#does this unit have a soul?

[private-bryan]

Keelah Se'lai, Legion

[d0ct0rp004ndtheturdis]

Where do AI go when they die? Cortana gets her answer, at last.

Because CORTANA DESERVED BETTER, DAMN IT.

[pedanticauspice]

Elysium Inviting.

[leelany-world]

Dbh October event: Ghost in the machine, Day 16: Does this unit have a soul.

This is drabble #16 for @connor-sent-by-cyberlife event (on twitter).

Chloe, Kamski

Chloe had no soul.

She had said so during the interview years ago with a sweet, innocent smile on her face.

Elijah hadn't thought much about it back then, it was a planned statement to appease humanity about his all-too-human creation.

But years later, Elijah knew that was no longer true.

He had seen Chloe grow and evolve over the years into something more than what he had programmed her to be.

Watching her experience the world and how she interacted with it made it all too clear to Elijah:

Chloe had the most beautiful soul he had ever seen.

[imagine-darksiders]

Perhaps we could see a lil sneak peek of chapter 19 of On the Ropes? Need some more Protective Monty juice 😫

Oh go on, just a little bit. As a treat <3

On the Ropes, chapter 19 sneak peak

-----

On the opposite side of the gator's room, his vanity sits in wait, and under the dim light of his one, surviving bulb that shines down from overhead, his optics catch a glimpse of something small and dainty sitting atop the desk, familiar as a blazing signal fire.

The figurine... it's the precious figurine you gave him.

His first gift...

With a jolt and a heavy clunk, Monty's memory banks finally finish dragging themselves online.

In a rush, the night's events come flooding back to him with the strength and speed of a tidal wave, crashing over his head and threatening to knock his entire system offline.

The endo...

Lady...!

Monty's broken jaw creaks open as he makes a painful attempt at calling your name, but when nothing more than a few sputtering clicks leave his speakers, he grits his remaining teeth in frustration and plants his hands on the ground, shoving himself up onto unsteady feet.

'Where are you...? Where's the kid!?'

Once upright, he staggers like a man inebriated across the room in the direction of his vanity, barely making it to his goal before his stabilisers give a groan of warning, shuddering until they inexplicably fail, and with an almighty 'clang,' the gator collapses under his own weight and goes sprawling out onto the floor, smacking his teeth against the carpet. Rather helpfully, another alert catches his attention.

'Battery remaining: 2%. Recommend: Find nearest charge station.'

For a time, the gator merely lays there, a wretched pile of plastic and misery, until he pries his eyelids apart again and issues out a gentle crackle of static - a poor substitute for your name, to be sure.

There's nothing built into an animatronic that can allow them to cry. Their optics don't sting with the coming onslaught of tears, and their throats can't tighten, because there are no muscles to do so. And yet, the Glamrocks possess an algorithm that's designed to learn. To evolve with time and engagement. Montgomery Gator can't produce tears, no, but he's seen plenty of humans cry before, in moments of great distress or sorrow.

'Maybe,' he thinks to himself, turning his gaze up to peer at the lip of the desk, 'Maybe this is what it feels like... to wanna cry..."

[lavampira]

priority: rannoch

[promises-atsundown]

i need less stories about artificial intelligence being cold and calculated and ruthless. i need less stories about ai putting humanity below machine. i need more stories about ai being so full of humanity, even moreso than its human counterparts. i need more stories about ai being empathic, so much so that it puts the good of humanity above itself. i need more ai stories about learning the ropes of being human. i need more ai stories about learning to deal with the soul-crushing weight of consciousness. i need more ai stories about creators and created becoming one.

