Happily Humming Heather

[Conduit]

"Ohohoho! Does it now? Let's see..." she actually leans over to manually type on the laptop and Will would feel a kind of tugging that fades after a moment. On the laptop an instance of the 'game' pops up, apparently copied over. Another bit of keyboard clacking and the pull turns into a tingling push and Conduit clicks on the little 'Brick' icon, followed by the overwhelming urge to shift into a brick pouring into Will.

[Will Stanton]

Thought followed function, and the response time between Conduit's command and Will shifting was...well, maybe a little longer than she expected, but not too long. This particular Will had not innate desires to be a brick -- that's not what it had come out of the cauldron for, afterall. That being said, a direct command like this wasn't going to be ignored for long, and within about 30 seconds, Conduit's high-tech, powerful WillPhone had been firmly bricked.


The brick had the faintest outline of Will's face on one side, caught in a surprised expression, mouth open as if to protest. It was blended into the faded red of the brick, though; not really noticeable unless you examined it closely. And who examined a brick?

[Conduit]

Steepling her fingers Conduit sends another command, maintaining the 'Brick' one and adding 'Desert' to see if they'd combine into a pyramid. Or anything else.

[Will Stanton]

It did not, in fact, turn into a pyramid. Instead, the 'brick' stopped being made out of, well, brick, and instead softened into sand. Sand that, when not acted upon by an outside force, maintained it's shape as a brick, but could be pushed around and reshaped like sand with any effort. Almost like a block of kinetic sand, only both firmer and more malleable, depending on what was being done to it.

[Conduit]

"A sand-brick, that makes sense. Crap! Crap crap crappity crap! This'll take forever to map out! Unless....." She glances over at the laptop and picks it up. She'd only copied over the game but what if...

Sand-brick-Will would feel the commands ease up and force him back into a phone, followed by the pulling sensation, except this time it kept going, feeling like a vacuum stuck right into his head. Except that it's not emptying anything out, only making a copy. Or rather copies as folder after folder pop up on Conduit's laptop. All in their own little empty box.

[Will Stanton]

This worked...more or less like Conduit thought it would, cloning copies of Will's phone architecture over, and over, and over, each isolated from the world around them for as long as Conduit kept them idle and offline.

[Conduit]

"Mwahahaha! Yes, this defies all hardware requirements!" she laughs as multiple instances of a cloned consciousness are running on nothing but a consumer-grade laptop. "Something somewhere is running a whole buncha data to make this happen and it's buried somewhere in your brain. Or... thoughts or... I dunno, it's somewhere and it's inside of you!" she informs the phone, though Will might not necessarily be aware of what she's done.

"Oh right, the poison." she suddenly remembers. "Damnit, this is so inconvenient!" she stomps her foot. "So, hey, you said you'd help me, riiiight? If I let you skedaddle?" she puts on an obviously fake tone of voice.

[Will Stanton]

Code: Select all

>>That's...not quite what I said, no.  I said that if you're being blackmailed or coerced, that I could help.  That the university could help.

[Conduit]

"Yes, with robot blood. Try to keep up! Eesh. So, we got a deal? You get me some nanite-laced blood from Headmistress Beep-Boop and I don't delete you to install Fortnite."

[Will Stanton]

Code: Select all

>>You realize that plan doesn't work for, like, two reasons, right?  If you DID let me go, you couldn't delete anything.  And I'm not going to steal someone's blood for you.  You want some, we can walk in there and ask, like civilized people.

[Conduit]

"Ha! Ha ha ha! And then I never walk out again. No thank you! I'm not that dumb. And you shouldn't be either! I absolutely cannot be trusted, you dummy. Which really only leaves me one option..."

Code: Select all

~~> Code Injection in progress...
~~> Conditional rerouting of active processes
~~> Compiling triggers

"Gonna have to make it so any time you think of today and this conversation it gobbles up your train of thought and shunts it to... hmm... Let's make it random and I'll throw in a couple funny ones. Picturing whoever you're talking to naked, that's a classic. And turning into a cow. Uncontrollable laughter? For... anywhere between 1 minute and 1 hour. Head turns into a bucket with a face scribbled on it..." she goes on, rattling off things ranging from horrifying to childishly stupid.

"And it'll delete itself when you send me a drop of robo-blood. Don't worry, I'll jam that idea all the way in your subconsciousness so you don't trap yourself in a loop. You'll just know you gotta do it for reasons! I think. Never done this to something that's not always a machine, but that's science for ya!"

[Will Stanton]

Code: Select all

>>You really don't think they'll notice me acting strange and figure out something's up in about 45 seconds?

[Conduit]

"I dunno, I think I'll hedge my bets on you not being particularly 'normal' most of the time. Besides, it's a failsafe." she says, picking up the phone and walking over to the nearest window.

[Will Stanton]

Code: Select all

>>I certainly hope you're providing your latest employers with better quality work than this,

Will scoffed.

[Conduit]

"Oh I'm soh-rie! Was this not up to your standards? Do you want to rate me 1 star? Fine!" she huffs and in a childish fit starts splaying Will's 'program' wide open. This time with a big bottomless pit of deletion that she chucks every bit of memory-deluge into to focus on the rest.

