Dr. Morgan Yu (whoareyu) wrote in valloic, @ 2021-02-04 09:46:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | ₴ inactive: morgan yu, ₴ inactive: murderbot |
Log: Murderbot and Morgan
What the Kentucky-fried fuck?WARNINGS Discussion of death, eye stuff, tentacles, and butchered sense of reality.
The forge was easy to find due to the heat and the smell of smoke. Murderbot slid inside, his steps light, eyes tracking movement as he found his target. His… person to talk to (people didn’t like being called targets, apparently).
Morgan didn’t appear to be too busy, nor did he have an air that said “leave me alone”, so Murderbot approached, straight to the point as usual: “Hello. I’m Murderbot. We spoke over the network when you were in the other Vallo.”
Morgan had his hands in a complicated piece of armor, carefully attaching the electronic bits that would give it a cool blue glow. No point in going around wearing rocket armor if you weren’t going to have cool glowing bits, Morgan figured, and his new boss was on board, so here he was. It wasn’t anything too involved for someone with Morgan’s level of expertise, though, so when he heard the workshop door swing open, he looked up and gave a slight smile that suggested he didn’t mind an interruption.
“Murderbot, nice to meet you face-to-face,” he said, apparently unperturbed by addressing a person as Murderbot. Being a human-typhon amalgam himself, Morgan had developed a rather blasé attitude toward the strange and unusual. “Do you need something?”
Murderbot had seen enough serials to know how to feign a casual stance. Walking over to one of the armor pieces on display, he looked it over, his hands in his pockets. He hoped making an effort to appear like not a threat would dampen the insult of his next words; he simply wasn’t sure how to ask it without offending anyone: “The previous Morgan Yu indicated that she felt like a threat to the people here at Vallo, and I concurred with her opinion. With your permission, I’d like to perform a Risk Assessment on you so that I can be aware of your general stability and skill set in the event of… well. Fucking calamity.”
Murderbot felt his face making kind of a wincing expression on his own - he really ought to have better control of his face. “...unless you feel more confident in your own ability to control the nature of your construct than the previous Morgan,” he added, because hell, this Morgan was sufficiently different enough that maybe, just maybe, he didn’t need to be monitored. Murderbot certainly didn’t enjoy being a babysitter, but he also didn’t like being in the fucking dark when it came to someone who previously had seemed unstable at best.
Morgan appeared skeptical--not offended, not angry, but skeptical--at the suggestion of a risk assessment. The conclusion of fucking calamity was funny enough to bring him back to a smile, though. He’d experienced a few fucking calamities, or at least he remembered them, and he could appreciate wanting to avoid them.
“What’s a risk assessment entail?” he asked. He didn’t mind letting someone else evaluate him, feeling fairly confident of the results, but he had made a pretty firm rule about not putting any more needles through his eye.
Murderbot had a particular lack of interest in stabbing needles through anyone’s eyes, hating fluids. “All our past choices are available to peruse here,” he answered, “publicly. I learned early on that it was considered rude to analyze them without permission.” Imagine that, data just out there, and you weren’t supposed to scan it? Murderbot well I never. “I understand it to be considered a violation of your privacy. With your permission, I would like to scan and analyze the data associated with your previous actions and put them through an internal module of mine that will recommend in quantifiable description how much of a public threat you are. In terms of losing control, of course,” he added with a shrug. “Pretty much half the population here, myself included, could be an unstoppable killing machine if they wanted to.”
“Oh.” Morgan blinked, taking in all that information and turning it around with what he knew of himself. “It, uh...might get weird.”
That was an understatement. Morgan was in part a set of transferred memories and DNA - the parts that were Morgan Yu, specifically - and in part a lone piece of a constantly connected and completely alien consciousness. And his history...Morgan wasn’t even absolutely confident of how much of it was real and how much was simulated, and then there were all the missing pieces of time. Would Murderbot be able to read those missing pieces, he wondered? And how did the risk assessment module take into consideration the personality shifting caused by the repeated neuromod installation and removal?
“...more than weird,” Morgan qualified. “I have no idea how my typhon brain-human brain combo will interact with something meant to understand human thought and memory.”
