#this evolutionary line in general is a strange progression. to me

[front-facing-pokemon]

[vergess]

Who's that pokémon ask game!

Hmmm... Has a strangely mid-evolution bug type mid-evolution appearance without its being anywhere close to a bug type. That is, its evolutionary line mimicks that of the classical bug type by its having a second-stage evolution that looks not out of place for a bug type

(Doing my best here with the random number generator; any other descriptors I can think of also apply to a significant number of other pokémon. I will send a followup of my own choosing soon!!)

So I went to look it up before just shouting LEAVANNY at my TV screen like a fool, but apparently Leavanny is not the mid evo between Petilil and Liligant.

I think I can be forgiven for the confusion, though, since in order they would look like this:

Which I think is a natural progression. Anyways it turns out liligant evolves directly from petilil and leavanny is totally unrelated.

With that all in mind, I'm going with Pupitar.

I was never clear on why that lil dinosaur has a cocoon stage.

Who's That Pokemon!

Send me the worst descriptions you can think of for a pokemon, and watch me struggle to guess them!

[List of all pokemon] [Random Numbers]

[sights-on-the-scifi]

Violence in MASS EFFECT.

Alright Tumblr i’m gonna try even harder to satisfy your content laws... God I hope this posts.

MASS EFFECT 2 Marked a change in the creative direction of the series in many ways not just limited to style and presentation. But also in how it tackled violence in its narrative and gameplay.

It developed a near uncritical affection for its violence. Removing any semblance of scepticism towards its application with exception to a few storied and mechanical instances all for which will be talked about as we progress.

VIOLENCE IN GAMES AND OTHER FORMS OF MEDIA AS A WHOLE.

Before we begin ill like to explain to you why violence in a video game is so fun to the player on a mechanical basis. You see video game violence is complete fantasy that much is obvious just from looking at it I hope, it has no real basis in reality. For example the simple fact being that you are interacting with simulated combat via mouse and keyboard on a flat 2D surface, not with your hands, feet, arms, firearms, grenades and depth perception... Some games like the first CALL OF DUTY title go out of their way to communicate this very important distinction to you with its death quotes system, which communicates a famous anti war saying every time you die on the digital battlefield, and you do die a lot in the game so the words always have time to sink in...

The chest high wall games of wack a mole and close range engagements you typically find yourself in are inherently ridiculous, but something that is true about these portrayals is the deep psychological stuff that occurs in the back of your mind through play.

Fight or flight. Those instinctual, primal/animal like areas of your mind that govern responses to threats and general dangers that were extremely useful during our species evolutionary development as hunter gatherers, if a game is designed well enough it can take advantage of those responses and insert them into game-play loops which encourage positive reinforcement when taking down digital combatants... These are the things games tap into and the things military companies etc also tap into as part of training or recruitment programs especially in modern digital age armies where focus groups have to find new ways of getting young people interested in soldiering without conscription and a national crisis to absorb individuals into service positions. Anyone has the capacity to be violent and become a killer you need only the right training and psychological conditioning and in the army that is one part of basic. Popular video games and films provide you with that psychological training in a very subdued, consumer friendly fashion and that is through desensitisation. “Image training”

It is turned into a power fantasy, for military recruiters it is also an effective strategy for recruitment purposes.

“War is delightful to those who have not experienced it” Erasmus.

Violence in real life is brutal, random and horrifying even in a domestic sense to any sane or normal person with the capacity for human empathy (Though sometimes there are forms of desensitisation that override this), not even most soldiers who undergo psychological conditioning to be able to kill are immune to this trauma. Violence is not fair, violence is not graceful and more often than not it is also used irresponsibly in any situation where in it is absolutely necessary to be used, even then those situations are themselves questionable. Especially in present day conflicts waged overseas out of sight and mind of the general public for wealth, oil and resources.

I have experienced forms of domestic violence throughout my childhood such as being beaten by my parents and having animals ordered to attack me, I understand how awful it can be to live in absolute fear and experience excruciating pain and misery as a result of this so making a post like this I hope makes you think about this a bit more from that personal lens too.

