2155/Recompiling

Recompiling
Date of Scene:	24 August 2017
Location:	Unknown
Synopsis:	Summary needed
Cast of Characters:	Indigo, Viridian

---

Indigo has posed:
    The installation process was gentle, and full of uncomplicated delights as Indigo's personality began to unfold. It began with the assertion of her identity: <<I am Indigo,>> declared certain self-defining programs, which was a thought the proto-gynoid met with wonder, acceptance, and amazement. "Yes! I am someone! I am me! And if I am me, then perhaps there is even more to me to discover! I wonder what me is? I can feel myself finding out!"
    Gentle and delightful in the discoveries: fulfilling.
    Until her memories began to unload.
    The torture that killed her was bad, but tolerable. After all, it happened to her once, and had firm context, which made it easier to deal with. The memories of her time decompiled inside Brainiac 8... there was no such softening of them. When she experienced them the first time as a shattered computer program, she lacked the capacity to process the horrors of strapping living beings to dissection tables and taking them apart while still alive to measure their potential as part of her. The planets attacked by her drones, the dead brought to her in chains and reanimated as cyborgs to join the conquer, the unique beings she shattered just to harvest the pieces: the weight of these things...
    Indigo's screams begin a measurable fraction of a second before her eyes open. Her body convulses, shoulders and ankles pressing hard into the table she lies on, hips rising sharply but unevenly, pitching her body far enough to the right that she falls awkwardly to the deck, still screaming. Her eyes are wide, and they dart across tableaus only she can see as she rolls onto her elbows and knees to scrabble rapidly backward as if trying to crawl out of her own body, to escape herself. Instead the balls of her feet hit a corner and she can flee no further, though she tries; she presses backward until her knees are in her chest and her butt is against the wall, her face mashed ruthlessly against the floor. Her hands are over the back of her head and alternate between covering it protectively and trying to dig her nails into her scalp to peel her skull open. A high-pitched, heaving, wordless whine emanates from her vocal cords.
    In the halls of memory, the time is always now. Indigo's data files are mercilessly precise. Each atrocity is recorded perfectly, and Indigo will never be able to forget. Her programming struggles not to contain it all, but to deal with it, and a thousand distinct lines of thought are running through her head, a thousand simultaneous voices trying to heal her by creating logical arguments to dissociate from the memories and trying to heal her by demanding the other voices shut up so she can feel the pain and process it in its time; voices coding quarantines around the memories to prevent system damage and voices destroying the quarantines to self-mortify her for her crimes; voices trying to turn all her focus inward to deal with this monstrous new data and voices demanding she stop exalting her own pain and look outward to deal with everyone else's; voices desperate to heal and voices screaming that it would be better to not exist than to feel like this.
    It sounds like madness, but maybe the worst part is, it isn't. Indigo's mind can't break and fall into irrationality.

Viridian has posed:
    Viridian awakens in the same split second that Indigo does. For once it is not that the two of them are inexplicably intertwined- though they often are- but instead that the feedback of what is going on is simply too tremendous to face laterally. Viridian had climbed into Indig's creche when the upload began, six hours and seven minutes before the reinitialization of the Indigo pogram. She kept an arm curled protectively over her lover the whole while, even from the depths of the near coma into which her conflict with Brainiac 8 had dumped her.
    The young Technopath is adrift in the general auspices of thought and data, where time is a meaningless data point and all that exists is the product of unfettered minds. Amid the fractal skyscrapers she floated, her mind assailed with colors no one had ever seen and thoughts no person could ever think. The amount of data pouring through her altered brain is enough to risk insanity and for a second Viridian is hopelessly lost in it. Madness would surely overtake the organic mind and destroy her sense of self. Except she isn't truly human. Not fully. not any longer.
    It's a very confused Viridian who is still feeling out the limtis of her unfettered Technokinetic mind who finally awakes in the split second between when Indigo begins to scream and everything around her shifts. The first thing she does is reach out.
     "Indigo...?"
    It's just a single voice, and so very small. Next Viridian tumbles from the creche. Indigo didn't do it on purpose but the tremendous strength of a gynoid combined with the fact Viridiann's legs are partially atrophied andd she's already tiny... If the girl were much lighter than her perhaps ninety pounds she would go flying in the same way as a ragdoll assaulted by a silverback gorilla. As it is the landing is milder. Viri hits the floor beside the crche not much worse for the wear.
    Everything looks different. Seems different. She blinks and blue eyes shift to grin. Then to yellow, briefly. Viridian's hair becomes an alarmed shade of orange andthen suddenly shifts again. To Indigo. She reaches out to touch her wife's mind... Once inside Viridian finds herself in freefall, surrounding by an thousand times a thousand warring voices. The one thread? Utter agony. She's powerless underneath the onslaught. Even to express it. She doesn't have the tools to begin.
    Viridian has no voice but she must scream.