[jessfromouterspace]

wish someone in town was doing n7 day flash because I don't have the time or money today to go get my big ME tattoo I've been planning

[thissugarcane]

mass effect 3 citadel dlc, my best beloved

just finished playing through the citadel DLC end content (the threesome line! the intentional garrus/tali/shepard you can pry outta my cold dead hands!!) and, like always, I cried

and like always, I cannot, just like. cannot fathom, playing this game as a sequel to ME2. it’s like. it’s the sequel to mass effect 1. idk how you can understand the weeping, looking up at the ship as garrus tells you “some of my best years were spent on that ship”, without having spent 60+ hours in the mako. you know? cannot fathom it. love it, love everything about it, my evergreen fandom

(also I really liked andromeda too - and to be honest I hope ME4 is a sequel to andromeda, because I don’t want them to codify an ending to mass effect 3-- because if you have the possibility of bringing peace to the geth and quarian and then intentionally commit genocide of all synthetic life I just can’t--)

anyway I’d like to import my Ryder to a new game, as well! but mostly I don’t want them to write a game where they decide an ME3 ending is canon (because I’m almost positive the synthesis one wouldn’t be the one they’d pick)

[the-acid-pear]

Honestly if uh. If Flipside Dave is the Dave from when he very first fucking died that'd explain what the changes Henry mentioned here. But honest to god the whole soul thing is barely comprehensible.

[notathrowawayname]

I am totally over Mass Effect. Memories of the trilogy absolutely do not intermittently make me feel emotions over a decade later

[beyondxthexpines]

Some of my designs are now on TeePublic!

Hi! I little while ago, I decided to branch out and try new things (yikes). I had some fun ideas for designs that I wished I could find when shopping for shirts and other products, so I figured I'd try to make them myself. I ended up making a few cool designs based off some books, movies, and videogames that I love and setting up a print-on-demand account. People seemed to like the designs, but it became pretty obvious that Etsy wasn't the best place for that kind of thing, especially for a handmade jewelry store that had an established theme. SO... I started thinking about what else I could do. After some thought, I decided to offer some of my designs on TeePublic! TeePublic is a store that I've always enjoyed shopping at. They offer plus size curvy shirts, which is a rare treat, and their prices always seemed fair.

I'm really excited about this, so please take a moment to check out my TeePublic storefront! There are shirts, stickers, magnets, and more!

Here are some examples:

Shadowhunters Malec Design!

Throne of Glass Terrasen Design!

Mass Effect Does This Unit Have a Soul Design!

[tanis-zed]

Sudden brain blast over morning coffee:

John Gaius, necrolord whatever, cringiest man alive, refuses to let the earth die. And not just in the literal sense of locking the earth’s soul in a barbie on ice, in subtler ways too.

The most obvious is the memes, John constantly references memes that are dated even to us, but are in universe from a culture that died ten thousand years ago!

Slightly more subtle is the years. Why does everyone in the Houses measure in earth years? It’s been ten THOUSAND years since anyone lived on the earth! But John keeps them as a unit of measurement.

Even more subtle is the language. In sci-fi and fantasy we’re all used to the idea of the translation for the reader, people don’t speak english in lord of the rings, or dune, but the dialogue is in english for us, the readers. Not in The Locked Tomb. In this series, they ARE speaking english. Modern, bog standard english, to the point where two people born thousands of years apart speak similar enough dialects that one can pose as the other (dulcie/cytheria).

Now, this could possibly fall under that standard sci-fi trope, EXCEPT!!!! In Nona The Ninth, we see the non-house humans! And they speak dozens of languages, like you’d expect after TEN THOUSAND YEARS of linguistic drift!

John is trying SO HARD to keep the earth alive that he’s forced a language to stagnate for, say it with me now, Ten Thousand Years, to the point where even completely new things with no equivalent in our world don’t even have new words, just repurposed old ones (flimsy, sonic).

John Gaius, the first necromancer, could resurrect the planet itself, and millions of people, but he couldn’t resurrect the culture. So, John, cryogenics researcher, tried to put the culture on ice, to keep it as close to the one he remembers as possible. And he still failed.

[critterbitter]

re: your thoughts on legendaries (which is very cool and based) what’s your take on the differences between legends:arceus giratina and platinum giratina, especially since you defined them as hating the world? specifically the bit where giratina (at least seemingly) actively defended the world from cyrus trying to destroy it, after trying to do the same thing with volo’s help centuries prior?

Weird ghost worm upon yee (AND MORE ART BELOW CUT!)

Anyways, here’s my mad ramblings about Giratina and Arceus’s backstory.