Murderbot’s lips moved into a smile; weird was his comfort zone. “It analyzes non-humans as well,” he assured Morgan. “I routinely am required to fight other sec-units and bots. It also analyzes situations, such as infiltration missions.” How odd to have someone worried about his safety. Not so odd as it once was, but still special enough to make him feel seen in a good way.
“But if you’d prefer, I can take your word for it.” Murderbot would never have offered this had he been tasked with a mission back home, and had Morgan been similar to the Morgan he had remembered, it wouldn’t have been offered here. But… well. But.
“If it doesn’t require putting a needle through my eye, I’m game,” Morgan replied with a shrug. “I’m still scientist enough to want to find out what you see and how it compares to the previous iteration of me. I’m actually pretty good with psychic-to-tech connections, so if you’re confident it won’t fry you, let’s do it.”
Curiosity was the blessing and the curse of the scientific mind. Now that he knew it was an option, he had to know what it did. And while he had gone and acquired ethics and empathy in the course of having his brain modified over and over, this didn’t seem like it would be a violation of either. Might as well let an assassin poke around in his weird brain.
“Do you have somewhere to connect?” Murderbot had a port on the back of his neck, of course, but he’d purposefully destroyed it months ago. He had another, smaller port on his wrist that would do, but if Morgan didn’t have somewhere to connect then he’d have to sift through by hacking the feed, and it’d just be easier and faster to do a physical connect…
...and somewhere he knew, deep inside the code of his mind, that the men and women of the Haus would be making inappropriate jokes about this.
“Yes, but probably not how you’re thinking,” Morgan replied with a wry smile. To someone who’d never seen a typhon before, this was going to be weird at best, horrifying on a Lovecraftian level at worst. On the other hand, a guy with a name and profession like Murderbot had probably seen some strangeness in his time - he didn’t strike Morgan as the type to panic just because the vision before him was a little dark and spidery and foreign. “I can...reach out, I tend to call it? I put a psychic feeler out, sometimes also a physical one, and I can connect with an electronic source that way. But it’s not a conventional port, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Immediately his Risk Assessment Module lost its shit, correctly pointing out that this could open him up to malicious code at best and complete annihilation at worst. Murderbot silently put it on mute and told it to calm its tits. “Let’s do it.”
He was used to being a connection - ART (Asshole Research Transport) had once done something similar to what Morgan was proposing. He hadn’t trusted ART that much either, and it had worked out okay, and by “okay” he meant that only bad people had been brutally slaughtered, so whatever.
“Remember, it’s only weird if you make it weird,” Morgan said, and then his hand morphed into a collection of pulsing gray-black cords of shiny something, no longer exactly hand-shaped. A faint purple glow rose around the end of the tendrils, and Morgan extended them slightly toward Murderbot. “Physical connection makes it a little more stable.”
To Murderbot’s credit, he didn’t blink or flinch. His muted Risk Assessment Module might have produced an inarticulate “GAHHHH” but as previously mentioned, it was mute and Murderbot didn’t give a shit.
“I prefer physical for this form of data connection anyway,” Murderbot confirmed, and flipped his wrist toward the tendrils. Honestly, Morgan’s tentacles looked a great deal like some of the Fourth Generation connections that the Corporation Rim made everyone buy and use until the Fifth Generation came out, and then you had to buy converters or new shit altogether because motherfucking capitalism.
While there was a certain tentacleness about it, the end of Morgan’s hand didn’t feel like a collection of tentacles at all. There was the same sort of give and flexibility, but the surface was cool to the touch and smooth like glass. Morgan wound the threads around Murderbot’s wrist with the sort of grin a person who’s taking an unreasonable risk wears, and almost instantly, the connection was made.
Morgan’s mind wasn’t like most people’s.
There were human memories in there - stern and distant parents, hacking his brother’s computer, the high green hills of Sichuan, the sleek metal and glass of an expensive San Francisco apartment, fervent studying…
Then came a slew of memories that appeared to contradict each other. Bringing medicine to a friend in one, letting her die alone in another. Cold detachment as a human test subject dies in horrific pain, and abject horror at the mere idea of using unwilling human test subjects in a different-but-same vision. A space station exploding, or a bomb set off in the center of the golden filament they called the Coral.
