#exodustask

[lastexodusrp-blog]

Where would you have been, survivor? In another life, another dream, far away from Earth’s demise.

Our first poll was a success! We were very pleased to see how many of you took the time to interact and place a vote. The winning choice was: AU selfpara of what your character would be doing if the world had not ended. But don’t worry! If this was not your choice, do not fear, because we will be using each item voted for in time! But for now, enjoy our first task!

Doctor? Malefactor? Soldier? For our first task we ask that you write an AU selfpara pertaining to where your character would be if the world had not come to ruin. What do they struggle with? Are they satisfied with the life they live? Would they rather be living in a wasteland? This task is not mandatory, but will end on Friday, March 31st @ 11:59 PM and count toward activity. Please tag all posts revolving around this task as exodustask, so we and your fellow survivors can take a look at how your character would be fairing in an alternate life. We do hope to see you participate and look forward to reading your selfparas!

[tevgreenai-blog]

AU Selfpara: In Another Life, Another Dream

Kailey Johnson-Johar scrubbed her palm across the bridge of her nose, trying to chase away the throb of tension that had blossomed there halfway through the salad and remained through dessert and after-dinner drinks. She loved her mothers, she did, but god could they be tiring. She’d sent the kids to bed at last, kissed Dee on the cheek and said she would take care of the dishes, go relax, and let herself sink down on the plush sofa in the living room for a few minutes of respite before she got started on the clean-up. She needed the break.

She did love her mothers, but she wished the both of them loved their work a little less. Just once she’d like to have them visit without any mention of Mama-Pri’s quantum theories or Mama-Carol’s lattice matrixes; without any interrogation of the kids about their schoolwork and grades, about what kind of science their teachers were sharing with them, about GPAs and college plans. Kailey understood that they were both a little disappointed that she had gone into vanilla mathematics instead of chasing some more exciting, cutting-edge field like they had, but that was no reason to push their grandkids so hard. They weren’t even teenagers yet, and Mama-Carol was already talking about MIT’s standards for admittance! Mama-Pri was no better; she had taken her undergrad at Brown, so she considered herself “the open-minded one,” but she still made it clear that she thought any course of study that elevated theatrics or color theory over quantum physics was a waste of time.

“Mom,” Kailey had pointed out for the seventieth time at least, “it’s fifth grade, not junior year of high school. Of course everybody is more interested in the school play than in Newton’s Aerodynamics. Cut some slack, okay? Now, do you want tickets or not? Neither of the kids have a lead role, so if you want to skip it--”

To their credit, both proud grandmamas had been outraged at the very idea of passing-up a chance to see their precious darlings on stage, and Kailey had smiled with grim victory as she made the note to call Ms. Wu in the morning to buy four tickets in the fourth row, not two, but she couldn’t help but remember all the times her mothers had promised to come see her plays and concerts and field hockey matches only for one or the other to cancel at the last minute because the Ebrahim-Jackson Collider had just done something unprecedented, or because the Wagman-Savage Singularity Simulation was acting up, or any others of a hundred various important but still disappointing reasons. Maybe she would also call Uncle Choi and see if he and his new protégée, that sweet boy with the impossible hair whose name Kailey could never pronounce right, wanted to come to an elementary school play if she bribed them with wine and pie afterward. The odds that all four scientists would have to rush away were slim to none, and if there were six people there instead of four, the absence of one (or maybe even two) would be a lot less noticeable from the stage.

The kettle whistled and Kailey sighed with relief; a cup of mint and valerian tea would chase away this not-quite-a-headache and help her wind-down enough so she wouldn’t be up tossing and turning half the night. She didn’t want to keep Dee awake either; the art gallery was having a showing of some new talent tomorrow night so they would need all hands on deck there first thing in the morning to get all the decorations and artist-statements arranged properly. Kailey sipped the hot, drowsy drink and let herself smile. If the worst family drama she had to complain about was overly-interested grandparents, she had it good; and at least with Dee’s parents having moved back to India three years ago there was an ocean between them and any pestering they could do. No, life was pretty good, and Kailey didn’t really have anything to fret over...but of course as she’d told her mothers, the kids weren’t teenagers yet.

