tevgreenai-blog

[tevgreenai-blog]

dorianhawthorne:

Kirs question only gave him momentary pause. For a second, he assumed ki was questioning the “we” part of it and he had a smart remark ready for kir. But ki agreed and it only made his brow knit slightly. Was ki really questioning that the kid needed a doctor? He just got the holy hell beat out of him and could barely even keep his head up. 

But ki offered to carry the boy and he nodded, “Yeah, otherwise I can. Up to you.” The poor kid couldn’t even answer kirs inquiry, merely shaking his head at the sound of kirs voice. Dorian wished he had some sort of medical know-how to help the kid then and there, but that wasn’t his area of expertise. So he would just have to take them to someone who did know. And fortunately, they weren’t too far away. 

“Careful,” he warned, noticing kir wobble in kirs stance while carrying the kid. He stood next to them, making sure kir could actually handle carrying the boy before he would lead the way. He had been to the medic tents a couple times before. From minor injuries from being in the wastes, or even getting into fights on the streets, Dorian was familiar with going to the tents to have them look him over. If he had supplies to trade. Maybe they would cut him some slack this time around. “Follow me,” he replied, starting to take a few steps forward. 

He glanced back at the two, brow raised upon kir next inquiry. His walking pace slowed almost to a stop again at kirs question. Was ki serious? Had ki not dealt with having to go to a medic kirself? “You’re kidding me right now, right?”

He could hear Gwen’s exasperated sigh now. Maybe mindcook got to ki too badly, or ki may need to see a medic for head trauma. He paused, taking a moment to recollect his thoughts. Ki said ki didn’t understand and just wanted to know why they were taking the boy to a medic. How in the flying hell that wasn’t obvious was beyond him. Be patient. “People’s bodies can only take so much. Whether it’s a fight, or… doing any sort of straining activity,” he explained, “In this case, that asshole– or that guy– was beating this kid up. The kid could only take so many hits, he can’t even stand up on his own. So he needs to see the doctors so they can help him get better. Does that make sense?”

Tev nodded obligingly although ki wasn’t sure exactly what ki was supposed to be careful of. Ki endeavored to follow the instruction anyway, keeping kirs eyes peeled both for obstructions in the roadway that might cause kir to trip and drop the child as well as for anyone who looked unduly interested in their activities in the sort of way that meant they were probably about to take advantage of the preoccupation that the child was causing and attempt to rob or murder them. Tev tried to shrug the child a little farther up kirs shoulder so that his weight would be distributed more evenly but the child squealed and kicked weakly against kirs ribs in protest so ki left him where he was and leaned sideways a little kirself to adjust kirs center of balance instead.

When the man questioned kirs veracity, ki shook kirs head. “No,” Tev replied, “I’m not kidding. I’m curious.” He looked like he was going to answer kir though, so ki waited patiently, although ki would rather have been walking while they spoke so as to get the child wherever they must take him so ki could put him down. His weight was not yet an inconvenience, but it was unpleasant. An explanation was preferable though, so ki said nothing to interrupt the man’s thought-process and ignored the squirming boy on kirs shoulder.

Tev listened politely, but the explanation seemed only half-formed by the time the man finished. “Yes,” ki said, “I know. What you say are true things. What I fail to understand is the correlation between those facts and our current course of action. Why must we take this child to a medic? I’ve heard of medics,” ki added quickly, before the man went on another tangent of facts that would distract him from giving kir a proper explanation. “And doctors, too, although I’m not sure what the precise difference is between them -- if there is one -- but either way, I know the basics of what they are: They’re people with advanced knowledge of one or several sciences dealing with the human body and how to accelerate or optimize self-repair. I don’t think I’ve met any myself, at least none that introduced themselves properly, but I know their purpose.” Ki paused, watching to make sure the man understood that ki understood what ki was saying, then continued to the heart of the matter: “What I don’t understand is how you came to the conclusion that we must take this boy to find some. Why must we do this?

“Again,” ki added quickly, “I’m not objecting. I understand that it’s something we must do; I heard you. I just want to understand why. I need to know your reasoning so I can use it as precedent in future situations and not neglect a necessary action due to ignorance, please.” Another thought struck kir, a tangent bouncing off the idea of doctors and medics who might have failed to introduce themselves to kir. “I’m called Tev, by the way,” ki said. “As far as introductions go, if you would like one.” Ki would have shrugged, but the boy was already whimpering in kirs ear and the sound was not a pleasing one. Ki didn’t want to encourage him to increase the volume or frequency of his high-pitched, wet little noises. Tev shifted kirs feet, hoping the man would start walking again soon. It was illogical, but somehow the boy seemed heavier when ki was standing still than he did when ki was moving.

[tevgreenai-blog]

bludthirsty:

Leona’s fingers curled around her pistol at the stranger’s admission of them not being alone and she quickly scanned the horizon for signs of an ambush. She relaxed a bit when the girl explained what she meant, but it wasn’t enough. As she continued to speak, however, Leona began to catch on to her strange, literal way of thinking. She wasn’t aware of mindcook having negative symptoms, but that was what made sense. Flat emotional affect, poverty of speech…. It fit, and Leona dreaded the day she progressed to that stage.

“Yeah, I’ve been in a boat, but it was a figure of speech.” She shook her head to clear her thoughts, then unlocked the passenger side door with a quiet click. “Get in quick; I’m wasting the A/C here.” Leona rolled up her window and waited for her guest to climb in, arranging her complex system of fans so most of the cool air would hit her guest, she looked like she needed it.

Speaking of looking, the other seemed much older up close. Yes, her skin was fairer and her eyes clearer than most of those still left, and she certainly had a certain… naivete about her, but she was not a child.

“So, Leona said casually, locking the doors once more and kicking dear Rooney into gear before regarding her guest more closely. “What rock have you been living under?” Damn, more idioms. “I mean, how did you get all the way out here by yourself?”

Tev was confused but ki bit back kirs questions; the woman seemed to be in a hurry. Tev quickly bundled kirs blanket into a loose roll, strapped it to kirs pack, and hopped into the offered seat. Ki looked around, delighted, taking in the sight and smell and feel of the truck. It wasn’t the first vehicle ki had even been in, but this was the first time ki had gotten to ride in the front seat and it had a different perspective than the bed in the back. “Thank you,” Tev said, both for the ride and for the woman’s solicitousness in adjusting the artificial flow of air. Ki leaned in and closed kirs eyes, savoring the lovely stream of manufactured coolness as it poured over kir.

Eyes still closed, ki asked, “How were you in a boat that was a figure of speech?” Tev might not be well-versed in idioms yet, but ki wasn’t an idiot; ki knew what a figure of speech was in theory, even if ki wasn’t very good at recognizing them when they were spoken. Ki was getting better, though; every encountered metaphor, colloquialism, and nonsensical phrase got filed-away in kirs head for later reference. But that was an unprecedented situation that would require a dramatic update of kirs understanding of figures of speech, if this woman had actually somehow entered one.

Fortunately, Tev had heard the living-under-a-rock phrase before; ki had learned that one early and had heard it repeated often. “I don’t live under rocks ordinarily,” ki explained, craning kirs neck to look out the window at the ground speeding past alongside them. It was exciting, moving so fast, and the way the truck bumped and jostled across the rough terrain made a very far away, distant part of Tev’s brain squeal with delight. Kirs lips curled up in the barest trace of a smile; no more than that, because it wasn’t a conscious gesture on kirs part, and kirs systems rarely translated unconscious gestures -- but there was a trace there, peeking out at the corners.

Kirs voice was as flat as ever as ki spoke, though: “I was in the rocks to take shelter from the sun to attempt to prevent overheating. This is a much nicer and more effective way of doing that, though. Thank you for the ride.” Tev paused, decided that anyone who was kind enough to share their truck without even asking for anything in trade was no danger, and added by means of explanation, “I don’t live anywhere ordinarily but I used to live at the NASA base, so I suppose that’s the metaphorical rock in question. Does your truck have a name?” ki continued, hardly pausing for breath in between topic shifts. “Boats used to. Maybe they still do, in places that have boats; I don’t know. But I think it would be nice if cars and trucks and bicycles got names, too. Names are important things.” Tev had learned that lesson early on, as well.

[tevgreenai-blog]

bludthirsty:

Leona was quite surprised to see the pretty young woman–no, girl–hiding under the ragged, filthy blanket. This could be a trap, it was common enough. Leave a defenseless pretty thing out in the open to draw in a passing stranger looking to save her (or do the opposite) while her companions waiting behind some other sand dune would strike as soon as the passerby was vulnerable. It took Leona a minute to realize that the other was speaking, droning on and on about the various properties of lead. Not something bait usually said.