Games and movies on their own dont cause violence that much is certain from studies no matter how vivid their depictions get, but they do desensitise you to its realities in strange and weird ways both mechanically, visually and also sometimes in the narrative. (Until we can someday reach the point where in we can perfectly simulate reality and violence there is no way in hell military companies are going to rely on it exclusively to train soldiers). But they can rely on the positive mental associations they bring to warfare.

HOW MASS EFFECT 2 PORTRAYS VIOLENCE.

MASS EFFECT is by no means a game that is used as a vessel to drive up real world military recruitment, there is no indication of official army endorsement since it is just a trilogy of science fiction video games after all. But it does include violence that tries its very best to make you the player think its wicked cool in addition to finding it fun if the game-play loop is effective enough. Which in ME2 it is especially effective and the marketing wanted to push that.

So how does MASS EFFECT 2 and to an extent MASS EFFECT 3 make its violence so fun and “Cool”... Ill break this down into a variety of factors starting with your enemies.

DEHUMANISATION OF COMBATANTS AND KNOWING YOUR ENEMY.

MASS EFFECT 2 takes players to the Terminus systems and other parts of the galaxy that do not fall under official council law, so naturally this means there is an seemingly over abundance of private military and mercenary organisations. But ME2 is not interested in what these things represent completely, more so it is interested in using their presence as a convenient means to provide the player with thousands of disposable henchman to shoot, stab, pull and blow up in a variety of fun and exciting ways!... (Those gamified ways) All the while giving you the excuse to not feel bad while doing so no matter how cruel you are in the application of your response to incoming fire.

In fact throughout the whole ME2 experience you probably kill more mercenaries comprised of Turians, Humans, Asari, Krogans, Vorcha and salarians, more so then you do the Reapers or Collectors who are supposed to be the primary antagonists of the series... Which it seems is pretty antithetical to the overall themes of uniting the galaxy to fight a common threat which threatens all life, perhaps you have already done the job for em in this regard. What you are seeing here is a form of precision engineered dehumanisation of combatants for purposes of providing a player with something to shoot and kill without much thought and sympathy... and the military also employs this tactic in real life to dehumanise other humans for soldiers to shoot and actually kill.

Make your enemies faceless, inhuman or “irredeemable” cannon fodder and the feelings you get for uncritically slaughtering them all are palpable, especially with such entertaining gameplay systems that make the whole endeavour that much more exciting. The same was true for Cerberus in ME3 effectively turning the whole organisation into faceless storm-troopers with filtered voices and intimidating armour again another form of enemy dehumanisation in addition they are all conveniently indoctrinated so thats another justification hooray!. More bad guys to shoot right?

You dont have to feel bad if there is nothing to feel bad about right? You are Commander Shepard! Or a soldier in the military you are right in all actions and decisions you make by virtue of the fact you fight for a cause like stopping the Reapers.

VIOLENCE AS AN ONLY MEANS TO A DESIRED END.

Despite MASS EFFECT’S status as an RPG experience, the games rarely if ever provide you with substantial opportunities to employ diplomatic solutions to various problems where in it would seem feasible that it can be at least attempted.

Most of the time you will be exhausting dialogue options on a screen and shooting faceless thugs behind chest high cover throughout the entire experience.

In the narratives themselves this refusal to resolve conflicts peacefully are actively supported by characters or hand waved as being frivolous by the plot and sometimes even Shepard himself. Kill or be killed rains supreme in again, But in real life that mindset is far from being realistic or preferable.

THE BADASS CHARACTER CLICHE.

Something that will severely age the MASS EFFECT 2 experience is its over reliance on making every single character a BADASS stereotype. Even beloved Mordin Solus falls victim to this strange fixation with violent attributes and histories being considered wicked cool bro! In combat Mordin will utter lines that hint to the fact that he very much enjoys the killing he is participating in.

“Killed that one!”

“Thought I was harmless did you?”

“Oooh headshot!”

“Here... Enjoy” (Plays during times he sets people on fire with his tech attacks)

He also lists at one disturbing point in the story, all the ways in which he has killed people. Which includes using lethal drugs and... farming equipment, thats funny right? Actually MASS EFFECT 2 seems to include a lot of moments like that in where people list off hilarious methods they have used to kill people.

Every character in one way or another has the capacity to kill and does kill, they kill quite a lot of people actually and in some cases this is celebrated with gleeful enthusiasm by the plot.

