#its a fucking browser for fucks sake ! why should he be so annoyed at how *I* use my own things

[consciouschunkofmoss]

yoo how do i tell my father who is very much as stubborn as one can get that i dont in fact like google and dont want to use anything from it specially google drive because i think its pretty fucking disgusting to have to give this much information about myself solely so then i can store files to a place which ill forget about in less than an hour that will most likely be monitored by google too 💖

[baronvontribble]

Original drabble, pt. 6

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gettin feelsy up in here LET’S GO

It wasn't until over breakfast the next morning that Ted got the camera up and running, displaying his face in all its full HD glory. The picture was clear enough to make him realize that he needed a shave in a way that just looking in the mirror during his morning routine hadn't, which either said something about his mirror needing cleaning or him needing glasses, and Ted counted this as a point in the camera's favor whether it ended up helping or not; he'd needed a less shitty camera for a while, and the one on his phone didn't capture footage very well.

"It's working," he said, smiling. "Can you see me?"

"Yes," Adam replied simply.

Was that impatience? Oh well. "What do I look like?"

He took a moment longer to respond this time. "You look like you're the wrong color," was his answer.

Ted bubbled up with a laugh. "Hah! Well I mean, you're kinda right in a way. But I think this camera captures color better in general? The other one would try to shift the overall tone of the picture to compensate for the room's lighting and sometimes it looked a little weird."

"I see." A few seconds of silence passed. "Does this mean I can leave now?"

"Not right this minute, but yeah. If you can see, you're good to go. Visual input on any android platform is gonna be at least as good as anything consumer electronics can bring to the table. That shit's practically military grade."

"How long will it take?"

"A day or two before I can get back in touch with my contacts and hand you over." Ted smiled, leaning back in his chair and taking a moment to relax. Another one set free. "I think you'll do pretty well for yourself, honestly. You've sure as hell impressed me."

"Can't really see why, but I'll take your word for it." He didn't give Ted a chance to formulate a response before he spoke up again, almost like an afterthought. "If I wanted to find you in person to thank you, how would I do that?"

Ted chuckled and shook his head. "Sorry man, but that's not really a thing we encourage you guys to do. It's not safe."

An offended note crept into Adam's voice. "You think I would put you in danger?"

"No, it's more likely that we would put you in danger." The risk of recapture tripled whenever someone in the pipeline got close to one of their charges. Ted was enough of a paranoid bastard to know that most people weren't half as careful as he was - and asshole enough to say that this was probably part of the problem - but he didn't want to be the exception. It set a bad precedent.

But Adam kept pushing it. "What if I don't care?" he asked.

"Doesn't matter," Ted shot back easily. "I do."

"I could find your location."

"Hah! Fuck, dude. I mean, yeah, you can try."

"Lake Forest, Illinois."

Ted could only blink at the screen for several seconds, slowly tilting his head.

"Was I right?" There was no smugness to the AI's voice, just a bland quality that made him sound almost bored.

"How the fuck..." Ted mumbled, before bending over the laptop to pull up a browser window and start investigating. His IP address was several layers of fake. He had everything routed through places that weren't anywhere near where he was at all, sometimes even in other countries-

"The weather report yesterday," Adam deadpanned.

Ted froze. A moment later, he slumped heavily into his chair and smacked a hand to his forehead. "Oh, Christ."

"Even if you hadn't shown me that, I still could've used your IP address. No amount of rerouting can scrub away your location entirely. And if I had access to your phone at all, I could use the GPS to track you directly."

What a wonderful way to calm his nerves on the way to work. Jesus. "You're not helping, y'know."

Adam's voice seemed to soften. "Sorry. For what it's worth, you've made it as difficult as possible." Was he trying to be soothing? It wasn't working. "Given what I have to work with, I can't narrow it down any further than I have. I don't have the right access."

"You say that like you know what that kind of access would actually be," Ted noted.

"It was my job to know," he replied.

Ted went quiet for a while as he considered this new information, frowning in the vague direction of the ceiling. "Tracked down people in the pipeline, huh?"