When she let the blanket fall back down over her face and gave Leona a few rote reassurances, Leona began to think that this was exactly what it looked like, and the thought worried her. Kate might have been a better influence on her than either of them had thought, but she wasn’t going to leave her stranded out in the Wastes. She had a bit of a heart left. Aside, when people started politely refusing offers you hadn’t made it was a sure sign that was what they really wanted.

“Are you, ah, you alone?” It was a stupid question to ask, given that they were both in the middle of nowhere and of course the girl could lie, but Leona wanted at least some sort of reassurance before she offered any sort of hospitality. Gifting of supplies was one thing, but inviting a stranger in to her inner sanctum was another. “As in, are you waiting for someone? I don’t want anyone to come after me for giving you a ride.” God, she hated herself. So soft! “If you’re running from someone, that’s different. I think we’ve all been in that boat.”

The woman’s question was foolish, but perhaps she was suffering from the mental effects of too much sun and heat and was not thinking at her best. Tev endeavored to be polite yet still accurate: “No,” ki said, speaking a little slowly in case the woman was having trouble thinking, “I am not alone.” Ki extended a hand from the blanket to point at the woman in the truck. “You are here,” ki added gently, just in case the woman was still having trouble making the connection. “But I’m not waiting for anyone, no,” ki continued, since the woman had asked more than one question and it would be rude to only reply to one of them. “You’re the only other person out here that I’ve seen recently.”

Ki glanced around at the empty desert and jagged rocks and the long, flat expanse of earth that stretched out away from them without so much as a puff of dust to indicate the presence of another living creature -- not that that meant there were none out here, of course; ki had passed by a wasteworm tunnel only two miles back, although from the dust that had gathered across it, it was an old one. Still, it had been enough to increase kirs usual sense of prudence, and when ki had felt the first inkling of an oncoming shut-down ki had settled on the first piece of rocky ground ki had found rather than walking on and hoping for a more secure place -- and possibly being able to find only a riskier one. Tev did not attract much interest from wasteworms, or at least ki had not so far, but ki definitely didn’t want to reboot inside ones guts.

“I’ve never been in a boat,” Tev said quietly. “I think I’d like to. I think that would be interesting. Have you? Been in a boat, I mean?” Ki looked back up at the woman and pushed the blanket back off kirs shoulders so ki could see her better. “Do you have a boat?” Tev would trade everything ki had and more for that kind of a chance -- not that ki where around here a person would use a boat, but still -- it sounded marvelous. Then ki frowned and added, “Although I’m not sure a boat would be the best thing to use if you wanted to run...”

[tevgreenai-blog]

regnantrory:

Every time Rory ventured into Fervention, she always felt like she left with an oily sheen on her skin that she couldn’t scrub off. But even the righteous had their vices and Rory’s involved liquor. Today, she was particularly craving the nasty burn of amber and the numbness that came along with it. Rory didn’t get drunk upon principle because getting drunk meant she’d have to spend the night in Fervention. There was no way she was making her way back to the Air Force without all her wits about her. Which meant, she’d have to find a place to sleep that was safe and that cost money. No, she was better off just drinking until she felt nothing and then moving on.

Rory had barely made it past the first few establishments when the sounds of a scuffle reached her ears. Fights were nothing unique in Fervention but this one caught her attention because it involved a child. Coming to stand next to another bystander, Rory crossed her arms and debated between stepping in or minding her own business. The child reminded her of her younger sister; she was at about the same age when the radiation took her small, fragile body. Something protective stirred in Rory.

But, the voice that drifted over to Rory jolted her out of her thoughts. Turning, she faced kir, a little tilt of her head. “Are you saying that I should do something?” 

Rory turned back to the fight which to her, was becoming less of a fight and more of an attack. She really should step in and do something. But that would mean gaining an unwanted enemy and painting a target on her back, it would mean making her presence known, it would mean fame, perhaps. None of that meant anything to her. The child wasn’t her sister. Her sister was dead. She didn’t have to care. 

This wasn’t the first time that someone had read more into one of Tev’s statements than ki had intended; it was a common failing of humanity, kirself included, to interpret every stimulus through one’s own biases and presumptions rather than to assess them neutrally. There was no reason to feel flustered or defensive, ki knew; merely to explain kirs statement in more clear terms, clarifying the original intent enough to counter-act whatever biases or assumptions the other had applied to kirs words.

“No,” ki said simply. “My statement was a question only. I’ve found that most people have strong and illogical reactions to the presence of children, reactions that are often contrary to their ordinary behavior patterns. I find the phenomena curious, but I wouldn’t attempt to coerce or goad someone into acting contrary to their ordinary patterns solely to allow me further observation of the phenomena.” Ki shrugged. “I just wanted to know if you were going to do anything, because then I would have wanted to stay to watch. As it is, there’s nothing really of interest to observe,” ki added lightly, glancing again at the child, who was now being shaken like a reconstituted food packet, and the red-faced man doing the shaking.

Ki looked back at the woman standing next to kir; a source of much more potential interest, ki thought: someone whose reactions weren’t affected by the perceived age of an observed being. Perhaps she could shed light on the phenomena for Tev; if she had noticed it in the behavior of others, she might have an explanation and might even be willing to share it. “I'm called Tev Green,” ki said, because that was what people did when they wished to strike-up a conversation and had no other excuse for doing so, and extended kirs hand. Belatedly ki remembered to smile.

Across the street the child started to wail, its pleas unintelligible but shrill, so Tev raised kirs voice a little in order to be heard above the noise: “I apologize for incorrectly giving an impression of attempted authority earlier. I hope no offense was taken?”

[tevgreenai-blog]

infractuslucas:

It occurred to Lucas that someone else might not have let their opponent walk, and though he had killed before, he had no wish to do so again. It had taken 20 years to get Lucas to snap against his father, and though he had felt immense anger to the man beating the small child, it was not in his nature not to give second chances. Hopefully the blows he had landed would serve as warning enough not to repeat his offences. 

Lucas listened to kir words with an expression of bemusement and reservation emerging onto his face. He absently touched the places on his face where the other man had landed blows to gauge the extent of their severity and hoped the bruises he would inevitably be left with wouldn’t last too long. 

“No, no - I, uh, I meant is he yours like, is he your son? Your brother? Your family?” Lucas’ eyebrow shot up. The way that ki had interpreted his question was strange to say the least and though he had his suspicions as to why, he was content to explain himself though the answer had been sufficient enough. “But clearly not.” 

With disdain, he watched the hunched over form of the child and knelt his height down so that he could further examine the state of his injuries. The poor thing had suffered immensely, and Lucas didn’t blame him for his silence - he knew that terror well. “He’s going to have some serious bruises. I wouldn’t be surprised if his ribs are fucked in some way or other.” Lucas knew the product of a boot to the chest too well and hoped that his guess was wrong for the child’s sake. “It’s bad because he’s not responding. Probably means he’s either in too much pain to speak, or is scared shitless.” He couldn’t figure out if he was silent and still out of fear, or hurt, but wondered if he should take him to see a medic at the old headquarters. 

Lucas put his hand gently on the child’s grubby shoulder and quietly tried to get him to answer with hushed questions. Brown eyes that had been clenched shut opened for a moment, but that was the only answer he got. 

Lucas’ face screwed up in an expression of disgust at the stranger’s suggestion that he had only stepped in for some eventual gain of his own. “Fucking hell, of course not.” Who did ki think he was? “Even if he did, I would not take it from him. If I had done nothing, it would have made me just as much of a monster as the man who was beating him.” Physically, the word had gone to shit, and apparently morally it had to. Not that anyone had ever stepped in for him before the fallout. 

The man’s reactions -- his expressions -- remained a mystery. Tev watched him investigate his newly-acquired bruises and wondered again if he had taken those hits on purpose, or if he had somehow not processed them until now. There was something unsure in his attitude, but Tev kirself was unsure what. It was fascinating -- he was fascinating. Tev crouched down next to him and the child for a closer vantage point and listened carefully as he spoke.

“Son,” ki repeated tonelessly, “brother. Family. No. No, I don’t have those. Sons, or brothers, or family.” Tev turned the idea over in kirs head a few times and wondered, suddenly, where people got families -- and why. It wasn’t something that ki had thought about before. The idea of family reminded kir too much of Kailey, so ki had pushed those thoughts out of kirs head. Kailey had had a family, Tev knew that much -- had had mothers who...loved her? Protected her? Gave her rules about when and where she should ride her bicycle, and who she should and should not talk to...and Kailey had not listened, and she had died, and now she no longer mattered. Families no longer mattered.