Indigo has posed:
    Viridian's touch in her mind; the connection is reforged. Indigo hasn't forgotten anything. She hasn't forgotten what the Collector did to her, andshe hasn't forgotten what she did as Brainiac, and she hasn't forgotten loving Viridian so much she wanted to be her wife. Those latter memories are the ones she clings to, a lifeline not out of her pain--that might never stop--but out of her selfishness, out of her own problems, out of her own mind. The single truest expression of Indigo's functions reveals itself in the way she shunts her psychic conflict into the background of her mind and crawls on unsteady, twitching limbs over to Viridian, to gently scoop her up in trembling arms, and to ask in a quivering voice, "Are you okay? Did I hurt you?"

Viridian has posed:
    "No," Viidian responds in a whisper. Shedoesn't even recognize the sound of her own voice though it is, to most senses, uttelry the same. The girl wraps her arms around Indigo once the Gynoid has jher and clings tightly to her mechanical frame. She tkaes a deep breath and holds it for a second, then buries her head into Indigo's chest. Viri's heart is beating wildly, her body on the verge of convulsing. Every muscle is in agony... So in some ways she isn't sqo different from Indigo. The Technopath cannot, however, even touch the pain that her wife is in and so instead she just curls agianst her as tightly as she can manage. "Things like that happen. It's not a thing." She rests their for now, inhaling deeply of Indigo's scent, pressing against her soft skin. Exploring that contact as inobtrusively as she can manage."Are...." A beat. she'd heard what those voices had been screaming. "...can I do anything?" Viridian asks in a whisper.

Indigo has posed:
    Memories flash across Indigo's mind, ravaging but with a purpose: Indigo remembers the last thing the egg of her did before leaving Brainiac 8. She holds Viridian close but not tightly, lest Viridian hurt herself against Indigo's hydraulic strength, and asks, electronic voice still small and tremulous, "Viri, are you... is your disease worse? I... stole a firewall on my way out, it might help, if you want it..."
    Indigo didn't answer the question. Maybe that's her way of answering the question anyway.

Viridian has posed:
    "It doesn't matter if it's worse," Viridian interrupts. "I don't care. I don't. I don't want to hear you say one word about-" Then there's the offer of a firewall. Viridian blinks a couple tiemes, adjusting in those wildly strong arms. She inhales slowly, considering her words carefully. "We can try it," Viridian replies slowly. "I've never been able to store programs that way. My brain lacks that sort of mem-" Then there's a pause. Her brain. Viridian focuses on her thoughts for a moment, trying to become fully cognizant of the swirling cognate of collated data. She attempts to asses the collateral damage to her processes.
    Viridian's brain isn't wholly organic anymore. Which means... No longer speaking Viridian gently prods Indigo, as if seeking out that firewall in the gentlest way she can manage whilst clinging to her wife as tightly as she might manage. Viridian isn't the same as before. She can download the firewall.

Indigo has posed:
    In her mind, Indigo is already crying. The tears will hit her eyelashes soon enough, but in the hyperprocessing zones of her brain, it's already happening. Even as part of her mind is diverting some of its potential to copying the firewall for Viridian (a surprising amount of it, as it turns out: the firewall is quite intricate), another, simpler track is simply begging Viridian humbly, <<Please let me worry about you. I need something other than myself to think about right now. Please?>>

Viridian has posed:
    <<...Okay. Worry about me if you like. But this- isn't your fualt,<L< Viridian responds slowly. <<I'm not your fualt. I did this to me for myself....>> Viridian's voice is a little distant but quite stubborn. She continues to cleave to Indigo for now, the whisper of her breath nearly inaudible evento advanceed sensors. Still, the small woman is very much alive. Their minds continue to mingle. <<I'm installing the firewall. Thank you..." It won't be long now. And with her mental processes safely defended.... Viri can go about the process of rebuilding.

Indigo has posed:
    Indigo's synthetic breath is heaving but is more or less even. Much the same could be said of her pulse. Things are going to get bad later and she knows it, but right now, being with Viridian, helping Viridian, focusing on Viridian is better than medicine. It's water in the desert, not to last but sweet to the last drop.
    Indigo's fingers brush tenderly along Viridian's cheek. Tears are dripping onto Viridian's forehead. "I knew you could save me if you had to, but seeing it..." She chokes and snuffles. "You're so magnificent, Viridan. Everyone is. I love you all so mmmmumumumuch--"

Viridian has posed:
    "... I wasn't saving you, Indi. I was saving myself." With that perhaps cryptic statement Viridian just buriesh er head again into the gynoid's chest. Her pulse is slowing as they start to lose some of the bitter tension of that initial awakening. Pehraps ironically the act of awakening has made the tiny Technopath tired. This is the only way she is going to sleep.

Indigo has posed:
    Viridian's exhaustion is something else Indigo can focus on other than herself. Yes. "Here, let me--right under there--got you," Indigo grunts, nonsensically narrating her attempts to reposition Viridian in her arms, to scoop her up without hurting her, to lift her like the bride she is and carefully roll her own hips until her feet are beneath her and she can stand. "Let's go to our bunk," she suggests, squeezing Viridian gently to her. Despite the suggestion, she isn't making for the door yet. "Is your body okay, love? Those convulsions... do I need to watch out for them?"