[Fateverse Side Story: NC Bundle] Fairy Godmother
because, as much as he annoys her, Five actually likes Six.
warnings: AU - Fateverse. sci-fi with technobabble. OC: Programmer 005. language: pg-13 (for f***, s***, and g**damn).
pairing: none/gen.
timeline: NO 3621 (AD 6157), a few months after Prodigal.
disclaimer: marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.
notes: 1) Five's name, if you'll recall, is Mizutaki Oshima. she wears glasses for vision correction; they also happen to be programmable to work as the visual peripheral of a computer system. 2) Five (and the person on whom i based her) is perfectly capable of holding a lengthy conversation with absolutely no swearing. the moment you point this out, she'll absent-mindedly start to swear again. 3) "comp-ed" = "compulsory education."
visit The Fateverse Glossary for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.
Fairy Godmother
Mizutaki ignores Underprogrammers as a general rule. They’re usually sloppy, pig-headed morons, uncreative as they are inelegant. Occasionally, one will start to get clever, will try to write code using tricks and shortcuts and backdoors. The result is almost always that something breaks, or something that no one else can use.
They’re numbers. An army of stupid, insipid numbers that crunch like calculators and don’t give two shits about computerized sentience, about rudimentary AI, about data interpretation, about timestream theory or chronogeometry.
Except this one.
The Cartographer told her to keep an eye on him.
The son of an Engineer and a Theorist. The son of Maria Stark, whom Mizutaki liked.
Miss Oshima, I think you should watch this one, he said.
So she watches the kid. He’s all mussed hair and knobby knees and constant absent-minded writing.
And after watching him for an hour, she walks up to where he sits at a table in one of the Academy study halls.
“You’re Anthony,” she says by way of introduction.
He writes a little more, stops, looks at her. “Yes.”
“I’m Mizutaki. Programmer 005. You can call me Five. I knew your mother.”
His eyes wander to the side. “Oshima. Drafted to full Programmer status before you finished Academy courses because your instructor happened across an AI you wrote as a joke.”
She nods. “That AI was turned into a companion-AI, marketed in disgustingly adorable little stuffed toys for children.”
“It’s good,” he tells her. “But you could’ve done so much more with it.”
“I could’ve. But then I would’ve had to worry about ethical implications.”
He leans toward her, eyes alight with interest. “Have you given much thought to them? The ethical implications, I mean. I’ve been thinking for so long about the way human consciousness and conscience are structured, and about streamlining the decision tree to form a moral compass, because of course you need a moral compass if you’re going to have independent decision-making, and who’s to say that there wouldn’t come a point when some of our field agents need the backup of a semi-autonomous, self-reliant piece of equipment, right?”
It’s cute, this puppy-like eagerness, this genuine fascination with their field of work. Only Three has this kind of energy, only Two has this level of interest. This is why the Cartographer told her to keep an eye on the kid. Train him up right, draw attention to the appropriate projects, and he’ll be a Programmer in no time.
“Can you show me some of the code you might use to implement this new kind of decision-making?” she asks him.
“Sure, sure!” he says, tapping his pseudo-pen on the personal tablet in front of him.
Two buttons later, she’s watching him write, code scrolling through her glasses as he talks about beautiful, exciting things like ‘fluid priority cascades’ and ‘trainable decision trees.’ His code is good, but poorly spaced, like he just writes it out in a stream and never reads it.
“Steve said you swear a lot,” Anthony says abruptly. “But you haven’t sworn at all.”
The non-sequitor startles a laugh out of her. “Kid, I cuss like a sailor most of the time. Hell, three out of every four words that come out of my mouth around Underprogrammers is something that’d get bleeped by a censor program. I took it easy around your mom, though, and I guess that just automatically carried over to you. If it makes you uncomfortable to be treated differently, I can throw in a little more profanity.”
His mouth twists for a moment. “If it doesn’t make you uncomfortable to change your habits…” he offers.
She grins at him, but doesn’t answer. “Have you read the Savant’s thesis on timeline absorption?”
“I started to, but my instructor told me to put it away and pay attention.”
Mizutaki laughs again. “Stodgy old fucker. You should finish reading it. The Savant’s fucking brilliant when it comes to complex chronogeometry. I mean, all Wades are smart in a kind of dumb, disconnected, accidental way, but he’s a goddamn genius. It’s amazing talking to him. Tellya what-you finish reading his thesis, tell me what you thought of it, and if you liked it, I’ll see if I can get him to drop by for a chat.”
“Isn’t he busy?”
“He has to be dragged kicking and screaming away from his work,” she snorts. “He needs the downtime, and he loves talking about timestream theory. He and your mom and I could talk for hours and hours about shape-matching and the minute alterations of resonance that signal certain events. We’ve been trying to understand his intuition.”
“Oh?” Anthony looks nonplussed.
Mizutaki stares at him. “They must not teach you kids jack shit about Network history in comp-ed!” she declares. “The reason he’s called the Savant is that he has completely unerring intuition for about three or four months ahead in any timeline. We send him off with a briefing that explains whose body he’ll land in and who’s likely to try and kill him, and that’s all he needs to figure out exactly how to demolish the timeline in under two months. He’s fucking amazing.”
Anthony squints at something to his right. “Complex inter-object chronometric resonance receptivity, clairvoyance, precognition, ESP, psychic signature interpretation.”
“Yeah, that kinda stuff. Anyhoo, it’s hard as hell for him to find people who can keep up with him when he talks about some of the more esoteric aspects of timestream theory, and since your-they’re hallucinations, is that right?” At his nod, she goes on. “Since your hallucinations fill you in most of the time when you don’t understand what’s being said, you shouldn’t have a bit of trouble. Think of it as doing him a favor.”
“Hm.” Anthony slowly turns his head to the left, as though following something. “Let’s get ice cream. I’ll finish reading while we eat.”
“Kid, you just said four of my favorite words in sequence: let’s get ice cream. It’s a verifiable fact that I’m eighty-seven percent more amenable to any suggestion placed after that phrase.”
.End.
merianmoriarty has my formal permission to pimp my fics on various comms (if/when i ever abandon deviantART, i'll go ahead and join the comms myself and take care of getting things posted in the right places). no one has permission to re-post this ANYWHERE, but feel free to share or link.
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