Tev shook kirs head roughly and agreed, “Clearly not.”

Tev reached for the child, curious to explore what a “fucked” rib felt like, but the man moved first, shaking the child gently and asking questions in a soft, kind voice. There was something familiar about it. Something deep inside Tev twisted in response, cold and oily, uncoiling in the back of kirs mind; ki shoved mentally as hard as ki could and pushed the feeling back into the shadows of kirs thoughts. Ki wasn’t sure what paths that...familiarity was going to lead kir down, but ki didn’t want to find out. “Maybe he simply has nothing of worth to say,” Tev retorted, almost snarling the words; speaking more sharply than ki ordinarily would have -- but the things the man’s soft treatment of the child stirred in the farthest reaches of kirs memories had unsettled kir and ki lashed the words out roughly in response. The child did not appear sorry for what it had done -- almost done -- to kir; did not appear even to have noticed. “I could probably entice him to speak if you really wanted him to,” ki muttered, scowling at the dirty pile of skin, bones, and rags.

The man wasn’t done surprising kir, though; despite kirs attempt at a gentle tone in questioning his foolishness, his reaction was strong and surprising -- revulsion, if Tev was right, which ki gave herself 60-40 odds of being in this case. His statement baffled kir even more than his emotions, and ki cocked kirs head sideways and stared tightly at him, as if a different angle might offer her a more helpful perspective for figuring him out.

“Would it?” ki asked, bewildered. Ki raised kirself up on her haunches and looked around, craning kirs neck for a glimpse of the now-beaten beater but he was long gone. “How would that work? Is it some kind of -- of infectious transmission?” Tev settled back on kirs heels and turned to face the confusing man again. “I didn’t even realize he was a monster,” ki said, more to kirself than to him or the child. “I thought he was a person. How could you tell? I saw nothing outlandish about him.” Another thought occurred to kir and ki frowned. “Am I infected? I did nothing. How is his condition transmitted? Why does action negate the effects? For that matter, what are the effects of his monstrosity?” If ki was potentially going to catch it, ki wanted to know what to expect.

It occurred belatedly to Tev that perhaps the man was making all of this up -- not necessarily lying, just wrong and unaware of it; “folk superstitions” was the phrase the man who’d tried to explain the phenomenon to kir had used, although ki wasn’t sure which folk he had been talking about and kirs attempts to obtain a clearer explanation had only resulted in him throwing an empty bottle that had previously contained alcohol at kirs head. That had not been helpful. Still, ki had filed the incomplete data away for further reflection. Maybe this man would prove to be a good source for elucidating the matter, either through willing explanation or through kirs own observations of his behavior.

“Do you mean he’s a...” Tev racked kirs memory centers, rifling through the various possibilities. “A werewolf, perhaps?” ki asked, pleased to have made the connection.

[tevgreenai-blog]

dorianhawthorne:

Fervention wasn’t the best place to hang out or even to do business, but Dorian had managed to stay alive after six months there. Not that Colorado Springs was much better, but Fervention was known to be the lesser when it came to being civil and any genuine trade going on. Dorian learned fast who to trade with and who to avoid like the plague, knew when it wasn’t worth putting up a fight or when to seal the deal. But sometimes he spoke before he thought and, well, that tended to get him a black eye or a knife to his throat. But he wasn’t dead yet.

It was one thing when an adult was getting the holy hell beaten out of them, but it was another when it was a child. Dorian wasn’t one to butt into other people’s affairs, but when it came down to seeing a kid getting kicked around, he couldn’t stand idly by. 

He didn’t even hear kirs question, immediately stepping toward the beat down. Maybe it was the fact that he had been a father, maybe it was just him hating bullies. But Dorian was already clenching his fist and giving a harsh swing right for the guy’s ribs without any warning. 

The air rushed out of the thug’s lungs and he staggered backwards, the kid falling to the ground from his grip. Before he could get another word in, Dorian was already swinging another fist at the prick’s face. He may have been smaller, but Dorian knew how to fight. Had to when it came down to your life or the other guy’s. Luckily, this guy was slower in his movements, and Dorian was quick to pull out one of his throwing knives, blade glinting in the light between his fingers.

“Try it, I fucking dare you,” he warned. “Get out of here while you still can, asshole.”

The thug’s hands were up in the air, clearly only armed with his fists and feet. Blood was pouring from his nose, dark crimson dripping to the dirt at his boots. He slowly backed away, gripping at his bleeding nose before taking off from the scene. Dorian turned back toward the boy, slipping the knife back in his pocket before he knelt down to check on him.

His gaze lifted up to the person that had spoken up. He recalled kir saying something, merely standing by while the kid got the holy hell beaten out of them. “Hey, you know this kid?” he asked, before looking back down at him. He looked like he was in rough shape, no surprise there. “He’s not looking good. We need to get him to a medic.”

Tev enjoyed watching the fight for all that it was short; there was a raw ferocity to the man’s attack that had been quite unanticipated based on the temperament precedents his appearance had triggered in kirs accumulated data. Ki approached the scene slowly not because ki was nervous that the violence might spill-out and across kir -- the man’s anger seemed very fixated on his target, not the sort to spread to observers or passerby; ki might have gauged it wrongly of course, but it would be a simple matter to retreat if ki needed to and leave him to the target he had first focused on -- but because ki was trying to take-in as many of the details of the scene as ki could.

The first man fled when the second produced a knife and a verbal threat. Tev watched him go, then turned back to the shorter, older man who had won the fight. He had bent over the child and ki stepped closer for a better look. Ki hadn’t expected to be questioned by the man, but when he asked, ki answered readily enough: “No. He is a stranger to me.” Ki cocked kirs head, curious what the man meant by his assessment of the child’s looks -- he seemed a normal enough creature to Tev -- but before ki could ask for clarification he had already made another declaration, one that involved kir directly:

“We need to get him to a medic.”

That was startling, and Tev made no attempt to hide kirs surprise. “We do?” ki asked, then shrugged. “Very well.”

He seemed quite certain, and Tev had no real reason to argue. Ki crouched down next to the man and the battered boy. Skinny, bony, dirty, underfed; he did not look heavy. “Shall I carry him?” Tev asked. “I don’t believe he is capable of walking at a reasonable pace at the moment.” Ki leaned down until ki had forced the bleary-eyed boy to meet kirs gaze. “We must get you to a medic,” ki repeated, in case he had not heard the man’s edict. “Do you wish to walk on your own feet or be carried there?”

The child shook his head numbly; not at all an acceptable answer. Tev sighed and lifted the child by the armpits, slinging him brusquely across kirs shoulder. A high-pitched squeal escaped the child and he then began to sniffle wetly, but he spoke no words of protest and his struggles seemed more like automatic physical reflexes than a conscious attempt to free himself so Tev folded an arm across his back to hold him in place and stood up. Ki wobbled a bit, off-balance from the extra weight on one side of kirs body, but ki made it up without falling over. Almost immediately ki began to breathe heavier, kirs respiratory system working at a heightened pace to keep-up with the extra effort ki was demanding of it, but it was a tolerable level of strain. Ki could handle the expenditure for a while before negative effects would result.

“All right,” Tev turned toward the man who seemed to know what must be done, “where do we go? And while we go there, could you explain to me why we must do this thing? I don’t object,” ki hastened to add, before he thought that ki was trying to avoid carrying-out a necessity, “I simply don’t understand. I’d be pleased to have an explanation?”

[tevgreenai-blog]

tevgreenai:

thenebulous:

Like with most things, Solas was the observer. Perched upon a stack of crates at the back of an abandoned stall, he watched as the crowd gathered around a plucky musician. Green eyes focused on the relaxed pace their fingers kept as they rolled across the strings. Every once in a while, the tempo would speed up as the passage became more technical, more intense, then relax in the practiced spells of chorus. The women and children danced, somehow divining grace from their movements beneath the heavy, soiled rags that cloaked them. With ankles crossed, the AI surveyed the gathering with a hint of a smile curling the corner of his lips, but never truly blossoming.  

Music was bittersweet for him. It had once been a weapon BioCorp utilized to weed out the A.I. they considered defected, whose minds yielded suspicious responses to stimuli — something akin to happiness, or intelligence. Those were no allowed within the sterile white walls of his former world. It was forbidden to be human, and yet it was important to understand the subtle nuances of emotion, to emulate them, to anticipate them.