And along with all that, memories that understood the Coral completely differently. Memories of being part of something, of being just one piece of a massive entity, exploring and looking for food, hiding to evade predators, taking neverending joy in experiencing the universe - or at least, that was the best those thoughts could translate to humanoid terms. The typhon weren’t like anything else in the universe, and the intricacies of their thoughts didn’t really make sense to anyone used to thinking in human terms.
Pieces were missing, but in flashes it was easy to see the things Morgan could do. Bending a machine’s programming to his will, picking things up from a distance, perfectly mimicking the form of a nearby object, making more mimics in what was left of a corpse, striking out with a gold glowing orb that put out a massive force around it, even swinging a pipe wrench with deadly force. An unstoppable killing machine, indeed...but not much interest in using that power. A brilliant mind, but its sharp edges were now blunted with empathy. Morgan Yu was and was not a host of things at once, but oddly enough, he could be ruled no more a threat than anyone else. Control was something he had plenty of.
Connecting to a foreign being was always an exercise in surprise. Murderbot didn’t have a stomach, but if he did, he might have understood that human sensation of missing a stair while walking downstairs and nearly falling, your “stomach leaping into your throat”. He’d never connected with anything quite like Morgan - but then, doing so was strange, then barely comprehensible, and then all the memories and half-remembered glimpses of an unlived existence began sorting themselves into proper configuration for classification and tagging.
Murderbot was a sec-unit, after all. Back home, humans generally understood that to mean “horrific killing machine”, and it was true - he could horrifically kill. But that sold his abilities short. War-bots, not security units, had been built to murder large numbers. Security units had been build to identify threats and be able to reason with them, and murder them if necessary. That extra component allowed Murderbot to engage with a wide variety of connections and - most importantly - sift through massive amounts of information and stimuli at once.
Which was to say, this shit was wild, but he was largely cool with it. Beat having to attend a party in person anyday.
Once he was satisfied with the data tagging, he gave his wrist a shake to warn Morgan that ejection was safe.
“One moment while I process,” he advised in a pleasant voice that wasn’t his usual dour grump; it had been pre-recorded by some human who hadn’t anticipated that a bot would want to communicate on its own.
Processing completed 23.2 seconds later, which was frankly embarrassing but fuck it, it was a lot of data. “Speaking quantifiably, your risk assessment sits at about a 21.537% chance of failure, which is well in line with the average human of stable mental health. You are safe. Speaking qualifiably, what the Kentucky fried fuck.”
Twenty-three point two seconds had given Morgan time enough to go back to having a human hand, get used to being solo and not connected to a network again, and have the mental wherewithal to laugh out loud at Murderbot’s assessment of the situation.
“Which aspect of the Kentucky-fried fuck do you want to know about?” Morgan asked. “Because even the short version is a pretty long story. I don’t mind answering, though. Bridging gaps of understanding is sort of my purpose.”
“I know a sufficient amount,” Murderbot hedged, because he’d done research on his own months ago when he first had met the other Morgan Yu. “You’re the result of imprinting on a Typhon certain human characteristics and memories for the purpose of scientific advancement, but it all went to shit.” The fact that Morgan wasn’t actually human didn’t faze Murderbot in the least. Humans were-- we’ll go with fine - but largely intimidating when they weren’t doing stupid things. “Is that largely correct?”
“Yes and no,” Morgan replied. “Things went to shit when Alex and the original Morgan tried to put Typhon abilities into humans. Putting human abilities into the Typhon was Alex’s attempt to fix what they broke. I was his first successful experiment. They found the right mix of Morgan’s DNA and mirror neurons to implant, ran me through a simulation to test it, and determined that they’d managed to give me empathy. Alex’s hope was that because I was human and Typhon, I could be a bridge, help the two species communicate, and maybe help humanity survive.” He gave Murderbot a winning smile. “But no pressure, right?”
Murderbot gazed at him while Morgan spoke, considering. He had been told on more than one occasion that his typically expression-less face made him seem intimidating, but he didn’t want to give one emotional reaction to the story before he’d heard the whole thing.
“Essentially,” he said finally, perking up as he found something to reference, “you’re that meme in which God fucks up the monkeys and accidentally creates humans by giving them anxiety, but in a more science fiction format.”