Even Shepard can participate in a little bit of casual BADASSERY no matter if you are renegade or paragon. Be that shooting through hostages, threatening Batarian thugs, shooting Konrad in the foot or generally acting like a ruthless prick all for the fun of it like when you trick a injured mercenary into thinking he is going to die from minor wounds. This is a stark contrast to ME1 which at least tried its best to codify violent or aggressive acts as morally questionable. You are the first Human spectre in that game after all a shining beacon to all humanity in the new frontiers of space, what you do in that story is emblematic of the attitudes the whole of humanity express going forward.

Jack is probably the most blatant example of this new approach to violence the series took for reasons I have already described in previous posts.

To be clear, I’m not saying MASS EFFECT 2'S inclusion of glorified fantasy violence is entirely a bad thing. I just think that if you are gonna include violence you best be a little more intelligent when it comes to its usage in mechanics and narrative. Because it can be a powerful thematic tool if used right, in some cases there are moments in ME2 wherein it does get used extremely well but those moments are also still few and far between.

We can do so much better.

[ruler-of-scientists]

Revelation: Part Three Contd.

“So....it’s a prototype...”, Deire mused, observing Veryn intently. The truth behind Project SHELL...some kind of evolutionary program..she wasn’t really sure of what to make of it. Not yet. The information she’d been relayed was still rather hard to process, even if it....made a fair amount of sense. A body composed of nanites could continually reconstruct against the destructive energies released by their PSI when it got too strong, and being able to harness PSI that usually went above their ability to contain in the first place was quite a tempting prospect....

But at the same time, she couldn’t help but wonder if it was the direction a species like theirs was meant to go. Surely they were to evolve beyond their reliance on technology, eventually? She had always entertained the idea that their limits could be overcome with sheer mental dedication. After all, Veryn himself was at a level of PSI many other Arkans couldn’t reach without burning out themselves... Then again, Veryn always had been fairly special. And mechanical evolution wasn’t inherently limiting, so long as their brains- the primary component for their ‘organic’ existence- remained, then there was still room for evolution after the artificial evolution the nanites would grant had been accomplished. She looked more closely at her mentor, narrowing her eyes then. “And it’s close to completion? Has it been tested?” “It’s been through multiple revisions and redesigns,” Veryn replied steadily, nodding, his own arms at his sides while he stood upright and proper. “You saw the blueprints, there are many of them...of course the physical design changes all the time, that’s the nature of the nanites. It’s the composition of the nanites themselves and the materials they fabricate which was constantly being changed...various tests ended with them shorting out and being destroyed by the power they were attempting to contain.” “And now?” Deire asked, leaning forward slightly, an intense interest in her gaze, tail curved gently behind her as a further sign of intrigue; if they were really so close to potential evolving then she had to know if it worked...! “Now, recent tests have proven that it’s capable of creating bodies for itself that can withstand levels of PSI even we can barely comprehend,” Veryn affirmed quietly, causing Deire to lean back again, looking at Veryn with a mix of awe and incredulity. He’d really done it, then... “So far we’ve tried brains of Arkans from the Depths, with additional willpower-blocking programs enforced by the nanites,” Veryn continued, watching her come to grips to all this slowly. “I believe only a few more tests and the production of a few more nanites is necessary before the project can be considered a success. Upon project completion I will bring it forward to the rest of the council and see what they make of it.” “Can the nanites not self-replicate?” Deire asked now, raising an eyebrow as she seemed to gather herself, finding that detail about more needing to be produced a bit...strange, considering the whole self-replicating thing and the usual relative ease of nanite construction regardless. “A fair question, to which I can say yes...and no,” Veryn answered honestly. “How the nanites work is that they are a group of complex ‘super’ nanites which produce swarms of smaller, less complex ‘worker’ nanites to do the majority of the work for the entire construct. The super nanites coordinate the efforts of the workers and can self-repair, but take time to do so. As such, an excess of super nanites is recommended...they individually take some time to craft, hence the delay.” “I see...” Deire murmured, rubbing under her chin now, before sighing. “Well...I still believe you should have told me about this beforehand, I could have been of some help. Regardless, I appreciate you telling me this now. Where is it?” “On the facility Silver is currently working at,” Veryn replied curtly, before pausing...then looking away to the side. Deire could swear she saw something that looked like hesitance in his eyes. “He is unaware of its existence. I remotely accessed the systems working on it as I passed the station by to repair Cercil...progress is going smoothly.” “Why is Silver unaware?” Deire asked now, folding her arms and tilting her head to the side. “I thought you two trusted each other as colleagues.” “...it is...not easy to explain,” Veryn murmured, slowly returning his gaze to his protegé and clasping his hands together, tail beating the ground once or twice. “He has...enough to work on as head engineer. And he would try to help me regardless. The fact of the matter is that you would indeed try as well if I had told you sooner and as I said...the project was personal, and controversial. I am still not certain how the council will react to my usage of brains, let alone how Silver will react. Which is why I, and I alone, have to make sure that it is at its most complete and perfect before I present it so that it will make a tempting enough proposition that the sacrifices required to create it will be overlooked...”