With his fingers bound together, he watched as a peculiar figure moved out among the ring of joyous dances. Despite the varying styles of choreography, there was one thing that gave the semblance of oneness among the group, and that was tempo. A sense of rhythm. Solas noted silently to himself that this particular being did not possess it. Curiosity was often shot down by logic or the stentorian voice of his former instructors resonating in his mind, but they did not exist here. Solas was a free agent, and while he needed to exercise care in his mingling, he would not resign himself to solitude forever. With a soundlessness reserved for phantoms and specters, he touched down on the red dirt of the market floor, and traversed the swaying crowd. The music grew louder, its constant thrum of energy swelling in his chest cavity. He stood beside kir, hands buried deeply into the pockets of his hooded coat. 

He arrived just in time to hear kir speak. 

“Yeah, rhythm,” he announced rather bluntly, though the humour in his voice would’ve been lost on even the most perceptive being. “You’re overthinking it,” he amended. “Music doesn’t come from the feet. It comes from in here.” Solas placed his hand on his sternum, and looked up at kir, wondering if the explanation would make any sense. He was no expert, but he would always try to be honest.

Tev raised kirs eyes from kirs dusty boots to the shadowed face of the man now standing next to kir. Unlike the others he wasn’t dancing; unlike the others, he was speaking to kir. His words sounded like an explanation but it wasn’t one that offered any additional sense to her. “Rhythm,” ki echoed, rolling the words around on kirs tongue, “that means a repeated pattern, yes. Some of them are repeating physical patterns with the motions of their feet, although only in approximate terms, and with distinct individual variations. I’ve tried to count the timing of their steps, and it doesn’t seem to be dependent upon any mathematically logical source.” Ki frowned at him. “You’re saying it comes from...” Ki rested kirs fingers lightly on the back of his hand. “Here? I feel nothing. How are you transmitting--”

Ki turned sharply, pulling kirs hand back, kirs words cut-off sharply. Tev looked at the ukulele player instead. “Oh,” ki interrupted kirself, “you mean from there, don’t you? I’m sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you were speaking literally. But you meant here as in there -- yes?” That didn’t seem right, either, though. Tev’s brow furrowed in a deeper frown. “But I don’t feel any projection-source over there, either; just the sound from the instrument. You’re not talking about that.” That one wasn’t a question; if he had meant the ukulele, he wouldn’t have pointed at himself, surely.

Tev looked down at kirs feet again, so still and flat in comparison to the stomping, twirling boots and sandals and rags that everyone else was kicking-up in their haphazard-yet-fluid dance. Ki looked back up at the man with the deep hood and the unsatisfactory explanation. “It seems to be coming from their feet,” ki said, tone accusatory. Was he lying to kir, maybe because he thought it was funny to play tricks on her ignorance? Tev had met a few people who found amusement in such games before and while ki was not very good at figuring out when people were “playing her,” as the crotchety old lady had called it, ki had filed those events away as examples or precedent by which she could judge future actions. This interaction did not ascribe to those parameters exactly, but it bore a few similarities -- enough to make Tev curious, at least.

Beats in Binary Codes

[tevgreenai-blog]

trxjcn:

Kael’s laughter drifted awkwardly to a stop, unsure at first whether the female before him was being serious in her statement or whether they too were attempting to make light of an almost morbid situation. The more they talked the more he began to realize they were not joking along but had in fact taken his words literally. He blinked at her, a little confused - had life outside changed so drastically that people didn’t understand humor anymore? Their monotonous voice should have been a give away, and might have been to many, but Kael had never actually met an AI before - he had heard about them, and believed them to be very lifelike, both supposedly in looks and behavior, but much like a actual computer there was only so much understanding of human behavior they could understand. 

“I uh, no - I didn’t mean… I meant that I was almost giant bat food out there.” He tried to explain, pointing over his shoulder towards the door. “I didn’t mean I’d literally attempted to shave a Diver, that’d be a death wish. Might as well have signed my own death certificate, if those still exist…” He chuckled, it wasn’t really a question he expected an answer to but something he hadn’t really thought about before. With no Government in place he suspected that both birth’s and deaths went unregistered in any formal kind of record. “Anyhow; I’m Kael - local idiot and Diver delicacy…” He stepped forward, and offered the female his hand. “I didn’t meant to burst in, and if you’ve laid claim to this place then I’ll move on, all I ask is that you allow me to stay for maybe half an hour, just to let the Diver move on.”

He laughed, so Tev smiled, because ki had learned that smiling was what people expected when they laughed. Sometimes. Other times, they expected fear -- Tev hadn’t quite worked-out how to differentiate between laughter that signaled the former over the latter. But ki curled kirs lips up because he was laughing, and ki wasn’t very good at looking like ki was afraid, so smiling was a better option for kir to default to in lieu of surely botching the other. Confusion, that was always easy, that came natural -- but fear? Fear was a complex combination of factors that ki hadn’t thought the whole way through yet. Ki couldn’t really do fear.

Then he stopped laughing and started explaining, and that was better. Tev liked explanations. They didn’t always make sense, and often had gaping logical fallacies riddled through them like mental potholes, but whenever someone at least tried to explain it made kir feel better, whether the explanation itself panned-out or not. Ki nodded along as he spoke, a gesture that ki had mastered a while ago; nods could indicate many things, but the precise calibration of the one ki was using now indicated listening and acceptance of the man’s words but was not so enthusiastic as to necessarily signal agreement. “Perhaps someone should try shaving one,” Tev suggested, when he finished. “Their bristles might prove useful, and if no one else has procured any yet, their rarity might make them valuable.” Ki had little interest in the things that most people assigned value to, but ki understood that scarcity was a component to the factors most people used to gauge price. Ki wondered idly if any of kirs blades would be sharp enough for the purpose.

Kael’s introduction was friendly at any rate, although Tev wasn’t sure how one went about earning the titles he had assigned himself -- especially not the latter, when one appeared at least at first glance to possess all of one’s original limbs. Still, Tev knew what to do when offered a hand, so ki wrapped kirs fingers gently around his and shook it three times as ki rose quicly to kirs feet in a fluid twisting of kirs legs out from crossed to straight. Before releasing Kael’s fingers ki said, “I’m called Tev Green and I’m not anyone’s delicacy yet.” Something told kir to smile again so ki did, briefly, and let go. Then ki shook kirs head. “I have claimed nothing, save a seat on the floor here.” Ki pointed at the semi-circle of supplies ki was still standing within and the half-empty pack that lay next to them. “You’re welcome to stay in here as long as you like as far as I’m concerned, regardless of the divers’ interest. Or their state of hairiness.” Ki thought over his words a moment and then asked curiously, “What’s a death certificate? And what does signing one do?”

[tevgreenai-blog]

Over the last six months Tev had encountered the caravan four times and seen it twice more from a distance too great to traverse before they passed out of sight. The first time all ki had done was watch, hunkered down with wide-eyes below the sheltering protection of rugged, broken stones, as it trundled by in front of kir. Ki had quietly drank-in the glorious, incredible, overwhelming sight and smell and sounds of the thing -- falling in love with its existence, if such a being as Tev could be said to be capable of falling in love with anything. Ki loved humanity though, loved the chaos and noise and confusion of human life, and the caravan was like someone had taken an entire town and wrapped it up into boxes and barrels and shoved it into truck-beds and car-doors and campers and set it off to roam across the desert like some free, wild thing.

Tev had laid there staring so long that ki hadn’t realized that the sun had moved and the shade ki had been lurking under had evaporated and kirs systems were overheating. It wasn’t until ki booted-up again almost an hour later, with the caravan now nothing but the empty trails it had left behind in the dust, that ki realized what had happened. It didn’t matter; ki loved it already.

The next time ki had seen the beautiful, tarnished, motley collection of dusty vehicles and faded fabric bumping across the Wastes ki had run to catch-up with it -- no plan in mind, no purpose other than to experience the thing for kirself. But while Tev had an endurance that any ordinary human would envy, ki was not a runner. Even if ki had been an Olympic-level sprinter -- not that there were Olympics these days, or professional athletes to compete in them -- ki likely would have been unable to catch the distant snake of vehicles. While the caravan moved at no blistering pace, it went faster than a person could walk especially in these scorching wastes, and it never slowed to rest. Tev rarely slowed either, but ki was slow enough to begin with. After three hours of kir following it determinedly across the sands it finally drew so far out of kirs sight that even the dustcloud of its passage could no longer be seen. An hour later, with no tracks left to follow, Tev finally gave up and returned to kirs original course.

