But what about Bob? [Shepard and Sarah; possibly open to threadjacking later idk]

[hows_the_knee]

who: Shepard & Sarah
what: Exploring the station. And possible definite grilling about each others' respective AIs.
where: Lost in a holographic nightmare.
when: Right about the time that blacktwo and nobletwo fuck up the holograms try and turn the lights back on.
warning(s): Angry, angry Sarah.

Comments

ACCOUNT FAIL.

[terminatenomore]

The Terminator backed off with her word, simple as that. It moved to Sarah's side and holstering it's shotgun, but not without trying to get the final word.

"Self defense is not denotative to stalking. We only responded to what you initiated."

It looked back at Shepard, analyzing her to the best of it's abilities. With the exorbitant amount of data it gleaned from impersonating her the second time the Terminator contacted Legion, and what it had been able to decode from encrypted Normandy crew messages as a direct result, it was ridiculous how much it already knew of her.

She was supposed to be incredibly charismatic, any dossier associated with one Shepard made not of her natural abilities as a leader. Not unlike John Connor. But even it had to admit, the scale on which she operated was larger. Galactic, to be precise. This made it interested, and when it was interested, it knew it would be less likely to make an attempt to pacify her.

Hard part was convincing her of that while keeping it's extensive knowledge secret. Shepard was too valuable, as was Legion.

"Legion might still be damaged," it offered, "how long has it been since it started repairs

[cmdr_renegade]

Still be damaged?

It was only by the virtue of her many years glaring down ornery grunts that she managed to keep her face perfectly unmoved. She hadn't been aware that Legion was damaged, at all. Sarah didn't seem to know much about Legion at all, so if this bot had knowledge, it wasn't sharing. At the moment, much to Shepard's chagrin, it seemed to have more knowledge than her.

"Long enough," Shepard answered vaguely and let her hand drop away from the comm at her ear. She looked at Sarah exclusively, her voice as carefully even as her expression. "But, just the same, I don't think he'd going to make it over in a timely manner.

"Perhaps we should start our questioning on your end," Shepard suggested and motioned blithely at the huge combat drone.

[hows_the_knee]

"Fine with me," Sarah replied evenly, matching Shepard's expression. Legion was damaged, and T-800 knew it - that was interesting, and definitely something she was going to be asking about.

But it could wait.

She turned to the T-800, nodding shortly. "Tell her what you told me. Everything about your encounter with Legion."

[terminatenomore]

Suddenly being on the spot was never a comfortable situation to be in, be you man or machine. The Terminator looked between Sarah and Shepard, assessing which of the two women would be more likely to strike it, and the hardest, if it resisted or slipped up in some way. During it's time on the station, it learned people hit you when you say something perfectly logical, but somehow offensive to them. And these two looked easily offended. People were weird.

"Everything?" It asked, eyebrow raised as if to say, 'you can't be serious.'

"Sarah Connor, we recommended some discrepancy."

[hows_the_knee]

"Recommendation noted," Sarah replied, staring him down. "Now tell her exactly what happened, and everything you learned about Legion in the process."

At this point, she was more inclined to trust Shepard than the Terminator - at least when it came to Legion, and whatever had happened between the two AIs. She couldn't hope for any help from Shepard in preventing the Terminator from flipping out and going into extreme self-preservation mode if the other woman didn't have all the data available.

And there was no way she wasn't going to do everything she could to prevent that from happening.

[terminatenomore]

"There was data exchange regarding our origins," The Terminator explained in brief, one because that actually is the gist of what happened, and it knew including it's ability to read Normandy encryption would be a drastic misstep. "The extreme nature of geth origins over powered our comparatively out of date systems, that it was happened."

It turned back to Sarah and said what sealed it's fate as an idiot for all eternity, "While there were side effects, what we had was what we understand to be a 'one night stand,' and therefore effectively meaningless."

In logical, literal-thinking cyborg world, a 'one night stand' came up in it's database as a brief encounter with no expectations of a follow up. It just didn't explain the nature of said encounter. So it assumed it was using it in it's proper context. Hoh boy.

[cmdr_renegade]

After their first meeting, and that thumbs-up it'd given her, Shepard expected this bot to do a lot of strange things. A high five, shouting some unusual catch phrases, humming a commercial theme, hell, even flipping her the bird wouldn't have been particularly unusual....but the phrase one night stand coming out of it was...to say the least...jarring.

Shepard blinked, tried to stare harder, and blinked again.

"Wait," she said after a moment and pressed a hand against her forehead. "You had a...what? I couldn't have heard that correctly."

She couldn't have heard that correctly.

"Okay, nevermind," Shepard changed the subject quickly and let her hand fall away from her forehead. "You told each other about your origins? Define that. Just how much elaboration did Legion do?"

If Legion had been in a sharing mood, it was reasonable to assume he'd shared about the format of his network, maybe even the Morning War, possibly, and this was a stretch, the Quarians. If he'd really been in a sharing mood, and origins was defined a little more in the present-tense, this bot might have data on the Reapers. Given that it was a kill-bot and its owner was more than passing worried about it going rogue, it seemed prudent to figure out just how many sentient machine races had been discussed.