Morgan considered that a moment, weighing the metaphor in his mind, then nodded. “Yeah, pretty much. Assuming, of course, that the memory I have of waking up from the simulation is real. It’s possible I’m just Morgan Yu with one neuromod too many, running experiments and scenarios, and the memory I have of being part of the Typhon is the fake. My sense of reality’s pretty well shot, to be perfectly honest.”
“Sounds like a pain in the ass to sift through.” Murderbot sympathized. He… empathized, shit. Yes, that’s what that feeling was - that deep-seated inability to trust one’s own experience was something he unfortunately empathized with.
Murderbot was patently not great with emotions. It wasn’t that he didn’t have them so much that he didn’t ever really know how to handle them once he had them. He had a tendency to just bottle things up and desperately hope they went away, but he was beginning to learn that it was useless to do that - impulse always came back, so he went out on a limb and did the thing he hated to do: self-reflect and empathize:
“I destroyed the port on the back of my neck because it was used to upload malicious orders,” he said. “My mission is to protect my human clients; this turned me against them. When it was over my memory was wiped by the Company because they didn’t want me to be a defective product. Piecing together what happened was an exercise in confusion and frustration. And that was just one incident - not a fuckton of lives and memories as you’ve experienced.”
"Oh, wow." Morgan wished he'd said something smarter. He was usually really good at saying smart things. It had simply never crossed his mind that he might meet someone in Vallo who could actually understand what it was like to have a memory full of holes and an incredibly powerful brain that you nonetheless couldn't really trust. He couldn't quite process that all at once, and the words came falling out to alert Murderbot to the fact that he was in fact processing.
"One incident's enough, when it comes to that stuff," Morgan said at last. "It sucks, right? You get used to being able to count on what you know, and then once you can't, you can never really be sure again. I hate it."
“It’s fucking hateable,” Murderbot agreed, lifting his chin a little. “Wondering what you’ve forgotten is worse than having the goddamn haunting-ass memory in the first place.”
He could delete his own memories, if he wanted to (not that he did). He was too afraid he might need it later. Murderbot regarded Morgan thoughtfully, and then suggested: “We’ve talked about The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon before - my favorite piece of media. If you’re ever bothered by your memories or lack thereof, you are welcome to watch it with me.”
"I'd like that." Morgan surprised himself by answering so readily, and it made him smile despite the dark turn the conversation had taken before. It was ironic, perhaps, that the Morgan Yu who was also a nameless alien was actually much better at making friends than the original. A little less obsessive, destructive ambition, a little more interest in forming connections, and there you had a Morgan Yu who accepted invitations to hang out.
"You have plans for Friday night?" he asked. "That is, if the invitation's open for when I'm not any more troubled than the average day."
Murderbot’s “plans” for Friday night usually consisted of powering down to 30% and doing his version of resting, which typically consisted of mainlining media and buying heavy-duty pants with too many pockets (he liked pockets) online. Nowhere in these plans involved dealing with humans.
But Morgan wasn’t a human, was he? Not really. And even if he was human enough to count, he reminded Murderbot of the Haus humans in that he wasn’t entirely exhausting to be around. Murderbot decided to make an exception on his wild Friday nights. He figured he could always change his mind later if it was too much. “Come by my apartment; I live in Morningside,” he said, and forwarded the information to Morgan in their shared feed. “I don’t have any food to consume so bring anything you want to eat. I’ve got the first twenty episodes.”
“I’ll bring popcorn - I don’t really need to eat, but I like to. And popcorn is a quintessential part of the movie experience in my culture.” Even the original Morgan Yu, with a Chinese father and a German mother, raised in California, would have a hard time pinning down exactly what “his culture” was. Now that he was also a typhon, Morgan figured he was simply a culture of one, and that culture included movie popcorn. “I’m in Morningside, too, so that should be easy - I don’t even have to use telekinesis to get to the fourth floor in this Vallo’s version of it.”
Murderbot, who had no knowledge of popcorn other than people griping when someone left it in too long and burnt it, considered the likelihood of Morgan not paying attention to popcorn, and decided to give him a nod in agreement. His apartment had a microwave - brand new, never used at this point. Might as well break it in.
“You can use telekinesis if it’s nostalgic,” he said, his voice flat as it typically was when he delivered his version of humor. With a nod, he indicated the door. “I’ll let you work. I’ll see you Friday night for the media viewing. Don’t lose your shit between now and then; I’d feel fucking dumb.”