The first time ki had gotten to experience the caravan had come as a surprise; ki had shut-down from overheat in the middle of the desert and had been picked-up by the caravan. Tev wasn’t sure why they had lifted kir along with them and ki hadn’t bothered to ask; perhaps they had simply been curious about the sight of a person clinging with rock-hard limbs to a spar of rock in the middle of the blazing sunlight, cheeks pink but unblistered, eyes closed as though sleeping, and had wanted to know more. Unable to pry kirs grip from the stone ki had chosen as kirs anchor-point for the shut-down period, the caravan riders who had taken kir had simply picked up the whole chunk of rock and tossed it and Tev into the back of a truck-bed and been on their way again. Ki woke up with the wind in kirs hair and a thin, jumping shadow bouncing on and off overhead as the bumpy ride jostled the blanket they had hung above her for shade -- or maybe just to conceal their prize. Their motivations became a moot point once Tev rebooted at any rate, and they were happy to share their goods with someone who was carrying fresh batteries for trade -- especially since Tev had no interest in driving a bargain hard enough that they might have been tempted to just try and take what ki offered.

If there had been danger, Tev hadn’t realized. Ki had been too busy drinking-in the sights and sounds and smells, asking questions and poking kirs metaphorical nose in every place ki could shove it. That might have angered some of them, but one of the old woman had said something about “simple minds, simple wants, but look the sort of scratch she carries, eh? And offers without a fuss for a few handfuls of bean and noodle? This one’s worth keeping on the good side of, hapless mite that she is, ‘cause she’ll fetch us more in future trade than the meat on her scrawny bones would be worth on its own.” Tev filed the words away, processed them over the course of the next few weeks, and decided that they meant ki was welcome to ride with the caravan whenever ki could catch it and pay for the privilege. Ki would have liked to catch it more often than ki did, but the caravan travel d by its own schedule and paths and was beholden to no one -- least of all kir.

Tev was happy to have caught up with it again now; it would do nothing to shorten kirs journey, since the caravan had been heading in the opposite direction to kirs path when ki had seen their dustcloud on the horizon and had run over to trade for a ride, but that didn’t matter. Kirs destination would still be there whenever ki arrived, and in the meantime ki could experience the caravan again -- at least until the credit ki had earned with the goods ki had given them ran out and they sent kir on kirs way alone again. Right now, ki was just happy to enjoy a tasty dinner and walk between the thick, chill-blocking tents and fires, listening to shouts and stories and snatches of song. Ki followed kirs nose to the great bonfire where miscellaneous sausages were being roasted “for those brave enough of gut to risk ‘em, eh?” the rot-toothed old man with the skewers laughed, and ki took two of the fat, greasy tubes in eager hands, biting into one immediately and feeling hot grease ooze down kirs chin.

Stepping away from the fire to enjoy the feast, Tev saw a face who looked familiar but not one that ordinarily belonged with the caravan, and ki turned to face the man with a full mouth and bright eyes. “Did you come for dinner?” ki asked him. “What are you eating? I’ve got sausages. McElroy is roasting more if you want some. Are there chilies in that?” Ki rose onto kirs toes to try and peer into his bowl.

The scorched sky was giving in to the lavender tug of dusk when his Jeep sputtered to a halt. After realizing he couldn’t fix the problem with what tools he had, Ezra promptly cursed the godless (and damnably silent) wasteland around him. His options were few this close to nightfall. If he braved the walk back to the base, he was asking for a diver attack — and it was very unlikely his Jeep would still be there when he returned for it. If he tried to outlast the cold and wait for dawn, he would catch his death. As he sat in the shadow of his Jeep, the sun sinking beyond the red wastes at his back, he could already feel the warmth leaching from the brittle earth. He wondered idly if this would be his last night. If after everything, this was what marked his shitty end.

He waited in the gloaming, watching the still horizon and regretting his indecision. It was hard to move in any direction when all options led to a dead-end. The sharp drop in temperature caused him to move sluggishly, and he found he missed the sun’s rays as they released him (how very fitting). Determined, he pulled up the Jeep’s tattered cover in hopes of fashioning a tent out of the cabin. He’d considered sleeping under the vehicle to stay out of view of divers (or whatever else prowled the wasteland after hours), but he’d slept on the ground in the Wastes before, and it was like sleeping on a fucking slab of ice once darkness reached its peak.

He had just gotten comfortable, barricaded by his Dillinger haul, when he saw a flickering swell of light crest the swales through strips of shorn black fabric. He didn’t study it for long. Instead, he laid his pistol on the toolkit before him, and cradled his pump-action shot gun against his chest. Settled back in the shadows, he waited for the raiders to come.

But alas, what spilled over the horizon was no horde of raiders, but the elusive Caravan. He heard the strange metallic music through the hard desert wind, dutifully keeping away the wasteworms, and he felt the tension melt away from him in sheets. As they got closer, their speed slow and aimless, he stepped out from the safety of his tent and dropped to the ground, weapons out of sight and palms outward facing. A few of them were already on foot headed toward him, setting up tents, building a fire. “Ya lost, boy?” an old slack-mouth man asked, his pale blue eyes crinkling kindly, his body bent around a gnarled walking stick.

After a long barter, there was an offer to have his Jeep fixed up by sunrise in exchange for all of the supplies he’d brought back from Dillinger’s Market. A sizable haul that was hard to let go. Ezra managed to haggle a hot meal and 5 bottles of water out of it, as well, and then shook hands over it. Now, he stood near the great bonfire, clutching a bowl of steaming Avalancher stew to his chest, and wondering just how long his luck was going to hold out.

[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...”

[tevgreenai-blog]

TEV GREEN · 00 · AI · THE SHELL · TAKEN

"It is said that man is the creation of god… So much the worse; god had no grasp of modern technology.” – Karel Čapek

ORIGIN:

Rothschild Space Flight Center, Colorado (also: White Rock, New Mexico)

TRAITS:

+ Curious, Optimistic, Trustworthy

-  Naïve, Callous, Detached

BIOGRAPHY:

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS;

Kailey Marie Johnson was a cheerful child, slightly precocious in the fields of reading and mathematics but behind the curve in creative writing and history. She had a sheltered childhood in the small town of White Rock, a place that made out moderately-well through the early stages of the dissolution of civilization due to the fact that much of its population – including Kailey’s parents – worked at the nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory. Prices in the town soon skyrocketed, but the scientists and researchers of Los Alamos could afford to keep their families fed and safe and so young Kailey knew little of the problems of the outside world. Shortly after her eleventh birthday she was struck by a truck delivering water and critically injured. She was rushed to the hospital where it soon became clear that her condition was terminal. Her mothers argued ferociously with one another until finally deciding to pull the plug three weeks later. What Dr. Priyanka Rath did not know was that her wife, Dr. Carol Shelley, had taken a digital imprint of Kailey’s brain before letting their daughter die.

One of Dr. Shelley’s close colleagues and friends, Dr. Choi Borjigin, was working at Rothschild Space Flight Center on a project that hoped to digitize human brain patterns so that they could be ideally transferred to other, cloned human bodies once a new earth was established or, in the meantime, transferred to virtual reality environments until such a time as downloading them again would be feasible. The project was not succeeding as well as had been hoped, and Shelley had declined recruitment when Borjigin had contacted her initially since she preferred not to break-up her family by moving away or demanding that Rath abandon her own work at Los Alamos to move with her. Shelley joined the project immediately following Kailey’s funeral, over the objections of Rath, although her goal was much more personal than the salvation of humanity: she wanted her daughter back. For more than thirty years Borjigin and Shelley worked on the project as its funding gradually dried up, being diverted to more feasible-looking ventures; as their colleagues slowly drifted away to other, more productive pursuits.

When the Valeris Corporation decided the project was a wash and took steps to terminate the experiment, Shelley took matters into her own hands: she stole a specimen from another lab and downloaded her daughter’s mental imprint into the empty shell of their half-finished A.I. container. She was taken into custody by Valeris security forces for her illicit actions but since her last-ditch effort had produced some kind of result, Borjigin was allowed to continue to experiment with what Shelley had created. Ultimately he could not craft the result into a fully functioning replica of Kailey, nor could he produce a way to duplicate the experiment for other brains on a reliable scale, and his solitary work was largely overlooked by the Valeris Corporation in their rush to get to space. Since his budget had been slashed to the bare-bones level already and the small lab remaining to him was not needed for any other projects, no one in authority really noticed he was still there, still tinkering. He would wake the A.I., talk to it and test it, shut it down, reprogram it, and reboot it again and again, attempting to perfect it. He was not finished when the last shuttle left; whether he left on that ship or left the base for another purpose is unclear – but he did leave, and he left the experiment behind, half-programmed and stuck in stand-by mode, waiting.

NOT WITH A BANG, BUT A WHIMPER.