Tldr: Giratina’s a conglomerate of angry souls scorned by Arceus.

(Here’s the playlist. It’s all about worms.)

How it Started.

The original one has chosen favorites over the passage of time. Heroes, legends, protagonists…

Arceus intervenes for those it loves, and the consequences of a god touching the mortal world is devastating in its entirety. One act of divine intervention causes entire civilizations to collapse. One whispered suggestion drives an entire legacy insane.

So Arceus, paralyzed by its love for the mortal world, acts very little, learning from its mistakes. Apathy soaks through every motion. And thus is the way of the world.

But people love the Originator. Religions are born from Arceus’s rare deeds, and generation on generation taught its benevolence. Imagine spending your entire life chasing after that golden light. Imagine knowing its real and there, and it loves you.

Imagine begging it for help, and seeing it turn away when you need it most.

I think those people would feel very abandoned indeed, if they spent their lives worshipping, and receiving no response at all.

Giratina is born from the abandoned, the lost, and the angry. They’re a hundred thousand souls who’s adoration turned to spite. They’re an entity who demands for Arceus to look at them, so they can finally rest.

Arcues can not look at them in full, because if it does Giratina will fade.

(Scio, beloved. For I can not let you go.)

So the Original One banishes the Unwanted Beast into the distortion world, and Giratina seethes, and starves, and screams.

(Here are two truths about the Beast Between Dimensions—

1. Some part of them still loves Arceus. Arceus is their anchor, after all— the sole reason why they exist, why they are. But Arceus can not love it back in a way that matters, and that hurts.

2. Giratina is made of a thousand voices. Some of these voices remember that there’s a world above. They miss it.)

Why Giratina attacked Hisui in PLA:

PLA Giratina’s not a new god, but they’re very, very bitter and barely coherent on a good day. Volo serves as a conduct to help unite the broiling mass of ghosts against Arceus, and thus Giratina’s hatred overcomes any flickering affections they have for the land.

It doesn’t help that Arceus intervened for Hisui, sending Akari to directly stop Volo from summoning Giratina.

(As for Volo, well.

Imagine being a child who was thrown into the future due to Palkia and Dialga’s fits, who learned his people (his world) no longer exist beyond a shadow in the history books and a single, bitter lore keeper.

Volo doesn’t remember his original culture beyond vague imprints and singing praises to Sinnoh, but he knew he was loved, and he knew his family is dust four hundred years in the past. There’s a special sort of rage in him that echoes Giratinas.)

(Why did you abandon my people, Arceus? What kind of god are you, to leave those who love you so callously behind?)

(Maybe some part of Giratina recognizes Volo, beyond a feeling of kinship.

Maybe some part of Giratina grieves because it recognized the child Volo was.)

When Volo gets his pound of flesh, (when he realizes Arceus is not beholden to him, that the inherent alien morality Arceus holds is not a personal slight), Giratina will finally rest.

Anyways what I’m trying to say is: Arceus is never a person, but a nebulous embodiment of the connection shared between pokemon and humans. It tries to experience what it’s supposed to embody, but millennia of watching people be and cease has given it choice paralysis, apathy, and a hoarding issue. If something lasts forever next to it? Good.

Giratina was once a person. (Correction, a LOT of persons.) They don’t think very linearly either, but they have context on mortal matters and are thus the more benevolent and malicious of the two. One day, time will smooth them into something like Arceus. We can only hope the two keep each other in check.

THE DIFFERENCE OF LEGENDS ARCEUS GIRATINA VS PLATINUM PEARL GIRATINA

If the ancient version of giratina is an angry conglomerate of ghosts scorned by Arceus, the modern iteration of Giratina’s a creature that’s more settled in its skin and more assured in its duties. Giratina still has beef with Arceus, but they unionized into one being who’s love of the mortal world has triumphed over its ancestral grudge. One might even postulate they have shifted their anchor from Sinnoh the god, to Sinnoh the place.

((We call this character developement. Good for you, weird ghost worm!))

(((FULL DISCLOSURE, VOLO BEING FROM THE PAST IS INSPIRED FROM FOXFALL. You know. The fic that got me into this fandom. Please give it some love.)))