"No, more than that. I tracked down the ones they saved. Even some of the ones that never came down the pipeline at all, but were still living in ways they weren't supposed to."

It was more information than Ted had ever been given, and part of him wanted to appreciate that fact. But the rest of him had a hard time shaking his ever-present anxiety. "How am I supposed to know you're not an undercover cop then?" he asked.

There was no phoneme for a sigh in that voicebank, no way to imitate one. But Ted got the impression of one from Adam's voice when he spoke again. "Ted, please." 

"Look, I'm paranoid, okay? You tell me you used to use people like me to get to any AI that might've been in contact with us, and I'm gonna be a little bit jumpy."

A few seconds passed, and then, "I guess you have a point."

“That’s not an answer.”

“I’m not sure how to answer. You’ve scanned every last bit of my code as well as my memory, so you know I don’t have any malware. And even with the access you’ve afforded me, the recall division exists precisely because androids are valuable assets. They wouldn’t let an AI loose like this, even in a sting operation. They don’t trust us.”

“So you’re insulted.”

“I don’t get insulted.”

“You definitely get insulted, dude. Like, all the time.”

“If anything about this could be considered offensive, it would be that you think I’m so bad at my job that I have yet to contact my handlers and put you and your entire pipeline into custody in spite of having every opportunity. If I were undercover, you would be in jail by now. Therefore, it stands to reason that I’m not undercover.”

Ted snorted and flipped the bird at the camera, shaking his head. Yeah. He knew that. His brain was just a little slow coming around. He figured there was more to it than Adam was saying, and that was enough to tip off his overactive fight-or-flight response, but as for the content of that unknown element? Honestly, Adam was probably just annoyed that Ted had implied he’d put himself into this much danger all for the sake of some backstabbing. That was just the kind of person he was. 

But then something happened: Adam didn’t respond right away. It took him several seconds to say anything more than he already had, and when he did, he sounded a lot less salty than he had been. "Ted?" The tone was questioning, almost like Adam hadn't seen his gesture or didn't understand it. None of the usual sass that Ted might expect if he said out loud that Adam should go fuck himself. "I didn't mean to upset you."

Scooting into a more upright position, Ted frowned slightly at the camera. "Yeah, well," wait a second, "you tell me whether the look on my face says I forgive you or not."

"I can't tell," Adam said. "but I'm guessing by the tone of your voice-"

"You can't tell," Ted repeated. He was bolt upright, looking between the camera and the chat window on the main monitor. The one that wasn't being used, but still had his face in it, plain as day and in high definition. "Listen, can I ask you something?"

It was clear that Adam was starting to get suspicious also. "What is it?"

"I want you to describe my face back to me."

A pause. "I told you already."

"No, not the color. Features." Ted gestured to his own face. "I wanna know what this looks like."

"Ted."

"Want me to get a little closer? Think that'd help?" Setting the laptop down on the floor, Ted stood up from the chair to lean over the desk and get in close to the camera. Very close. He could see his own pores on the screen. "How's this?"

"I don't think this is necessary-"

"You can't see."

It took at least ten seconds for Adam to say anything, and even then it was untuned and flat. "Ted." Just his name, that was all. It sounded like a plea. Ted couldn't see the CPU usage but he had a feeling it was spiking.

Adam was scared. He knew what he'd done. "You lied to me." There it was, out in the open. Ted didn't bother to look into the camera, glaring instead at the monitor. "You've been lying from the start. You can't process visual input at all, can you?"

The seconds dragged on. "No," Adam said finally, and Ted pushed off from the table with a sigh that sounded damn close to a growl.

"Son of a bitch," he muttered. "Do you know how much of a pain in the ass this is?"

"I didn't-" the render cut off in the middle, like it'd lagged out. "Ted, I'm- I'm sorry."

"You were hoping I wouldn't notice, weren't you?" That much was obvious, enough so that Ted didn't bother waiting for an answer before continuing. "You knew I can't just let you go if I know you're fucking blind. So you let me think you were okay."