It was probably a power-fluctuation caused by degrading energy levels and lack of maintenance that caused the surge that shorted the main computer matrix in Borjigin’s lab. Regardless of the cause, the result was that the brain connected to the fried computer woke-up. Half-child and half-computer, with an artificial brain filled with a jumble of organic memories and digital facts, the only thing the waking unit could determine with certainty was that it was not Kailey Johnson. There were bits and pieces of her in there, but there were bits and pieces of other things, too. Needing to designate itself as something other than “self,” it chose “Tev” because of the pleasant way the sounds made its lips feel. Finding that “it” was too impersonal, Tev then chose other pronouns – ki, kir, and kers – and then, finding that ki was alone, Tev (who would later designate kirself with the last name “Green” based solely on the color of its laboratory jumpsuit when someone asked for more name than Tev had given them) left the room and went to look for the only other being ki had known since Kailey’s death: Dr. Borjigin.

He was nowhere to be found. The entire base appeared abandoned to Tev’s cursory search so ki climbed down from Almagre Mountain and continued the search in Colorado Springs. The search was quickly derailed by the overwhelming reality of the place – more people than Tev had ever seen, had ever even thought of seeing in one place; ki knew statistics and population estimates in kirs head, but seeing it was something very different. For a while Tev simply wandered, drinking in the sights and sounds and smells; something that should have been a dangerous proposition for someone looking as helpless and unarmed as this wide-eyed science experiment, but Tev proved surprisingly adept at taking care of kirself – starting when ki broke the arm of the man who attempted to manhandle kir when ki first entered Colorado Springs, and continued when ki gave his partner a concussion with the rock ki hurled at him when he pulled a gun on kir. The violence made surprisingly little impression on Tev; it would have devastated the part of kir that was Kailey but the artificial portion of Tev’s brain saw only the logic of the action and attached no emotional resonance to the event.

Tev had not been programmed for violence but ki had been programmed with enough basic biological facts that it was a simple matter for kir to analyze weak points and stress limits of the human body – both those of others and kirs own. Tev has no special combat abilities and is not significantly stronger than an ordinary human of kirs size and build would be at peak physical condition, but ki is adept at utilizing leverage and physics to kirs advantage in hand-to-hand combat and can apply the moderate amount of force that kirs body can deploy with painful precision. As for ranged attacks, ki has an uncanny ability to calculate for projectile release and can turn even plain rocks into deadly distance weapons. This, combined with an innate hardiness that indicates that there is more behind kirs skin than simple meat and blood, makes Tev physically well-suited to survive in this world. That is good, because kir is also frightfully naive and has little understanding or innate grasp of emotional nuance. Ki learns from kirs experiences, but in the fashion of a computer filing away lists of cause-and-effect and compiling situations according to precedent and probability, not in the organic fashion of a human being.

There are a lot of things that Tev doesn’t understand yet, although ki is always happy to learn more about people whether that be through observation or direct questioning – and ki has a habit of asking uncomfortable, prying questions of a personal nature without understanding why people may find them upsetting. Most of kirs emotional responses to immediate stimuli are limited (sometimes deliberately, when those emotions reek too strongly of Kailey), although the more time ki spends in the world the more this changes. Some things have not changed at all, such as kirs casual disregard for the lives of others. The only real understanding of death that Tev has comes from Kailey, from the fact that the person who was Kaily died. Of course, it was only because Kailey died that Tev was born, so ki has a somewhat unique perspective on the process; death led to life, for kir. That may be why Tev has no qualms about returning violence with violence whenever anyone tries to harm kir; then again, most people still alive in this world have developed a thick skin when it comes to the circle of violence so perhaps ki is only following the precedent that ki witnesses others engaging in. Death of an individual makes little impression on Tev at any rate, although that may change when and if ki ever witnesses the death of someone ki has become close to…or then again, it may not. Before that can happen of course, ki will have to find someone worth caring about as more than just an interesting specimen to observe.

Tev has not settled into a permanent place in the world, wandering between Colorado Springs and Fervention and spending more time in the Wastes than ought to be healthy, but kirs natural hardiness makes that less of a problem than it might be; since the heat of the day does kir no permanent damage, even spending the afternoon outside unsheltered is no danger, merely an inconvenience, so ki does not require a place of safety to retreat to. That hardiness combined with an exceptionally trustworthy nature – ki has not yet mastered the art or motivation of deceit, although ki can be quite evasive when it comes to discussing kirs origins – makes Tev a useful errand runner, delivery person, and message carrier. The fact that ki never gets lost once familiarized with a route is helpful as well; while ki has no GPS map access, kirs memory for locations is precise and perfect. Most people seem to think kir is just an odd, emotionally-distant woman with poor social awareness, although those who remember the wide-eyed waif in the laboratory jumpsuit dispatching two toughs without breaking stride probably have other thoughts in mind. Despite any rumors or questions that might float in kirs wake, Tev makes enough in trade from these little jobs to be able to afford enough food to keep kirself fueled and since ki requires little in the way of hydration, has little to strain or stress over as far as a livelihood goes. Instead, ki can focus on learning what being human means…and whether or not ki qualifies.

FACECLAIM:

Summer Glau

[tevgreenai-blog]

infractuslucas:

Lucas watched the scene unfolding in front of him with dark eyes. It was all too familiar, and the sight of the child being helplessly thrown around made the scars that similar hands had left on him ache with memory. His eyes drifted out of focus and it was almost as if the child was him, and the man in the long coat was his father. The sound of booted feet colliding with tiny ribs made Lucas’ stomach lurch, but he was pulled from his waking nightmare by an unfamiliar voice. Blinking a few times to regain his composure, Lucas turned to the stranger. “’Course. Only thing worse than doing that, is standing around and letting it happen.” His words weren’t accusatory, but they were flat. This situation was too familiar for anything else; he had never been on the outside looking in before. 

His years in the military and tall frame gave him the upper-hand against the man who was beating the child. The child looked up with glassy, wet eyes and Lucas gave the best reassuring look he could imagine, before balling his fist and punching his assailant square in the jaw. He knew exactly what the child would be thinking, because he had been the child - wishing, hoping, that someone might come and stick up for him where he could not. The man hadn’t been expecting a third party, and after a strategically placed set of blows he had him on the ground, with the child folded in on himself in pain behind. Though his opponent had landed a few blows to Lucas’ jaw, the former pilot had come out victorious with little more than a few days of bruising to show for it. 

“Get the fuck out of here.” He spat down at the man. “Next time, pick on someone your own size, yeah?.” His voice, usually gentle and unassuming, came out an angry growl, punctuated by the groans and sounds of scurrying as his advice was taken. 

Triumphantly, he knelt down next to the child, and having forgotten the figure that had spoken to him for a moment, he turned back to face kir. “He’s in a pretty bad way. Fuck.” Lucas said, more to himself than to the stranger, a frown creasing his brow as the slight little thing curled up in a pile of scrawny limbs and slowly blooming bruises across dirty skin made no sign of opening his eyes. “He yours?” Lucas asked, wondering if this child was lucky enough to have retained a family on this cruel wasteland. 

The man’s reaction was interesting. At first he had seemed content simply to watch, as ki did, but the moment he processed kirs words -- not an immediate act on his part, either -- something in him seemed to shift. Tev could not place the tone of his voice but his words did not match his earlier inaction. They did match the action that immediately followed as he walked over without preamble and beat the man to the ground. Tev watched curiously, wondering if he had let the other man hit him those few times on purpose, as ki sometimes did in a fight in order to obtain a chance for a much better blow at the cost of minor pain and fleeting injury, or if he was too emotional to defend himself better. If he had not been clearly preoccupied with the beating he was doling out, ki would have asked.

The fact that he let the man leave alive was even more interesting than the juxtaposition of his initial statement and action; the way he had been acting, Tev had expected him to keep hitting the other man until he was nothing but a red paste on the ground. Ki opened her mouth to request an explanation but he wasn’t looking at her, but rather at the child; Tev wished that ki was standing on the opposite side of the little tableau so ki could see the expression on his face as he studied the cringing creature. Then he turned to speak to kir, and his words overshadowed any expression he might have shown.

“Mine?” Tev blinked at him, confused. “No,” ki said, “I do not own him. I do not understand the process by which people come to own one another, nor why a person would agree to become the property of another -- it seems a strange thing to do to me, to give over control of yourself to another -- and I have not engaged in any transactions to obtain ownership of anyone, myself.” Wondering if perhaps the man had kir confused for some other person ki added helpfully, “I do not know who owns this child, or if anyone does. Perhaps it belongs to itself. Or do all children have owners?” Ki cocked her head; that would certainly explain some of the interactions ki had seen enacted between children and adults in her observations, although others became even more confusing when viewed through that lens. It was definitely an idea worth further study, at least.