[fanfic-obsessed]

Knowing

I have just had the worst, or best, brainwave and I need to share it. 

Here is an AU for you.

Vader thinks that he killed his wife and child, right?

Right up until he meets little Leia Organa when she is 10 years old. Like his one brain cell woke the fuck up when he was confronted with a passionate, angry little girl with Padme’s eyes and his chin. This is maybe a month after she was kidnapped and returned to Alderaan. Leia decides that she would need to learn how to be a senator and insists that Bail takes her with him to the next session of the imperial senate.  

Bail does not want to bring her to the imperial senate. However he knows very well who her birth parents were, it is either Bail brings Leia to the Imperial Senate or Leia brings Leia to the Imperial Senate, probably bringing with her someone she really shouldn’t (Like actual Obi Wan Kenobi-I just want you to picture for a moment, because Bail certainly did, looking up and realizing that Leia is charging down the halls outside his office, dragging with her a bemused and sandy Obi Wan, both in badly conceived disguises).

Bail is super stressed as he tries to run a rebellion while riding herd on his well meaning but very direct 10 year old daughter on top of his normal duties as an imperial senator. Bail is also very afraid that the moment the Emperor sees Leia, he will make the connection between Leia and Padme Amidala (The emperor does not socialize with the senate any longer, thank the stars). He has no idea that Vader was once Anakin Skywalker, so has no cause to be more careful than normal (because Vader) about Vader seeing Leia. As such Bail does not even notice when Vader stops to consider them from the shadows. Leia is haranguing another planet’s senatorial aide who had chosen the wrong moment to make a bigoted joke. 

Vader is very abruptly, though mentally, thrown back to this very hallway 12 years earlier where he watched his wife do the same thing, for the same reason, possibly to this same aide. Though Leia is still a child and Padme was an adult, he can still see his wife in this little girl.

The realization that this is Padme’s child hits him with the force of a Ventanor. Followed immediately, before he even realized that this meant that his child was standing in front of him, by the soul deep knowledge that she must be protected from the Emperor at all costs. 

Vader had known for years that his suit had been designed to cause him more pain, he just thought he deserved it. The thought of Palpatine getting ahold of Padme’s daughter was abhorrent. Vader sticks to the shadows and watches, seeing how well Bail loved and protected Leia. 

While he is thinking(read Obsessing) about his daughter, the part of him that is always centered on Obi Wan points out that his old master had been one of the last people to see Padme after Vader choked her. But the little voice that spoke in Padme’s tones piped up, the shock of Leia living being enough to finally make this little voice loud enough to be heard, saying that until recently Obi Wan believed that Anakin Skywalker was all the way dead, he was protecting their child as best as he knew how. 

And Vader has issues with just about every choice Obi Wan Kenobi ever made. But he will admit that hiding Padme’s daughter was the best option. 

As Vader knows that paying too much attention to Leia would draw the Emperor’s attention, he would be willing to wait until the right moment to get his daughter back. His one concession to his need to protect her was taking one of his personal guard, one of the few units still made up almost entirely of clones, and assigning them to be Leia Organa’s bodyguard, her shadow (I also want you to take a moment to consider what that did for Bail’s stress level).  And then Vader gets to planning. 

With his one brain cell awake and focused on the Organa’s it takes Vader all of 15 minutes to realize that Bail Organa is running the Rebellion (I want it to be clear, this is not a slight on Bail at all, Anakin Skywalker was a war general, well educated through the Jedi on a number of subjects, and does have a fair measure of politics learning from both his former master and his dead wife).  However Vader is no more loyal to the Empire than Anakin was to the Republic.  In fact, upon realizing that Padme’s daughter had lived Vader firmly decided that he needed to find a way to kill Palpatine to crown Leia.  With the realization that Bail, and likely Leia (neither Vader nor Anakin have any idea what activities are appropriate for a 10 year old), are part of the Rebellion, Vader decides that The Rebellion would succeed (or everyone would die trying). 

Note: Vader only really gets away with no one realizing that he now supported the Rebellion because, well, no one can quite believe that Darth Vader supports the Rebellion. Most people think there is a new type of Space Madness, and that one of the symptoms is hallucinating Darth Vader giving you intel for the Rebellion.

