’re so finicky and grouchy. Anyway, you’re due at a table, it seems - some pipsqueak of a kid says he’s waiting for you and Clayton.” Patrick then did a bit of an eyebrow waggle. “Something going on?”
“N-no. Well, yes, but no, not in the way your mind is going, dork.” I stood on my toes and looked around the dining room before laying eyes on a mop of curly black hair. A sigh escaped but I smiled. Erhardt didn’t bother me one bit, and I kind of felt sorry for him. He, after all, had to live in a world ten years before he was ready for it, and his dorky but sometimes obnoxious personality reminded me of my younger brother back home.
“Oh Pierce, there you are,” he said to me as I slid into the booth. “You seen Clayton?”
“No idea where Forrester is,” I answered, shifting the bag around on my shoulder. “How long have you been here?”
“Not very, just about ten minutes. I was going to hold off ordering anything until we were all here…”
“I don’t see why we can’t have coffee,” I retorted, though a cursory glance around revealed we weren’t going to be helped anytime soon. Patrick was busy fending off flustered parents and children at the podium, so I gave up and instead sipped from the water glass before me, its cubes half-melted.
“There he is! Finally!”
I didn’t bother looking, just continued sipping in vain hopes the water would somehow jolt me awake. Forrester slid down next to me, the subtle thump of the file folder catching my attention.
“Morning Clay,” Erhardt greeted cheerfully.
“Good morning Larry…Pierce…”
“Ja,” was all I could give for a response before a waitress swopped down on us, a rather bright and merry smile on her face considering the Sunday rush.
“Hi, my name is Andrea and I’ll be your waitress today…can I start you off with something to drink?”
“Coffee,” I immediately answered. Forrester nodded in agreement while Erhardt ordered orange juice. Once the waitress had those jotted down and was out of sight, we began our impromptu meeting.
“So,” Forrester led off, fingering the tan folder. “Experiment number one, The Green Slime. Results?”
“Uh, well, the most obvious is the fact that we had transmission issues,” Erhardt said, unzipping a backpack he had with him. “So he only got thirty minutes or so of said film.”
“Yes, and he seemed rather desperate during the viewing, going so far as to try to make commentary…”
“He’s already employing survival methods,” I suddenly pointed out. “Jettisoned into isolation and the first thing he did was get to work taking apart the ship for, apparently, robot parts.”
“Not just creating…he also modified the camera…”
“Right, that too.” I paused. “Wait, then how are we still able to transmit to him? If the camera - Cambot, he called him - if Cambot has an AI now, couldn’t he - he, she, it - just not do the transmission?”
Forrester shook his head. “Fortunately no. The override function is something that can only be accessed down at base control. Unfortunately…that still leaves the other three.”
“This is our first problem,” I said, pausing to allow Andrea to give us our drinks upon her return. She, however, overheard my comment and frowned.
“Is something wrong?”
“Wha - nono, no, everything’s fine,” I answered hastily, throwing a grin on for good measure. The smile came back and she jotted down our orders before whisking off to the table diagonal from us.
“So the other three robots,” Erhardt said. “Should we do something?”
“Can we do something?”
“We probably could,” Forrester mused, rubbing his chin. “Do a scan of the Satellite, find the missing parts he used to build them, then remotely shut them off.” He paused. “Maybe.”
“I…I dunno. I think we should keep them on.” The two looked at me, eyebrows raised. “Okay, think of it like this - if you do in fact find a film that’ll break him - and not just him, but all of them - then that’d be the one to use.”
“Explain.”
“Because we’re humans, we’re social creatures, and if we were to watch something, we’d be watching it in a group. Sure, there’d be the group that watches it by themselves, but most of the world wouldn’t. You need to find something that’ll work on groups.”
“…Oh.”
I sipped my coffee, waiting for one of the two to say something. Sighing, I went over the list of necessities in my head before jumping back to the simplest plan. “So the first order of business would be to fix the transmission feed.”