“...” Deire sighed, closing her eyes before looking up and to the side, watching a distant ship pass over high above the plaza. This wasn’t the first time Veryn had pulled something like this...specifically, going to great and possibly controversial lengths to complete a project he believed would benefit the Collective in some way. Usually he succeeded, but this was possibly a step too far. Depths or not, he had still tested on Arkan brains and if there was one thing Arkans didn’t generally approve of, it was experimentation on other Arkans. Veryn simply watched her in her musings, not saying a word himself, expression stony as ever. Searching.

Eventually, Deire spoke up, quietly, “..you still should have told me. I obey your orders and trust you as my mentor. I am glad you told me about all this, but you only did it because I was on the way to finding the truth out myself after you had tried to hide it. Trust is an important thing Veryn. How do I know you are not keeping other secrets from me?” “You don’t,” Veryn admitted, his tone straight and frank. He then however took a step towards her, expression actually softening a little; “But...believe me when I say...I didn’t keep it from you because I don’t trust you. I do trust you. You are my right hand...I would sooner confide this to you than lose your loyalty if it were on the line. It’s simply that...in this case...it had to be me. I started it, and I have to finish it on my own. Besides.” A pause. “I...do not wish to implicate you in the potential controversy this could generate. if it is just me that is being viewed with suspicion, then you will be all the safer.” Deire blinked, and looked back at him. She...she hadn’t thought of it like that. Indeed, she would likely be in as much trouble as he if the council decided his work had been too unethical for their tastes and she would have suffered as well. Her gaze lingered on him, for quite a bit longer than it took for her to finally respond, “I...did not consider that.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Veryn shrugged, taking another step towards her so that he was now closer and practically in front of her, putting a hand to one of her shoulders as he looked at her levelly. “But I cannot fault you for it. You are right to question your trust, Deire...our surroundings are not always the most trustworthy. Nontheless, I hope that this means your loyalty has not been swayed. You are...an outstanding right hand and partner. I will try to be more tactful with you in the future where top secret projects are involved. You have been nothing but loyal and fair to me and I shouldn’t repay you with secrecy...” Deire blinked twice at this, looking at his hand, then at the man himself, her expression visibly a little shocked but ultimately...she offered a small nod, and stated, slowly, “I...thank you, Veryn. That is all I could ask.” Veryn nodded, then removed his hand from her shoulder and turned to look at the large statue depicting Homeworld itself, walking over to get a better look at its details. Deire followed, standing beside him and looking over the statue’s design herself, the two standing in relative silence for about a minute. Eventually, Deire spoke once more: “So, may I see the prototype?” “When it’s completed.” “Mm.” “....” “So how, when and where did you get that necklace?” “Another time.”

[jamesongrond]

ADAM

The machine is broken... and so is he.

A short story about robots, and what gets left behind. (2660 words)

“ADM-119, full diagnostics.”

“Of course,” the machine said with a smirk that should not have been, the left side of its face remaining resolutely neutral even as it tried to smile. When the right eyelid slid shut, the left only drooped, leaving a crescent of white and gleaming mahogany brown.

