Who: Alice Liu [KRAKATOA] & Bea Shelley [TWITTER] Where: Brewed Awakening When: Recently! What: A friendly chat, iPods, islands, and fancy drinks. Warnings: None
With the afternoon off from the library, Alice had blocked off her whole afternoon for schoolwork. She had only signed up for one class in the summer session, an elective on international metahuman history, and the reading assignments had piled up faster than she'd anticipated. Settling into one of Brewed Awakening's armchairs with a book open across her lap and a mug of hot tea on the side table next to her, Alice popped an earbud into her ear, pressed her thumb to the circular button on her iPod, and -- nothing.
"Noooo," she whined, deflating. Alice was ready to resign herself to a study session soundtracked by the B-Rude background music when she saw the shiny Macbook and fancy coffee that could only belong to the Lock's resident Cyberlinguist.
She tucked a napkin into her book to mark the page before tucking it in her bag and walking over to the two-top. "Hey… Bea?"
Bea was engrossed in what appeared to be a one-sided conversation with her laptop as she sipped her drink with a look of confused consternation on her face. “The heck? What do you mean? That doesn’t make any sense… “ she muttered. She was still scratching her head when she noticed Alice’s approach.
She looked up and greeted her with a smile. “Alice! Hey! What’s up?” Code irregularities could wait.
"Oh hey," Alice replied brightly. "Not much. How are you?" While she didn't look away from Bea (that was rude!), she fidgeted with her phone cord, absently winding the blue wire around her fingers. "I'm not bothering you, am I?"
“I’m good, how are you? You’re not bothering me at all - company’s nice!” Bea said, gesturing to the empty seat across from her. The closed her laptop and picked up her frothy beverage instead.
"I was just studying when I saw you over here," Alice explained, as she slid into the proffered seat. She tugged her headphones' plug out of the socket and set the shiny, black brick that had once been her iPod in the middle of the table, between herself and the older woman. Bea was so cool and professional. "But my iPod won't turn on, and I was wondering if you wouldn't mind, um, asking it what's wrong." That was how her powers worked, right?
“Ooooooooh, let’s have a look at it!” Bea said, eagerly accepting the offered device. She liked when people she liked came to her with things like this - it was like a puzzle. Bea loved puzzles almost as much as she liked helping people (ones who weren’t jerks, anyway) out.
“What are you studying?” Bea asked Alice conversationally, making eye contact before turning her attention to the iPod. She gave its buttons a tentative prod, then wrinkled her nose as she spoke to it, “What’s your problem, honey? Why’d you gotta be like that?” She pressed it to her ear and listened for some inaudible response. To anyone who didn’t know her, it probably just looked like she was bewildered as to how an iPod worked.
"My major is geophysics, but it's summer, so all I'm taking is a metahuman history elective…" Alice said, but her voice trailed off as she watched Bea interact with her iPod. "Is it saying anything?" she prodded, tentatively. "Is 'it' the right term to use? Does my iPod have a gender?"
“Metahuman history - that sounds really cool! I never took anything like that, but then, I never knew I was a Meta back in college… “ Bea said, trailing off as something the iPod told her seemed to spark her interest. She hmmmmmed, but then returned to her conversation with Alice as though she hadn’t just paused in mid-sentence.
“Computers have no concept of gender that I know of - they’re a bit more progressive than we are in that respect,” she said, and smiled. “I think it just got a bit tired, is all - its battery is a bit low, but a reset ought to do the trick.” Bea held down the power and home buttons for a few seconds, and an Apple logo appeared. “Aha! Rise and shine! That wasn’t so bad.” She handed the iPod back to Alice.
Alice beamed as she took the device back into her hands. "Thank you so much," she gushed. "I don't know what I would have done without you. Probably gone back to my apartment and ordered a new one."
“Please, never hesitate to ask! I love helping out, and anything that could save some poor little iPod from winding up at the dump is worth a shot,” Bea said, chipper. She clasped her hands across the top of her laptop and grinned.
Alice looked down at her glossy iPod screen, still booting. "Your power is so cool," she intoned, impressed. Useful powers fascinated her, especially when the only use she'd gotten out of hers all day was being able to drink her tea as soon as she received it. "Computers don't have genders, but do they, like, have personalities? Do they have names?"
“Not personalities like ours, no, but they do have their own little quirks - some are slower, or more stubborn, or less communicative, but they don’t really have like… you know, aspirations or fears, or y’know, any of that kind of stuff? They just keep doing their thing, which is pretty much all they want, as far as I can tell. I’ve never really talked to, y’know, fancy AI or anything like that, so I could be wrong?” Bea wrinkled her nose, contemplative. Fortunately, the latter question was a bit simpler to answer than one that involved considering artificial existentialism. “They’ve got names though, yes! They’re just long strings of numbers - kind of like an IP address - but I think you could call them names just the same. You can call them whatever you like, though. They don’t seem to mind.”
"Aww, that sounds cute!" Alice grinned wide. She had no plans to adopt a string of numbers to refer to her iPod, but the idea appealed to her. "A fancy AI, is that something you'd want to do? To use your powers on, I mean."
“Gosh, I don’t know! That’d be cool, but also maybe a bit… I don’t know, scary? Although who knows! Maybe it’d be like that movie Her and we’d be soul mates.” Bea said, wiggling her fingers like a digital witch as though to emphasize that she was just being fantastical. “What about you, Alice? Is there anything special you’d do with your powers if you could do whatever you wanted to?”
Alice sighed wistfully. Her iPod booped in her hands. She had thought about what it would be like to use her powers so many times, but even in a volcanically-active location, her practical applications were limited. "Maybe go to Hawai'i and, like, make my own private island," she suggested.
“Ooooooooooooh,” Bea said, allowing herself to daydream for a moment about what it would be like to be away from here on an island of her own creation. It was never going to happen, of course, but she would have gone stir-crazy years ago if she hadn’t been allowing herself to imagine what-ifs from time to time. “You’d be the Queen of your domain, sipping fancy beverages on the beach. I like the way you think.”
Alice laughed at the image. She hadn't been to the beach since she was a kid and could use her day pass in Los Angeles, but it sounded nice. Maybe now that her iPod worked again, she could load up some ocean noises and pretend. "Well, I'd have to get someone to help me out with the drinks and the sand," she admitted. "My island would just be black rocks."
Bea playfully waved Alice’s concerns away. “Oh, that’s just icing on the cake,” she said. “Besides, I’m sure someone here could figure something out.” That depended, of course, on said someone or someones being free as well, but Bea refused to acknowledge the thought. “Just remember me when you need someone to make your touristy app.”
"I wouldn't dream of another developer!" Alice played Bea's rabbit game so much that it had earned a spot on her phone's home screen.
She glanced back at the beverage, no longer steaming, she had left at her table, and it reminded her of what she had come to the coffeeshop to accomplish. "Anyway, I have to get back to my reading," Alice said. "Thanks again for fixing my iPod." She pointed at Bea's mug. "I'll buy you another one sometime to pay you back?"
“Oh, don’t worry about it! Any time.” Bea said, and smiled. “It’s always nice to help a pal.”