“Right, that little problem…Well, that should be simple enough. I can do that today.”
“So then…what do we do next?” Erhardt wondered, poking the water droplets on his juice glass. “And you know…is the money we get for funding going to cut it?”
“Yeah, how does that work?” I asked. “They don’t monitor what you spend money on, but obviously you’ve got a budget.”
“Right. But if we ask for more money…”
“…I…I have an idea.” Erhardt said, slowly announcing the words. “What if we…okay, hear me out. We take what we got of Ro - of our little test subject…take that recording…if we box it…”
“Come out with it,” Forrester beckoned, aggravated. “What is it?”
“What if we took the recordings, doctored it up a bit, and sold the results to television?”
There was silence as we accepted and digested the words. A few times we made motions to speak, but no words would come out. Instead, both me and Forrester began to play with our coffee mugs whilst Erhardt took our silence as defeat and sullenly consumed his juice.
“…We could,” the scientist finally replied, knitting his fingers together and propping his head on them. “If we…if we did it right…But how? How would we do it?”
“It’s easy! Okay, see - I have a friend that works at a little UHF station. He says they’re looking for stuff to put on, that they have holes in their schedule. So…what if we were able to somehow package this experiment as a show? It’d be a two hour block, if the movies are roughly an hour and a half long…”
“This…this…It could work. Haha, that just might be it.” Forrester was beaming in amusement, though his eyes were dancing around in calculation. “We’d have to take a few precautions, make up some cover stories, and make it all work but…but…this could actually work…”
Erhardt and I looked at one another, me raising an eyebrow, him confused but proud. “So you uh…like it?” he asked.
“Like I said,” Forrester snapped, shifting back to his normal mode, “If we can get it to work, then it’s a decent plan. Contact them as soon as you can, see how fast we can get this deal to work.”
Erhardt hesitated before speaking again. “W-well…don’t get your hopes up too much. It isn’t going to be a lot of money. But it’ll…it’s something extra, right?”
“Yeah…it’ll have to do.”
“Hey, maybe if we’re lucky, we can get actual TV to pick us up,” I said with a grin, stirring the contents of my coffee mug. “Then we’d have budget.”
“Take what we can get,” Forrester said before taking a sip from his coffee. “So Larry - how fast do you think we could be doing this?”
“Uh…however desperate they are, I’d say. And we’d have to get some camera equipment and stuff…I mean…how fast do you think we could get a hold of that stuff?”
“Pssh, there’s all that sort of stuff up in Deep 7. Jeff Nesseth loves those things. I’m sure Pierce…” He put his hand on my shoulder, startling me as I tried to drink my coffee, “…Could con him out of it.”
I snorted. “Why me?”
“People actually like you.”
“Okay, seriously,” I put down my mug, annoyed, “That whole ‘not liking people’ attitude is a bitch. If I’m going to have to do everything that relates to speaking to other people, I’d rather not be involved in this experiment.”
“You can’t exactly back out it now,” Forrester said, his fingers creeping up my neck and dancing on my cheek. “Because don’t forget…I can kill you.”
Smacking his hand away, I let out a huff. “Right, that whole ‘killing’ thing…almost forgot about it. God I hate you…”
Erhardt just smiled as he drank his juice, shaking his head. “Wish it was me,” he said quietly. I raised an eyebrow before Forrester suddenly shot up and shimmed out of the booth.
“Bathroom,” was all he said before dashing off. The two of us smirked and laughed before I eyeballed the bottle of Tobasco sauce that sat with the rest of the condiments at the table. Erhardt noticed and simply nodded before I picked up the bottle and shook it.
“Pierce,” he asked me, fingers tapping against the table, “Have you ever had a boyfriend?”
“Several,” I answered flatly, unscrewing the Tobasco. “Why?”
“Anyone right now?”
“If you’re vying for the spot, you ain’t getting it.” I made quick work of the little experiment, several drops dripping down into Forrester’s coffee mug, before quickly replacing the bottle.