Tev stepped closer, crossing the street to join the man and the child. “What is bad about its way?” ki asked, peering down over the man’s shoulder for a better look. “It does not seem to be doing anything to me,” ki observed, “just lying there. It’s not even looking at you. What could be bad about that?” Was the man upset because the child had not thanked him or offered him a prize for his assistance? Tev could not understand the emotions on his face at all; they seemed familiar, as though she had seen similar ones before, but the context was all wrong. Those emotions did not belong on the face of a person who had just won a fight.

“Do you mean because it does not seem to have anything of worth to give you?” ki guessed. “If it did, I don’t think it would have been begging,” ki added, trying to modulate kirs voice for gentleness; ki did not want to sound like ki was calling him an a fool for misjudging such an obvious situation so badly, if he had thought to obtain a reward for his actions from someone who so obviously had nothing to offer, although if so he had been quite foolish. While the man he had beaten had not seemed to have much of value either, he clearly possessed more property than the child. This man should have sided with him if he had wanted to be paid for his efforts, although Tev doubted the man beating the child would have felt that any assistance offered in that task merited a reward either; he had clearly needed no help.

[tevgreenai-blog]

empyrhien:

She had heard the commotion. It was unlikely she would have missed it, loud and disruptive as it rang–sour in all the ways the wastes had a way of sitting. Her pace had been slow, and she had watched with bated eyes and the semblance of an expression that remained unmoving–impassive. Her hands had slipped to the hand-fashioned holster at her hip, tracing the ridges of her bayonet as she removed it in the smooth swipe of a move. The blade swiped and flipped between her fingers, catching the flash of the glaring sun as Eva dangled it back and forth in a one handed dance, gait stilling to a stop.

– -This world of wastes that they called their own was a harsh land, an unforgiving land. It drank blood from hearth and stayed greedy. Some way or the other you would come to owe it–and owe the land, you did. You had to be careful of the debts you sold around in these parts, because the earth had been ransacked dry and all that was left behind ( of the land & of the people ), was all the worst ways in which man knew to be greedy. 

If she took apart this pathetic shell of a man, she took upon a debt. And that debt Eva would carry on her back till it was broken or till it was paid to full due. She should be the wiser and keep away–keep to herself and keep her hands clean of blood she did not need. 

( But she had once been Euna. Euna who loved the sea and who had arms to catch her when she got close to falling. Euna who learned to fall in love with the world before ever growing wary of it.                                                  What was this one’s name? )– -

                                      “Are you going to do anything?”

The blade flew on the flick of a wrist, cutting a smooth path right until it embedded into the shoulder of the man. It was a clean shot, soundless except for the puff of breath released in shock from the perpetrator. He turned on ragged steps–she could see the anger coloring his eyes, burning somewhere between the flames of the sun as it was doing its work, and the challenge she had raised to him. His steps hunkered back and forth, like the decision of fight or flight was unmade in his mind. Eva made it for him, though, free hand uncoiling the whip secured to her waist until it pooled at her feet just in time for her to swing it.

It moved through the air in the blink of an eye, the slap of leather hitting skin sounding like the crack of lightening–unheard as it was these days. She’d left his exposed skin unmarred, the whip curling its claim around one of the his ankles instead. When she finally moved, it was to jerk her arm back, weight bending as she twisted her body with the precise force needed to tug him down and onto his back. She hadn’t been aiming for precision of pain, though some part of Eva hoped the blade in his shoulder was hitting bone. ( If she was going down with this debt to the devil, she might as well grab it by the horns. ) 

Another tug, this one sharper and with more weight to the pull–her jaw was steeled as she pulled the man closer, the figure of him too confused in the blinking moments that had passed to have his fists swinging just yet. It took her three steps to reach him from where he lay, and her foot made quick work of kicking him over–a functional offense to roll him onto his stomach long enough for her to twist the blade deep, and swipe it out of his shoulder. ( She may go down with the devil when he came to call her bets, but she wouldn’t lose a blade over it. )

She stayed by his side only long enough to wipe his blood on the rags that donned his back, straightening and stepping aside as nimble fingers sheathed the knife to where it had been held before. The whip was circled quick and clean on practiced hands before it was secured too, and Eva didn’t bother to spare him a glance as she picked her way back past the way she had come.

“He’ll be looking to land a hit when he gets back up.” Her tongue did not spill soft words for the world had grown out of practice of those, though there was nothing abrasive to the rough of them otherwise. She kept them reigned to a conversational neutral, gaze rising to meet either companion–woman, and child. “They don’t like staying down.”

Tev didn’t move, didn’t even blink, as the woman with the blade and the whip took apart the kicking man, left him lying limp and leaking blood on the ground as she cleaned and secured her weapons. Tev’s help had clearly not been needed and ki had enjoyed watching the show. The woman moved very fast, very smoothly; her motions had a fluidity that reminded Tev of all the dancing ki had witnessed here and there over the last few months except that unlike when ki watched people dancing, ki didn’t feel like ki was missing some crucial element of the action. Every step, every twist and pull and kick, had had a purpose that Tev could follow and the timing had not relied on indistinguishable sound-cues but rather on the obvious signs given by body and bone and blood.

Currently rather a lot of that blood was oozing from the downed man to seep into the dusty, dry ground; it drank the red liquid in greedily, holding Tev’s gaze. Ki looked back at the woman when she spoke: “He’ll be looking to land a hit when he gets back up. They don’t like staying down.” Ki looked back at the man, looking at him this time instead of being distracted by the pretty shimmer of his blood watering the parched earth. Ki cocked her head, studying him, and noticed that he was indeed still breathing and even twitching a bit in a pained, uncomfortable sort of way.

“Oh,” Tev said, “well that’s no problem.” Ki crossed the street -- path, really, but street in function at least if not in form -- to join the woman and the child. The latter scooted away, holding its ribs and looked between the two adults with wide, almost feral-fearful eyes. It flicked a glance toward the somnulant man and its dirty face sharpened with momentary greed; Tev assumed the child hoped to scavenge something of use off the man who had been so reluctant to offer help when it had been asked. Ki would do nothing to interfere with that; nothing that the man was openly carrying held any interest for kir. What ki would do was make sure he stayed down where the woman with the fast hands and faster whip had put him.

“Here,” ki said, “it’s easy. Cervical vertebrae are very simple to break if you apply pressure at the right angle and -- so far at least -- I’ve never seen someone get up again after you sever those.” Tev suited words to action, bending over and grasping the unconscious man by the chin. Ki pressed her knee hard against his upper back, braced her other hand against the opposite shoulder, and jerked hard on the hand holding his face. One short, sharp burst of effort to make sure ki exerted enough force to snap the bones -- and there, he went limp again, but moreso this time. There was a different sort of limpness, Tev had observed, between those who were merely unconscious and those who were dead. Still, ki waited a moment to make sure the man’s back did not rise and fall again with another breath before ki stood up.

Ki smiled at the woman. “There you go,” ki said. “All taken care of.” The smile faded, not because Tev was suddenly unhappy, but simply because ki had never seen much purpose in holding onto an expression once it had served its purpose of visual social exchange. Ki thought a moment and then said, “Do you want anything of his? You should probably have first dibs since you did the hard work.” Ki glanced at the child who cringed away from kir and added, “You can go next. I don’t think he has anything I want today. Don’t worry,” ki continued, unaware that ki was misinterpreting the most likely explanation for the child’s shudder of fear, “nobody yells at you when you take things from people who are dead if they hit you first. Not unless they were part of the group doing the hitting, and he was all alone. You don’t need to worry.” Tev tried another smile but had a feeling that this one didn’t work as well; ki hadn’t quite worked out the nuance necessary for offering “reassuring” expressions yet.

[tevgreenai-blog]

Tev can’t dance. Not even a little bit. Ki can’t even clap along to a beat; as far as kirs brain is concerned there is no beat. Ki can time things by counting, can measure the time it will take an object to cross a set space even with the wind moving against it -- but ki can’t keep a tempo or hear a rhythm. Tone is slightly better, because ki can detect the different notes of a person’s voice or the various range of the notes a musical instrument makes, but that’s all ki can do: detect it. When Tev speaks kirs words are flat, almost a monotone. There is no natural lilt and little emotional resonance (except when bits of Kailey leak through which never happens) although ki has been learning to simulate the latter through observation and a lot of trial and error.

Music is something else altogether, though. Whatever it is in a human brain that lets people tune-in and clap along, Tev doesn’t have it. Ki likes songs when they tell stories because ki likes listening to stories, but music that doesn’t have words is little more than empty noise to kir. Ki can tell that the notes are different, can hear the rise and sink of the pitch in an analytical sort of way -- but it doesn’t speak to kir, doesn’t connect with kir. There is no music in Tev’s soul.