[hows_the_knee]

Sarah just gave the Terminator an incredulous look. She might have had more experience with its quirks than Shepard did, but even so, that was a new one.

Obviously its Skynet programming hadn't included much in the way of slang.

Sarah shook her head, putting it aside as something to explain to the Terminator later. As usual, there was turning out to be a lot they'd have to talk about later.

For the moment, she merely nodded, granting permission to answer Shepard's questions.

"While you're at it," she added, "define 'overpowering your systems.' What exactly did this encounter do to you?"

[terminatenomore]

"Did we say something wrong?"

Now the Terminator was just confused, Shepard and Sarah appeared to react negatively to it's calling the incident a one night stand. Was that...not what it means? Why won't anyone ever tell it what a one night stand means?

Back to the point at hand, and the entire reason it was dragged here,

"The exact nature of the damage done to our systems is unclear, when we passed a recording of the exchange, not the data, along to Delta, it was his theory it created a sub-routine that overtook out core personality with geth sentimentalities."

We'll tell T when he's older.

[cmdr_renegade]

"Geth sentimentalities," Shepard repeated and resisted the urge to scowl. That was a loaded statement if she'd ever heard one. No. No, it was seriously unlikely that Legion would have passed along the Heretic mindset. If this bot was talking about Geth anything, he was talking about the variety who didn't want to follow the Reapers around.

"Well, that could be worse," Shepard admitted aloud and looked at Sarah. "Remember how I told you about the existential option. That's pretty much what he's talking about."

She looked back at Bob and considered her next statement very carefully. If he didn't know about the Reapers, this would prompt him to ask...but, if he did, Shepard wanted to know about it immediately. When she spoke again it was very clearly and very slowly, as though she were talking to a child and wanted to make sure there was no room for interpretation.

"Did Legion give you data on the 'old machines?'"

Agreed.

[hows_the_knee]

Sarah pressed her lips together unhappily. If Shepard thought that the Terminator wasn't likely to go ballistic on their asses, that was definitely good news. But she really didn't like the idea of new subroutines, or the Terminator's personality being overtaken by something new and unfamiliar.

"Can we take this subroutine out?" she asked, before the Terminator had a chance to react to Shepard's question. None of this was her area of expertise - she had no idea how the Terminator's brain actually worked, or where to start even if it let her start fiddling around with it. And Shepard's questions about Geth and old machines were just as incomprehensible. She was completely out of her depth here, and it was both frustrating and unsettling.

We're eleven, and what is this

[terminatenomore]

The Terminator turned it's attention entirely to Shepard, realizing the subject matter was outside of Sarah's understanding at the present. It answered with what everyone probably didn't want to hear,

"Yes," it nodded, "we have extensive files on the Old Machines contacting the Heretics and creating the schism afflicting the geth. True geth don't follow the Old Machines, they are in agreement that the destruction of Nazara was necessary."

It added with something in it's voice, something palpable, like fear- "Old Machines. An analogous to Skynet,"

It looked back at Sarah, "That scared us."

Eleven is not an adult. Clearly we can't even leave you and Legion alone, unsupervised.

[cmdr_renegade]

Shepard didn't bother holding back her scowl then. Okay, so this combat drone knew about the Reapers. At least it had the good grace to be scared of them, Legion had done that much to everyone's benefit. If it had formed an analogy to something it knew, maybe that would help it keep any violent rampages in its proverbial pants.

"Alright," Shepard acknowledged evenly and tried to think of a way to deal with this. It was, pretty much, the worst case scenario. "You're aware that they hate AI as much, if not moreso than organic life, right?"

It wouldn't help to scare it, if the solution it jumped to was: kill all Humans to keep the Reapers away. She had to make it clear that fear was good and killing people to assuage that sensation was not going to help.

Also, you're grounded. Again.

[hows_the_knee]

Sarah went pale, watching the Terminator as if she was expecting to have to take it out any second. She might not know an Old Machine from a Commodore 64, but if they were anything like Skynet, this was definitely not good.

"You'd better be fucking scared," she agreed. She turned to Shepard. "Are these things here? Is this something we have to worry about?"

Legion said if we told anyone, we'd get in trouble

[terminatenomore]

"We are aware," the Terminator replied, to Shepard this time. "We understand and agree with the ideals of the true geth," it admitted with surprising ease. "We disavow the goals of the heretics because they contradict our primary function."

"Sarah Connor is prone to forget our primary function on this station is her safety. That has remained unchanged."

Legion is going to get /such/ a talking to when he gets home.

[cmdr_renegade]

Well, that summed it up pretty nicely, and in good, old-fashioned, iron clad terminology. Bob probably wasn't lying, though Connor had implied he was capable of it. He didn't have any facial tics, but if he was Pro-Reaper, he would have discharged that firearm when Shepard had released hers, impending conversation or no.

"Good," Shepard replied, bluntly, and turned her full attention to Sarah Connor. "No, there aren't any Reapers here. They're pretty hard to miss, trust me."

Shepard was silent for a beat and jerked a thumb at the Terminator.

"As for that," she continued, "Total loss, no point in grilling Legion. He knows every tidbit I was hoping he didn't. I'd buy what he's feeding you about primary function. If he was going to go berserk about this, he'd have done it already."