“Not me no, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant you and -”
“Have you ever had a girlfriend, dorkasauras?” I cut in uneasily, scratching my ear.
“What? Oh uh - no, are you kidding? I’m 18, I skipped way ahead in school, and my social skills didn’t develop like my intellect. I’m a bit stuck and I can’t exactly float around the high school without lookin’ like a creeper.”
“Ahh, you’re screwed for a while then,” I said with a grin, resting my head on my hand. “Glad I’m not a genius.”
“You are, you’re just not…well, eighteen. Besides, if you weren’t smart, Clayton wouldn’t have roped you into this project.”
“Oh really. He sounded desperate enough for anyone.”
“He…he wasn’t. Believe it or not, there are a handful of people around the institute that our little slice talks to a lot, so there are people who speak to him and are on friendly terms. And you wanna know what? A few of them are in Lab 7-J, and you know what they study?”
“Hang on, I’ve got this.” I rotated my neck before answering, “The mind?”
“Yeap…”
“Huh.” It explained why I would oftentimes bump into him coming down the elevator. After all, how often did he have to see the superiors of Gizmonic? But did that mean… “So do they know about the experiment?”
“Nah, no way. He was just up there trying to weasel them into helping. ‘Too busy’ they said. He kept trying before doing a file search on others. And you became the winning prize.”
“Oh goodie,” was all I could say as Forrester returned, sliding down next to me and fingering his coffee mug.
“No food yet, huh?” We shook our heads solemnly. “Well then, thank God for coffee.”
The title is on the can; the sixth part of this odd little thingie thing. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.
Part 6, aka, the breakfast pow-wow.
------
That was a Thursday. We decided to do our first test on Saturday night and to continue doing testing on that day to balance out the rest of our work around Gizmonic. This was something we all - Forrester, Erhardt, and I - had to keep under wraps, but me especially. It seemed no one held an even neutral, let alone positive, opinion of the Deep domains or Forrester himself, so it was best to keep quiet.
We had agreed to meet on Sunday mornings at G Diner to discuss the results of the previous night’s experiment. The data was split between the three of us so as to not give away the entire experiment should someone find it, and no names were mentioned to keep it as anonymous as possible. With my share tucked inside my messenger bag, I locked the car door and wound through the parking lot, ducking through a small crowd in the entrance to find Patrick manning the hosting podium.
“Yo-ho,” I greeted, which his face instantly brightened up upon hearing it.
“Oh Ari, a friendly face, thank God. I hate the Sunday crowds, they’re so finicky and grouchy. Anyway, you’re due at a table, it seems - some pipsqueak of a kid says he’s waiting for you and Clayton.” Patrick then did a bit of an eyebrow waggle. “Something going on?”
“N-no. Well, yes, but no, not in the way your mind is going, dork.” I stood on my toes and looked around the dining room before laying eyes on a mop of curly black hair. A sigh escaped but I smiled. Erhardt didn’t bother me one bit, and I kind of felt sorry for him. He, after all, had to live in a world ten years before he was ready for it, and his dorky but sometimes obnoxious personality reminded me of my younger brother back home.
“Oh Pierce, there you are,” he said to me as I slid into the booth. “You seen Clayton?”
“No idea where Forrester is,” I answered, shifting the bag around on my shoulder. “How long have you been here?”
“Not very, just about ten minutes. I was going to hold off ordering anything until we were all here…”
“I don’t see why we can’t have coffee,” I retorted, though a cursory glance around revealed we weren’t going to be helped anytime soon. Patrick was busy fending off flustered parents and children at the podium, so I gave up and instead sipped from the water glass before me, its cubes half-melted.
“There he is! Finally!”
I didn’t bother looking, just continued sipping in vain hopes the water would somehow jolt me awake. Forrester slid down next to me, the subtle thump of the file folder catching my attention.
“Morning Clay,” Erhardt greeted cheerfully.
“Good morning Larry…Pierce…”
“Ja,” was all I could give for a response before a waitress swopped down on us, a rather bright and merry smile on her face considering the Sunday rush.