Partial left side paralysis, Sal thought, wheeling his chair around the machine in a rough, jerky circle. Looks like it continues down into the neck, from the way its head tilts. Could be a defective nerve-line. Sal couldn’t remember if the ADM-Models had old-fashioned central trunks or the newer radial systems, and Peterson Robotics had gone out of business so long ago even the International Technical Archive didn’t have copies of the schematics. All he had to go on was a quick-start guide he’d found on a hobbyist’s forum for old first-gen ‘droids, and that didn’t contain anything more useful than reset instructions and a handful of general error codes.

The wheel of his chair scraped against the battered wall and he cursed as another dusting of plaster scattered across the faux hardwood. He was in the middle of an awkward three-point turn when the ‘droid chimed, a merry little tune somewhere between a midi file and birdsong.

“ADM-119!” Sal called over his shoulder, muttering a curse as he fumbled at the controls and slammed the footrest of the chair into the wall. Good thing I don’t have fucking feet. “Gimme audio.”

“Of course.” The machine tried to smile again, and began to read out the codes, long alphanumeric sequences that might have been helpful as hell if Sal could interpret anything beyond the first five characters. E-5512 meant the ‘droid couldn’t sense heat for shit; M-1N54 meant unresponsive mechanics (no surprise there); FC-19C was some kind of module crash, probably the gastronomic subroutines, if his mother’s constant complaints about horseradish on her pasta were any indication.

Sal had told her to get rid of the busted old junker half a hundred times. He’d even bought her a replacement, a shiny new CASSIDY model she’d never even taken out of the packaging, just stowed under the porch until a stray dog came running out with a mouth full of sparking meta-fiber.

“Adam’s family,” she’d wailed at him. “You don’t throw away family!”

He’d bit his tongue at that one, so hard he tasted blood.

“Shall I attempt repairs?” the machine asked when it finished reading out the codes. Sal had his chair turned around by then, but he was still to the thing’s left, and when it turned to look at him its head twisted queerly to the side, like some kind of shiny plastic owl.

“Who fuckin’ knows, maybe eighth time’s the charm,” Sal muttered, jerking his chair back in front of it. What I need is a system restore drive, he thought. Too bad they stopped making them during the fucking Almasi administration. “You know what, fine. Go ahead. Can’t fuckin’ hurt, can it?”

The machine gave him another aborted attempt at a smile and knelt, joints creaking. One and a half of its eyes slid shut. It should have remained upright, but instead it slumped to the side like something dead, arms and legs at strange angles.

Sal stared through it for a while, then forced himself to look down at his wrist. The display on his medi-bracelet read 3:02 PM. I need a fucking drink, he thought, jabbing at the controls of his chair with a hand beginning to shake.

Rickard the Wonder Aide wouldn’t let him buy anything harder than individual cans of weak, watery Jefferson Red, and even that he had to ration, lest the mighty eye of the disapproving motherland fall upon him. He only had one left, shoved into the back of the fridge behind the latest load of lab-grown simulacra that Rickard called food. Reaching in as far as he could, his fingertips just barely brushed the cool bio-plastic rim.

“God damn it,” he muttered, reaching for the controls of his chair — but no, if he moved forward any farther, the footrest might get caught in the fucking freezer handle again. Just a couple more inches, he thought, undoing the buckle around his waist.

Some time later, the machine chimed, calling out in its lyrical, buzzy voice. Sal hissed a curse and fumbled desperately at the blood-slick brake.

“Hello,” the machine said pleasantly as it appeared in the archway, a shadow with a trio of blinking stars in the center of its chest. “You appear to be in distress. May I be of assistance?”

“Fuck off,” Sal spat through gritted teeth, pawing at the handle. “I don’t need your fucking help.”

“Of course,” the machine replied, with what might have been a head-bow or might have been a curious tilt or might have been a misfiring component making its head rock on its shoulders like the stupid bobble-heads Jason used to collect. Sal forced himself to take a breath, grabbed hold of the brake as tight as he could, and pushed.

The slick plastic slid out from beneath his hand. The chair rolled backwards. He fell forward hard, chin cracking against the linoleum.

“Fuck,” he shouted through his teeth. The heel of his hand pounded against the wheel of the chair, each blow pushing it further backward. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“May I be of assistance?” the android asked.

“No!” Sal made a fist, fingertips digging into the gash the cheap wire fridge shelf had left in his palm as he tried to catch himself. “I got myself into this, I can get myself the fuck out. Just fucking… Don’t touch me.”

