[Fateverse Side Story: NC Bundle] An Unconventional Symphony
a brief glimpse of Five's lunch with Theorist 503.
warnings: AU - Fateverse. sci-fi with technobabble. OC: Theorist 503 (Steve Rogers ND109), Programmer 005 (Mizutaki Oshima NC118). language: g (unless you read the 'censor subtitle' mouseovers, in which case it's pg-13).
pairing: none/gen.
timeline: NO 3652 (AD 6188), shortly after Vacation.
disclaimer: marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.
notes: 1) here you have an explanation of the theory behind auditory censorship brainware. some of those silly sound-sets probably produce an effect like the Monty Python song "I Bet You They Won't Play This Song on the Radio." 2) Theorist 488 is a Don Blake. he probably doesn't use "thou," but he probably does use silly anachronistic vocabulary.
visit The Fateverse Glossary for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.
An Unconventional Symphony
Theorist 503 is a rescue. His hyperbolic chronometric resonance phase was completely out of whack with his home timeline, but aligned perfectly with the Network Core. Waste not, want not, the Auditor had said with a little smile.
So he has spent the past forty years of his life training and working for the Network. His field of focus is Fidelis itself, the notion of things like sympathetic magic, of psychic bonds and non-mutant clairvoyance, of spontaneous leyline traversal. He’s worked with several transit Engineers and two different Programmers (and Three is also an Engineer, technically).
His work lets him wander the capital, devoting a week here and there to scanning various subjects of interest. He was allowed to spend a yearlong sabbatical studying twin-bonds in various parts of the continent.
He is getting old, and old-fashioned in little ways. After he got over the newness of installing software in his brain, he downloaded a Network-approved real-time auditory censor which he updates every day. At its base level, the censor pre-processes anything recognized as speech and simply removes words on its block list, leaving little silences in their place. Proctor studies have shown that most people find the silences disturbing, so all Network-approved censorship software defaults to using a tone (middle C, in fact) to replace the deleted words. The downloadable sound-sets for the censor he uses are varied and extensive. Car horns, animal sounds, birdsong, musical instruments, chimes… Most of them get a bit silly around a pottymouth, especially on the strictest setting, where he prefers it.
As soon as he got home after meeting Five for the first time, he laughed until he couldn’t breathe. When he was done laughing, he spent an hour looking for a sound-set that wouldn’t drive him into hysterics around her.
Now her swears are replaced with the sound of tubular bells, varying based on vocabulary, speed, and volume. In her tranquil moments, the tones are soothing and easy to ignore. Work the little woman into one of her fierce frenzies, and she spouts music. Several octaves of rich ringing combine with her smooth voice and natural verbal cadence to make a particularly versatile instrument.
“Steve, you’re spacing out again,” she tells him.
He blinks placidly at her.
Steve. He’s seen three or four of himself around the Core Compound, even seen them in the company of the diminutive Programmer, but only he is Steve. The others are Cartographer and Proctor 331 and that domineering ~~.
“Hey.” She reaches over the table and pokes his cheek with her pseudo-pen. “Kid, if you’re not gonna pay attention, I’ll just go yell at Six’s cadre of gremlins.”
Kid. He’s sixty-seven years old and she looks young enough to be his granddaughter, but he really is a ‘kid’ to her. That’s life extension for you.
He puts his tablet down and leans back in his chair. “I’m sorry, Mimi, I was just lost in thought for a while. Is it true that Six writes terrible error codes?”
Five slaps her hand onto the table and rolls her eyes. “Oh, don’t ~~ing get me started!” she cries in exasperation.
The point, of course, was to do exactly that.
Don (Theorist 488) has told Steve that Five’s swearing is so fervent and imaginative as to be perversely poetic. Since the sheer concentration of profanity would undoubtedly make him blush so hard he’d faint if he turned off his censor, Steve will take Don’s word for it.
In the meantime, Five plays a symphony about readability and coding standards.
After a long morning of chronogeometry equations, Steve likes to unwind by listening to a little music. He can even conduct the symphony by mentioning a different peeve, because Five has several subjects about which she is passionate enough to curse fluently (in multiple languages, Steve suspects). The Underprogrammers are a frantic, irritated staccato. Six is a bright and bouncing melody. The Cartographer is a menacing, aggressive waltz. Five’s favorite books are sweeping overtures. Her hobbies are melancholic dirges.
Sometimes Steve wonders how much trouble it was to design the sound-set so well. He wonders who designed it, and what kind of interesting usage algorithms and musical theory went into it.
Today’s music starts energetic and unsettled and slightly dissonant before curling into something simpler and uplifting. She must be talking about Six, then. She complains about the youngest Programmer (almost unceasingly, in fact), but Steve can tell that she’s very fond of him. Steve gets the impression that Six is brilliant and opinionated and broken. Radical theories about the timestream, about sentience, about AI, about resonant mutability.
“Do you think I could get a dispensation to study him?” he asks abruptly.
Five trails off discordantly. “What?” she says, confused.
“Six,” he replies.
She blinks up at him, shoves her glasses a little higher up on her nose. “I don’t see why you couldn’t, as long as you don’t ~~ up his productivity. You’ve got the clearance level. Just…if he starts to go ape-~~, you have to leave. Like, no matter how ~~ing worried you are, you have to leave the room right ~~ing then. It’s not perfectly predictable what kind of effect somebody will have on his stupid god~~ Fidelis Effect, and if he gets over-saturated he won’t be able to think straight until he purges.”
“Sounds absolutely fascinating.”
“…Steve, you are ~~ed up.”
.End.
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