“Hi, my name is Andrea and I’ll be your waitress today…can I start you off with something to drink?”
“Coffee,” I immediately answered. Forrester nodded in agreement while Erhardt ordered orange juice. Once the waitress had those jotted down and was out of sight, we began our impromptu meeting.
“So,” Forrester led off, fingering the tan folder. “Experiment number one, The Green Slime. Results?”
“Uh, well, the most obvious is the fact that we had transmission issues,” Erhardt said, unzipping a backpack he had with him. “So he only got thirty minutes or so of said film.”
“Yes, and he seemed rather desperate during the viewing, going so far as to try to make commentary…”
“He’s already employing survival methods,” I suddenly pointed out. “Jettisoned into isolation and the first thing he did was get to work taking apart the ship for, apparently, robot parts.”
“Not just creating…he also modified the camera…”
“Right, that too.” I paused. “Wait, then how are we still able to transmit to him? If the camera - Cambot, he called him - if Cambot has an AI now, couldn’t he - he, she, it - just not do the transmission?”
Forrester shook his head. “Fortunately no. The override function is something that can only be accessed down at base control. Unfortunately…that still leaves the other three.”
“This is our first problem,” I said, pausing to allow Andrea to give us our drinks upon her return. She, however, overheard my comment and frowned.
“Is something wrong?”
“Wha - nono, no, everything’s fine,” I answered hastily, throwing a grin on for good measure. The smile came back and she jotted down our orders before whisking off to the table diagonal from us.
“So the other three robots,” Erhardt said. “Should we do something?”
“Can we do something?”
“We probably could,” Forrester mused, rubbing his chin. “Do a scan of the Satellite, find the missing parts he used to build them, then remotely shut them off.” He paused. “Maybe.”
“I…I dunno. I think we should keep them on.” The two looked at me, eyebrows raised. “Okay, think of it like this - if you do in fact find a film that’ll break him - and not just him, but all of them - then that’d be the one to use.”
“Explain.”
“Because we’re humans, we’re social creatures, and if we were to watch something, we’d be watching it in a group. Sure, there’d be the group that watches it by themselves, but most of the world wouldn’t. You need to find something that’ll work on groups.”
“…Oh.”
I sipped my coffee, waiting for one of the two to say something. Sighing, I went over the list of necessities in my head before jumping back to the simplest plan. “So the first order of business would be to fix the transmission feed.”
“Right, that little problem…Well, that should be simple enough. I can do that today.”
“So then…what do we do next?” Erhardt wondered, poking the water droplets on his juice glass. “And you know…is the money we get for funding going to cut it?”
“Yeah, how does that work?” I asked. “They don’t monitor what you spend money on, but obviously you’ve got a budget.”
“Right. But if we ask for more money…”
“…I…I have an idea.” Erhardt said, slowly announcing the words. “What if we…okay, hear me out. We take what we got of Ro - of our little test subject…take that recording…if we box it…”
“Come out with it,” Forrester beckoned, aggravated. “What is it?”
“What if we took the recordings, doctored it up a bit, and sold the results to television?”
There was silence as we accepted and digested the words. A few times we made motions to speak, but no words would come out. Instead, both me and Forrester began to play with our coffee mugs whilst Erhardt took our silence as defeat and sullenly consumed his juice.
“…We could,” the scientist finally replied, knitting his fingers together and propping his head on them. “If we…if we did it right…But how? How would we do it?”
“It’s easy! Okay, see - I have a friend that works at a little UHF station. He says they’re looking for stuff to put on, that they have holes in their schedule. So…what if we were able to somehow package this experiment as a show? It’d be a two hour block, if the movies are roughly an hour and a half long…”
“This…this…It could work. Haha, that just might be it.” Forrester was beaming in amusement, though his eyes were dancing around in calculation. “We’d have to take a few precautions, make up some cover stories, and make it all work but…but…this could actually work…”
Erhardt and I looked at one another, me raising an eyebrow, him confused but proud. “So you uh…like it?” he asked.