Maybe that’s because ki doesn’t have one.

[tevgreenai-blog]

Tev didn’t know if ki had gotten what people called “a good deal” in her bartering that morning; the data she had collected on bartering so far was inconclusive, value being something that was apparently arbitrary according to the individuals involved and was furthermore prone to fluctuation according to events that ki could not determine. Certain items also had drastically different value depending on whether one was in Colorado Springs, the middle of the Wastes, or in Fervention where ki was now. The important thing to Tev wasn’t the shrewdness of the deal ki cut, though; it was what cutting those deals let kir do. Ferrying items between Colorado Springs and Fervention in exchange for goods that ki could use was a wonderful excuse for traversing between the two towns, and it kept kir fed and alive so ki could continue to enjoy life.

Ki enjoyed Fervention every time she came to the sprawling, ramshackle place. The flapping sound of the tents and tarps in the wind, the rich smell of both cooking and decaying food, the shouts and laughter and gossip and curses exchanged by the inhabitants, the eye-wateringly sharp stink of whiskey at the Legless Man, all the beautiful things tucked-away in the tent with the pretty birds and the rustling beads...it was a wonderful place. Tev loved Colorado Springs too of course -- it had been kirs first exposure to the glorious chaos of human life and ki would forever think of it as “home” because of that -- but Fervention was more intrinsically alive, in some ways, and ki liked that.

Fortunately it only took two or three days to travel between the two places, at least most of the time; delays happened of course, but it was never too long a trip and Tev liked the travel, too. There was always something interesting going on out in the Wastes, even if ki liked the sort of interesting that happened in the towns more. There were more people in the towns and they were more inclined to talk and laugh and argue than they were in the Wastes; mostly people out there avoided other people or tried to fight them. There was fighting in the towns too of course, but avoiding people was harder because everyone was so close together. Tev liked that; ki liked watching the people.

Ki liked listening to them too, and the sound of something unfamiliar drew kirs ear as ki walked through the dusty pathways that curled between the tents and tarps and metal sheets that made up most of the structures in Fervention. The pack on kirs back hung mostly empty now, its load of transported goods exchanged for consumable supplies and a bright band of braided beads whose use Tev didn’t know yet but whose pretty colors had caught kirs interest. It bumped against the back of kirs thigh as ki walked, its steady thump indicating that no one was trying to make-off with any of its contents with Tev’s permission. That was good because kirs hands were busy with the bowl of hot noodles and broth ki had exchanged a short knife for. Knives were good and useful tools, but hot noodles were better, especially when they were cooked with picked cabbage and spicy red peppers. Tev would pay a lot for anything lots of peppers in.

Now ki ferried the steaming food to kirs mouth in tiny finger-pinches; the vendor selling the hot noodles had offered little wooden sticks to eat the food with, but that would have cost most and Tev didn’t mind eating with kirs hands. They were dirty, true, but so was the rest of kir; why did it matter if kirs food got dirty too? It didn’t make the peppers taste any less spicy. Slurping up another handful of delicious food, Tev paused to listen to the twanging sounds that the brown-haired woman was making with the long-necked case of wood in her hands. Tev had seen other instruments before but ki didn’t know all their names yet; ki had only recently realized that they had different names but not individual ones. Ki had thought that they were like people, every one named something else, until ki had heard the same name repeated four times for different instruments of the same sort. This one looked a little bit like a ukulele, which she had learned about a few weeks ago when a woman in the Colorado Springs market had started to play one for tips, but it was a lot bigger.

One of the thin, twangy parts snapped under the woman’s fingers and she sighed with an expression on her face that Tev had learned to interpret as “sad,” but the sad didn’t last long; it melted into something that Tev had learned most people called “mind your own business,” but that wasn’t a fun thing to do; ki much preferred minding other people’s, so ki asked, “Why not? I think these noodles are very nice, and nobody stopped me having them. I just had to give the man who cooked them a knife, and he seemed to think that knife was very nice, too. I’m sure you could have nice things too if you wanted. Do you not think that that...ukulele is nice?” Tev was pretty sure it wasn’t a ukulele, but maybe it was just a big ukulele. Some people were a lot bigger than others after all, but you still called them people. “I think it looks nice. What were you doing with it?”

She could feel the skin on her face flaking off. Her body wasn’t used to be bombarded with this much radiation and dangerous sunlight, and this manifested in innumerous ways. In the beginning it was just with strong and unlivable headaches, that would cause Leah to spend hours sitting in a cold corner with her hands in her head, unable to do anything. So, in a way, she’d have to say that her biggest problem now being dry skin was actually quite an improvement.

She felt tempted to pick on the dead skin on her face, but already knew far too well that it’d only end up hurting more than it already did. To distract herself, she picked the guitar that was lying beside her. She had come across it that morning, but while it was still in perfect conditions, no one had had any interest in trading the dusty guitar for anything, so Maeve guessed that she was allowed to keep it. At least she would have some entertainment for the rest of the day.

She passed her fingers for the strings. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as out of tune as she thought it would. She started tuning it, using her hearing memory as best as she could. Her teachers had always told her she a good ear, but she hadn’t picked up any musical instrument in years, so she was sure she had lost some talent.

When she was done, she started playing the first song that she had learned. Tomorrow, from the musical Annie. It was a sweet song, she thought. Well, maybe now it was actually bittersweet. Not much because of the message that the song stated, but because of the memories that it brought to her. She could remember how sore her fingers were after that first lesson. How proud she was the first time she was able to play the song from beginning to end without making any mistake. Memories of music end around her middle of teens, after she lost all love for it and it became just a hobby, 

Yet, as she played in that moment, it was like she had found an old lover. The song wasn’t being played that smoothly, with Leah’s lack of practice making her take too much time transitioning from one chord to another, but she was still enjoying the moment, and that was something that she hadn’t done in quite some time.

With almost a smile on her lips, she was about to end the song, when one of guitar strings broke, leaving a small, but still hurtful, cut in her hand. Sighing, her face went back to its natural grumpy look as she put the guitar away.

“Guess you really can’t have anything nice these days.”

[tevgreenai-blog]

Beats in Binary Codes

@thenebulous

Tev was standing and watching, as usual; there were things that could only be learned by experiencing them -- by joining in -- but that stage of the experiment was usually a late one, coming only after considerable observation beforehand. Unless circumstances forced a more active role, of course. For now all was calm, at least by the standards of the marketplace; nothing in Colorado Springs was ever truly calm, which was what Tev loved about the place. It was what ki loved about the whole world, really.

Right now ki was trying to love dancing, but it wasn’t going well. Everyone else seemed to be getting something out of the music that Tev wasn’t. They were all moving together, whether they were part of the whirling group of people stomping around the ukulele-weilding musician or just a bystander tapping their feet on the sidelines. Tev tried tapping kirs feet but it felt wrong, felt off; there was none of the sense of connection that ki could almost taste as it flowed between the other watchers and dancers. They moved in time with one another as though to some unseen cue; Tev couldn’t tell what it was. Ki counted in kirs head, one-two-three-four, but it didn’t make things any clearer.

Deciding that maybe this was one of those things that had to be done to be understood, Tev stepped forward and stomped kirs feet like the dancers. Ki counted and watched the steps and echoed the pattern that everyone else was making but it didn’t feel right; kirs feet didn’t move at the same time, didn’t flow the way everyone else’s did. “There’s a component to this I’m missing,” ki announced, more to kirself than to anyone in particular. “There must be.”

[tevgreenai-blog]

Tev enjoys very strong flavors, especially intense spiciness. Ki has only been consuming solid food for six months, having presumably been provided with sustenance in some other way while ki was in the Rothschild Space Flight Center (kirs memories of that time are sporadic and hazy, being that ki spent much of it in shut-down mode being continuously reprogrammed by Dr. Borjigin), and as such ki has not yet decided on a favorite food but is happy to experiment.

Ki takes “experimenting” further than most people, perhaps; having no hang-ups about what precisely constitutes food and what doesn’t, Tev will cheerfully consume anything edible, from moldy bread to bugs. So far ki has not eaten anything that has proved to be poisonous, at least not fatally so, although a few dubious “meals” have resulted in violent, vomiting purges – kirs system ridding itself of non-compatible consumables before they can cause kir any damage, perhaps. The unpleasantness of those experiences hasn’t put a damper on Tev’s eager willingness to experience new foods -- of any sort, no matter how questionable their provenance or unappealing their smell.