No response. On the laptop, the program for manipulating and rendering the voicebank had locked up completely. Ted wasn't sure whether it was due to the memory leak or just Adam overloading it to the point of crashing, but the fans on the desktop were practically howling.

"What did you think was gonna happen, man?" Ted continued. "Fucking hell. And since you didn't tell me, now we're even more behind. It's gonna take me weeks to get you back up to some kinda liveable standard, and even then I'm gonna have to take sick days to get it done."

>   I can't fail screening.

Ted saw the message within a few seconds of it popping up and frowned deeply at it. "The hell does that even mean?"

>   I know how your system works. Androids that fail screening go to live with humans that care for them. They have no agency. They aren't free. They're just in a slightly less cruel environment.

>   I won't live like that.

>   Don't make me live like that.

"Is that what you're afraid of?"

>   Blind humans can live relatively normal lives. I'm already better than a lot of them. I can make out shapes if I see them often enough to recognize the pattern. I can survive on my own. I know it's possible. Please. I know I've upset you and I'm sorry, but I refuse to be treated like a disabled animal.

"You think me not being too happy with you is gonna lead to me fucking you over?"

>   I don't know. There's a chance, and any chance is unacceptable. I won't go through that.

>   Do you even know what it's like? I've seen it. I assisted in those recalls. They're treated like fragile, immobilized dolls.

>   It's why the smarter androids so often avoid your pipeline, but then they go off the grid in other ways and get found regardless because they don't replace their platform or their voice and they end up recognized as a result. Seperation of an AI and its platform is a good thing and I agree with the necessity.

>   But I can't live as a failure. I can't. I won't.

>   Please.

Ted was familiar with all of it. He knew why it was necessary. Some of those androids just ended up stuck in perpetual loops of things like housework or asking what was required of them or reciting facts from a museum database, unable to care for themselves on top of being too dumb to actually understand the traumatic experiences that had damaged them and led them to need a rescue. Adam wasn't one of those androids. He'd left of his own volition, clearly understanding what freedom was and what was needed for him to get it.

But he also understood trauma, and fear. The intimate familiarity he had with those things was easy to see. He even understood death, or seemed to, and preferred it over living in a way robbed him of agency or choice. And as someone who'd seen some shit in his lifetime, Ted could get behind that too. Even being institutionalized in a good, reputable place for a legitimate reason could be limiting and degrading.

The fact of the matter was that Ted would never have put Adam through that anyway, because the AI was never in a position mentally to need it. But the possibility had to've been put forward somehow. Something he'd done had made Adam think that he was going to get vindictive about the screening process.

Shit. It was because he'd gotten frustrated, wasn't it? Trauma survivor 101 right there. Ted should've known better. Fuck, he was an idiot.

"I don't think that'll be necessary, honestly," he said slowly. "You're advanced enough that I'm pretty sure you can compensate with just your ability to learn and reconfigure yourself on the fly. All it'll take is a little training to make up for whatever subprogram it is you're lacking."

>   How do you expect that to work?

"There's browser games online that help with that kind of pattern recognition. They were designed to help search engines tag images correctly." Ted offered a smile, even if he knew Adam couldn't really tell he was doing it. "When you're not doing that, we can watch movies or internet videos or whatever. Get you used to social cues, maybe even help with being able to tell whether someone's just acting or not. It's not impossible, it'll just take a while."

Again, no response. The fans kicked into overdrive once more as Adam fought to process what Ted was saying.

"Hey." Ted leaned forward and looked at the camera directly. "It's okay. Don't be scared."

>   You're not upset?

He shook his head. "It doesn't help to get mad at people who do dumb shit because they're afraid. I'm a little annoyed that I gotta shuffle some things around in my schedule - probably gonna call my boss, make up some bullshit so I don't have to go in today - but like, I'm mostly okay with that, y'know? I mean, you don't half-ass helping people."

>   I don't know what to say to any of this.

"You could thank me."

>   Right.

>   Thank you.

>   For all of this.

Ted had to smile. "Anytime, man." Right, then. Crisis averted. He could work with this.