“Of course,” the machine said with another wobble.

The effort of dragging himself forward by the only limb he still had left left him sucking in air with ragged, heaving breaths. His vision blurred. The LEDs in the machine’s chest blinked like eyes, like monitors, measuring his progress with the same cold clinical efficiency as the VA butchers. The handle within reach, he shifted as much of his weight as he could stand onto the aching stump of his right arm and tried to push it down with the left.

It started to roll, then stopped.

The shadow of the machine stood over him, hand resting lightly on the back of his chair. A curse came to his lips. He bit it back, and grabbed for the brake. This time, the lever went down.

He half expected the machine to come over, scoop him up, plop him back into his seat as if he were a child, the way the VA staff did every time he fell. It didn’t. It watched him, and when he finally managed to pull his torso up onto the padded, sweat-stained faux-leather, it gave him one of its strange lopsided smirks.

“Fuck off,” Sal mumbled. “Stupid… Stupid broken piece of shit. Shoulda thrown m… thrown you out years ago.”

The machine smiled, but did not reply.

 — — —

  “Well,” Sal sighed, “that module is irretrievably fucked.”

He had asked for pancakes. The things before him matched the definition on the whole, but in their specifics, they rather missed the mark. Black bits of liquorice studded the golden-brown pancake fluff, barbecue sauce glistened in artful designs across the top, and the whole plate smelled strongly of garlic.

“If you would like me to attempt a re-install—”

“Don’t bother,” Sal said, wincing at the pain in his bandaged palm as he pulled back from the table. “Servers have been down for decades.”

I need that fucking system restore drive, he thought as he wheeled back into the living room. He’d been looking for days, had three different bots and two RS feeds pinging him at any mention, but so far all he had were component sales: an arm here, a knee-joint there, the occasional hip. All the processors and memory banks had been bricked, discarded, or simply stopped working years ago.

He pulled in behind his desk. The machine had moved it farther from the wall, giving him enough room to maneuver without cutting new gouges in the sheet rock. He hadn’t asked it to — hadn’t asked it to do much of anything, aside from diagnostics and tests — but the ADM models had been designed as home care specialists, given a little more leeway in their decision-making than other first-gen ‘droids in order to compensate for a generation of crotchety Pre-Revolution holdouts too proud to ask a glorified appliance for help. Like me, Sal thought with a huff, though he had been born twenty years too late for that particular moniker.

He’d wanted to get into the bleeding edge of AI research — sentience sims, genuine emotion, evolutionary robotics — but by the time he graduated, the Sanderson/Wodehouse bill had passed and that ship had sailed into the less-regulated third-world horizon. The army had still been working on artificial analytics and he’d figured it was the next best thing.

His medi-alert bracelet buzzed and flashed a little red pill. Sal frowned, blinking away the afterimages in his head, and thumbed at the controls. His meds were—

On the desk.

The four bottles were half a foot away, the proper dosages measured out and placed neatly on the caps. Beside them were a glass of water and a cup of pudding with a spoon on top.

“Huh,” Sal said. Against the far wall, ADM stood, one side of its mouth drawn up in that stupid, somehow knowing smirk. His eyes on the machine, Sal scooped up the pills, tossed them in his mouth, and swallowed.

 — — —

  For the last three years, Sal’s prosthetic arm had sat beneath his bed, slowly gathering dust. The VA would only pay for the cheapest model, and grit and dust and bits of bullshit were always getting into the mechanics, gumming it up and turning the robotic limb into little more than an extremely complicated hook. It needed to be cleaned every day to be usable, half the mechanism disassembled in order to replace the lubricant, and he couldn’t do it one-handed. Rickard the Wonder Aide had done it for a while, but he didn’t come in person anymore. No-one did.

ADM cradled the arm in his lap like an infant. The stiff fingers of his left hand slowed him down, but only to the point where Sal could follow the motions, one flowing into the next like ink on waves.

Sal tapped his fingers against the control panel of his chair, thinking. His mother had called — she wanted her Adam back, was getting impatient. Rickard wanted to know why his food budget had suddenly tripled. Two of his freelance programming gigs were overdue, a third on the cusp.

He’d found a system restore drive.