The Borjigin-Lavelle device booted-up with the usual blinking lights and whirl of numbers flickering across the various display screens faster than the human eye could track. That didn’t matter; all the data was being recorded, was always being recorded. Operating System 3.7 cycled through its modified start-up perimeters and then, as its programming dictated, said, “Query: input?”

Choi and Yasmin both groaned. “So much for colloquialisms,” spat the younger of the two, plopping her chin in her hands. Her mentor smacked her shoulder with his plastic stylus. “Enough of that!” Choi scolded. “No defeatism so early in the morning, if you please!”

Yasmin rolled her eyes but sat up straight again. “No offense Professor Borjigin,” she said sourly, “but if you don’t want defeatism in the morning, maybe you should wait until the afternoon to boot-up the creature.”

“You know I don’t like you calling it that,” Choi said, his voice mild as he leaned in close to the screens and squinted at the scrolling lines of code. In many ways what he was doing was mind-reading; at least, he was reading, and what he was reading were the contents of a mind. It was just that the mind in question was a set of programming instructions that he and Yasmin had spent the past four weeks coding. If they were running correctly, they should have told the Borjigin-Lavelle device to request input...but in a less formal, less computerized fashion. Anyone could program a computer to react to input and stimuli; what he was trying to do was program a computer to take on the brain patterns of a person. And not just a generic approximation of a person, like most A.I., but rather a specific person whose brain patterns had been downloaded and synthesized into its digital carapace. In many ways that was the easy part; it was the upload back to the -- as his new research assistant persisted in calling it -- creature that was giving him trouble and had been doing so for over thirty years now.

Yasmin had only been working on the project for the past three, after Dr. Borjigin had selected her to be his research assistant for her post-doc work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Like the many, many research assistants he had had before, she would leave when her contract was over and move on to do her own research, maybe at Los Alamos but more likely somewhere else so she could get new experiences at other labs and with other scientists. She had hoped to be the one who would get to put her name on the final stage of the project’s success, but so far it wasn’t working out that way. That was why she had taken to calling the device “the creature” -- a sort of gallows humor, in more ways than one. Of course, she knew that that made her Igor in this story, which was a little less funny, especially when her now-ex boyfriend had pointed that out, but when you had rolled the post-doc dice and lost, you had to take your laughs where you could.

“Query: ought I to dislike being called ‘the creature’ as well?”

They both froze and turned to stare at the computer speaker from which the voice had issued. After a long, tense moment Choi muttered, “Tell me you didn’t program that response in there because you thought it would be funny?”

Yasmin shook her head. “I almost wish I had thought to,” she confessed, “that would have been hilarious.”

“Ah.” Choi did not sound amused; instead he sounded awed. “So then what you’re telling me is that, since I did not program it to ask that, and you did not program it to ask that...?”

Yasmin raised and lowered her head in a slow, slow nod. “Right,” she said. “I think...it told itself to ask that.”

“Should I repeat the query?” the program asked. “Was my statement unclear? Or my volume miscalibrated? I can increase the output.” A shrill, electronic shriek began and the speakers popped. Both scientists jumped.

“No, no,” Choi said hurriedly, waving his hands frantically toward the speaker as though to shoo away the piercing sound; Yasmin clamped her hands tight over her ears. “That is not necessary! We heard you.” A wild idea occurred to him -- was the device making jokes? Admittedly with an astonishingly dry sense of humor, but then again, the brain patterns he had digitized and downloaded had belonged to someone known for possessing a blisteringly dry sense of humor...

“Then I await your answer.”

Choi licked his lips, flashed a glance at Yasmin who shrugged, and then turned to face the speaker again. He knew that the device’s ocular senses were located in the two cameras tacked to the top of the coding screens, but some innate human urge insisted that he direct his response to the source of the sound -- the speaker -- even though he knew he was being illogical by doing so. “The answer,” he said slowly, “is that you should mind only if you prefer to be called something else.”

“Ah.” The lines of text flashed by on the monitors even faster now. After a while they slowed to the earlier, eye-blurring pace and the device spoke again: “In that case,” it said tonelessly, “I should like to be called Tev. Yes. That is good. Tev.”

“All right...Tev,” Choi said, after a pause in which Yasmin scrambled to grab an input stylus and the tablet upon which their file of prepared questions had been loaded, “do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Not at all,” said the Bojigin-Lavelle device -- said Tev. “Please, go ahead.”

“Well. Good. Question one...”