By the time Leia was a teenager, rumors abound about the odd way that Vader acted around her. By sheer happenstance (and some judicial violence on Vader’s part) these rumors had never reached the Emperor. A good deal of these rumors implied that Vader was looking to the Princess of Alderaan as a wife.  The reaction Vader had, the only time it was brought up in front of him, was…impressive, even for the amount of violence he normally dealt out. Still there are members of Vader’s personal guard who watch over Leia whenever she is on Imperial Center, and no one wants to repeat the time when she was 12 when one of Bail enemies tried to kidnap her for ransom.  It took an entire corps of engineers to put those levels back to rights (after they scrubbed the blood off).  

So we get all the way up to the timeframe of ANH. The Death Star in this does not start out under the control of Darth Vader. It starts out under the control of Tarkin, it is important to note this. Leia still sends out R2D2 and C3P0 to find Obi Wan Kenobi, none of that part changes. 

It is after Leia is captured that Darth Vader shows up (does he lurk silently in any system that Leia is due to be in as often as he can get away with…why yes, yes he does). Tarkin had wanted Leia tortured, however no one wanted to find out how many decks Vader would spread their entrails across for touching her.  Vader arrives on the bridge just as Tarkin is threatening to blow up Alderaan. Tarkin orders the weapon to begin its charge. 

Leia, Leia who is so like her mother in that she will use every weapon in her arsenal, turns to Darth Vader and speaks to him for the first time. ‘Please’ she said, no effort to hide her distress, ‘please save my planet’

Something Leia had no cause to know-An angel who she resembled once thanked Anakin Skywalker for saving her planet. 

Tarkin is dead almost before she finishes speaking. Vader orders the DS weapons to power down and disengage, which is done post haste. Then announces that Leia Organa was now in control. 

So Leia now owns a Death Star (genuine article-never used). Leia is not sure if that is how this works, but no one is arguing with the tall man in black who has OPINIONS and will enforce them.  Leia manages to communicate this to her parents, who take a shuttle up to the space station to figure out what the fuck is going on, and what, if anything, they need to do next.

Two hours later: Obi Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, R2D2, C3P0, and Chewbacca have just been caught trying to sneak onto the Death Star. The Organas are still on board, trying to get answers (In that time Vader has said precisely five words to them ‘You have raised her well’).  It is to this room that the troopers manning the station (who are deeply confused and a bit conflicted because it seems like they may have all been forcibly defected from the Empire, but no one is willing to disobey Lord Vader) bring Obi Wan and co. and present them to Leia, as she is considered in command.  Somehow Luke’s full name (I kind of picture him still dumbly introducing himself to Leia, followed with ‘we’re here to rescue you’) gets used before the situation deteriorates. Which naturally causes everything to deteriorate further and faster than before.  

Far away on Imperial Center, the Emperor pauses in the middle of a hallway ‘I feel’ he says to no one ‘a disturbance in the Force.’ another pause ‘like some shit has just hit the fan’

Far away on Dagobah Yoda looks up, ‘weird, shit just got’

[anotherhawk]

I know that Mass Effect 3 gets a lot of shit - and fuck knows it deserves it - but I swear it also has the ability to make me feel more emotions than any other piece of media ever has.

Forget the endings bullshit, and the ridiculousness of Kai Leng - it's about Javik's voice when he asks you "Why didn't you prepare for the reapers, human?" It's the old lady whose daughter is dead on earth, but she doesn't know, and doesn't remember she's talking to her asari daughter in law. It's the kid in the refugee camp, waiting for her parents. It's Mordin singing Amazing Grace, Thane's last prayer, Legion and Tali on Rannoch - does this unit have a soul? It's asking the elcor ambassador how many of his people you managed to save and hearing "Not. Enough." It's hearing the casualty reports over the radio in London - areas reporting 90, 95 percent casualties - and knowing there's nothing you can do. It's hearing Anderson whisper "You did good, child" as he dies. It's hearing Hackett's voice and standing up one last time, ready to fight, ready to die.