The listing had been up for six and a half years. He’d assumed it was inactive, but the poster had responded to his query letter eight hours ago. The drive had been sitting in their garage for almost two decades, but they’d plugged it in to an old Peterson desktop they had lying around and swore it worked. They could have it delivered by Monday.

He’d left the tab open. The thin line of the cursor blinked in the periphery of his vision, waiting for him to respond.

He had no idea what he wanted to say.

With a faint pop, ADM disengaged the elbow joint and began to wipe away the crust of blackened lubricant with a cloth. The paralysis on the left side of his mouth made the right look quirked up, as if he were pleased with his work.

Stupid pile of junk, Sal forced himself to think. For the first time in years, the words felt wrong.

His parents had insisted on meeting him at the airport, the day he came home. Jason had been there too. Sal would never have let him come if he’d known, but they never told him. They wanted it to be a surprise.

There had been calls. Emails. Physical paper correspondence, for fuck’s sake. They knew. They’d been warned. Somehow, it never got through to any of them that ‘lost’ meant lost.

Jason had been holding a sign with Sal’s name on it in rainbow letters, surrounded with hearts and dinosaur stickers. It had blocked his view as Sal came over the crest of the escalator, and when Sal’s mother screamed, he’d looked at her first, giving Sal enough time to find their faces in the crowd. Giving him enough time to witness Jason’s expression shift from confusion to horror to disgust.

By the time Sal reached ground level, Jason was gone, the sign trampled under half a hundred feet. He was supposed to drive them all home, so they waited; one hour, two, a third. Sal’s mother couldn’t look at him. His father couldn’t do anything but. They went out to look for Jason’s car, but that was gone too, which meant a taxi, which meant another hour and a half stranded in the middle of the surging, staring crowd while they waited for one large enough for three people and a chair. Even then, it took another fifteen agonizing minutes for his father to beat the chair into submission. It had never rolled right after that.

Rickard talked a lot about vicarious traumatization, emotional exhaustion, survivor’s guilt. Sal had shouted at him, cursed and raged, and when he was done Rickard got up and left without a word. He’d never come back, any more than Jason had.

Once the joint was clean, ADM applied the new lubricant in one graceful swirl, then fit the pieces back together. The elbow moved smoothly now, with none of the crackling stickiness it had had before. The android’s head wobbled on its shoulders in a motion that might have been a nod.

Someone programed that, Sal thought as he watched the android reassemble the arm. Someone designed it to smile. The thought felt strange, somehow. No-one had ever designed it to smirk, but when it held up the completed arm it did, with a wryness that had never been planned, never been intended, that never would have been at all if not for a broken nerve.

Swallowing, Sal held out the stump of his arm. The android strapped the prosthetic in place. The socket didn’t fit quite right anymore, but it was close enough for the electrodes to meet. He’d forgotten which muscle moved what, and for a moment the arm twitched and spasmed and bile rose in his throat, tasting of smells he couldn’t forget and sensations he didn’t want to remember. Then ADM touched his shoulder, and the knots in his stomach went away.

A few minutes later, he was making a fist, curling in his fingers one by one, making rude gestures. He huffed, and then for the first time in years he laughed, a strange hiccup that became a sob halfway up his throat.

“You appear to be in distress,” ADM said softly. “May I assist you?”

Sal nodded.

The android undid the straps. Scooped Sal up in his arms, carried him through the strips of old sheet that served as his bedroom door. Lay him down in the nest of rumpled blankets that was his bed. The ‘droid wrapped the softest around him, so tightly he could barely move, then padded off to fetch a glass, a bottle of water, and, for some reason, an entire miniature watermelon.

This time, when Sal laughed, it came out all the way.

 — — —

  Sent 8:46 16/10/2067 by slgonzales@swift.nz

 yo

thanks for the reply. unfortunately im no longer interested in the drive. the problem sort of fixed itself.

gl selling it tho

sal

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 Sent 9:16 17/10/2067 by glensharp@swift.nz

 No Problem Man

BTW I Have Other Old Peterson Tech If Your Interested. Even Got An ADAM Model. Mostly Intact — Just Needs A New Power Source. Could Salvage From Yours For Complete Unit?

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 Sent 8:46 16/10/2067 by slgonzales@swift.nz

 thanks man, but na

i'm good