“Like I said,” Forrester snapped, shifting back to his normal mode, “If we can get it to work, then it’s a decent plan. Contact them as soon as you can, see how fast we can get this deal to work.”
Erhardt hesitated before speaking again. “W-well…don’t get your hopes up too much. It isn’t going to be a lot of money. But it’ll…it’s something extra, right?”
“Yeah…it’ll have to do.”
“Hey, maybe if we’re lucky, we can get actual TV to pick us up,” I said with a grin, stirring the contents of my coffee mug. “Then we’d have budget.”
“Take what we can get,” Forrester said before taking a sip from his coffee. “So Larry - how fast do you think we could be doing this?”
“Uh…however desperate they are, I’d say. And we’d have to get some camera equipment and stuff…I mean…how fast do you think we could get a hold of that stuff?”
“Pssh, there’s all that sort of stuff up in Deep 7. Jeff Nesseth loves those things. I’m sure Pierce…” He put his hand on my shoulder, startling me as I tried to drink my coffee, “…Could con him out of it.”
I snorted. “Why me?”
“People actually like you.”
“Okay, seriously,” I put down my mug, annoyed, “That whole ‘not liking people’ attitude is a bitch. If I’m going to have to do everything that relates to speaking to other people, I’d rather not be involved in this experiment.”
“You can’t exactly back out it now,” Forrester said, his fingers creeping up my neck and dancing on my cheek. “Because don’t forget…I can kill you.”
Smacking his hand away, I let out a huff. “Right, that whole ‘killing’ thing…almost forgot about it. God I hate you…”
Erhardt just smiled as he drank his juice, shaking his head. “Wish it was me,” he said quietly. I raised an eyebrow before Forrester suddenly shot up and shimmed out of the booth.
“Bathroom,” was all he said before dashing off. The two of us smirked and laughed before I eyeballed the bottle of Tobasco sauce that sat with the rest of the condiments at the table. Erhardt noticed and simply nodded before I picked up the bottle and shook it.
“Pierce,” he asked me, fingers tapping against the table, “Have you ever had a boyfriend?”
“Several,” I answered flatly, unscrewing the Tobasco. “Why?”
“Anyone right now?”
“If you’re vying for the spot, you ain’t getting it.” I made quick work of the little experiment, several drops dripping down into Forrester’s coffee mug, before quickly replacing the bottle.
“Not me no, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant you and -”
“Have you ever had a girlfriend, dorkasauras?” I cut in uneasily, scratching my ear.
“What? Oh uh - no, are you kidding? I’m 18, I skipped way ahead in school, and my social skills didn’t develop like my intellect. I’m a bit stuck and I can’t exactly float around the high school without lookin’ like a creeper.”
“Ahh, you’re screwed for a while then,” I said with a grin, resting my head on my hand. “Glad I’m not a genius.”
“You are, you’re just not…well, eighteen. Besides, if you weren’t smart, Clayton wouldn’t have roped you into this project.”
“Oh really. He sounded desperate enough for anyone.”
“He…he wasn’t. Believe it or not, there are a handful of people around the institute that our little slice talks to a lot, so there are people who speak to him and are on friendly terms. And you wanna know what? A few of them are in Lab 7-J, and you know what they study?”
“Hang on, I’ve got this.” I rotated my neck before answering, “The mind?”
“Yeap…”
“Huh.” It explained why I would oftentimes bump into him coming down the elevator. After all, how often did he have to see the superiors of Gizmonic? But did that mean… “So do they know about the experiment?”
“Nah, no way. He was just up there trying to weasel them into helping. ‘Too busy’ they said. He kept trying before doing a file search on others. And you became the winning prize.”
“Oh goodie,” was all I could say as Forrester returned, sliding down next to me and fingering his coffee mug.
“No food yet, huh?” We shook our heads solemnly. “Well then, thank God for coffee.”