"Here, how bout we turn you into a dumpster in an alley." she says, dropping Will on the floor before taking a step back to make room for the expanding shapeshifter. "Or maybe just a pile of garbage all together?" She makes the dumpster turn inside out and warp into a bag full of, well, trash. "Oh I know! Why don't I turn you into a bomb and send you back?" This time it takes a bit longer to warp the garbage into a two foot robot toy with a red countdown clock in it's chest. "Ya know what happens when you detonate a neutrino-bomb halfway through a quantum-lock portal? I sure don't but don't you wanna find out!?" she grins as she works herself into a frenzy.

"You know they thought a nuclear bomb might ignite the atmosphere and never stop. I bet we could make that happen. Or maybe I'll launch you into space as my personal satellite? Then you can watch as I dismantle everything bit by bit down here until whoever's left begs me for a brain-implant so they don't have to suffer the fate of not being me anymore!"

[Will Stanton]

Conduit would have little trouble shifting Will into the dumpster or the garbage, but while she was briefly able to turn Will into the walking robot-bomb, that quickly provided resistance. Error messages of all shapes and sizes popped up onto the screen, as fast as Conduit could clear them, and Will's shape shuddered and shifted, back towards his normal form.

"I ammmm nnot a weapon," he managed to grunt out. "I am many things to many people. But not that. Never that."

Having an angry X-Man in her room was probably not one of Conduit's goals, though it would presumably be short-lived.

[Conduit]

"Oh shitsticks! Back! Down! Phone time!" she panics, especially as Will pushing back begins to slowly shift him away from any lingering computery-ness that let's Conduit control him in the first place. She grabs a random decorative plate holding those weird wicker-ball things that seem to spontaneously appear in generic domiciles and physically smacks Will on the head, trying to squish him flat and into a tablet.

[Will Stanton]

Will stalked forward a few steps, closing the gap between him and Conduit, and just for a moment, the techno teen would get a glimpse of what it might be like to actively piss off the Champion of a War Goddess. Don't do that!

But, due to a combination of her power and repeatedly hitting Will on the head with a plate -- OK, more the former than the latter, admittedly -- Conduit was able to regain control. with Will flattening out and squishing down into a tablet under the repeated decorative hammering.

A close call, that.

[Conduit]

"Phew! Almost made me lose my cool there." she dramatically wipes her brow with the back of her hand. "Why you gotta be so stubborn? Eesh. Fine, I'll go and edit all of this out manually." she groans. "You'll just not remember at all why you want to bring a drop of robo-blood to some Mutant Town park. Stupid bio-brain in a machine-chassis. You're supposed to just do what I want you to but nooo, it's all mushy interpretations trying to squeeze around me." she rambles as she goes about deleting Will's memories of their encounter.

"There, now go find your way home. I have digital copies to poke." she says and opens the window to frisbee Will out onto the street.

Meanwhile the Will-copies on Conduit's computer continue to be subjected to repeated combinations of shifting commands, speeding up to the point of trying to leave little to no room for actively thinking about it, aiming to have the combination of commands happen more instinctual than consciously.

[Will Stanton]

It remains almost comically easy to get into Will's memories and delete bits and pieces as Conduit sees fit, just as she could implant all the subconscious triggers in his mind, the list expanding as she got creative and/or vindictive over the stupid bio-brain cosplaying as a sensible piece of tech.

Flinging the phone out the window, she would see it sit there for a moment, before twisting into a sitting position on the sidewalk, shaking his head a bit confusedly, and staggering down the road towards the university.


Meanwhile, Conduit's shifting command program continued to run, recording the speed and efficiency of each generation and continuing to improve as the algorithm refined itself with each generation...

[Conduit]

Pacing around the safe-house, Conduit uses her power to single out one of the Will copies to pull out of the shifting analysis.

Code: Select all

~~> "How are you doing this? I can tell that when you're a phone your power does something to run a whole consciousness on a bit of hardware but now there's no body for you to shift and it still works!"

[Will Stanton]

Code: Select all

>>We're not going to get into issues of transubstantiation now, are we?  Because we'll be here for a while.

[Conduit]

Code: Select all

~~> "Well I don't know what that means so probably not!"

the code huffs somehow.

"Working theory." she starts dictating to nothing, though presumably the laptop is recording her notes. "Can't be he's just being electrons cause all the copies are using ones that came from the laptop itself. Concludingly, subject's shapeshifting works in the abstract, including non-physical thingies."

Code: Select all

~~> "Hey, noodles for brains, have you done something like this before? Run on hardware that's not your body?"

[Will Stanton]

Code: Select all

>>Sort of.  Yes.  Briefly, a long...~long~ time ago.  In a different universe, with a different ASHLIE.

[Conduit]

"Not just my power helping out then... Hypothesis! Subject exists completely outside physical space somehow. No wait. Amendment! Subject can exist entirely within a system that can conceivably hold his mind. But what are the limits?"

Conduit runs off and there's the slamming of cabinets from an adjacent room, followed by the sound of something breaking. Finally she comes back holding a potato that clearly has been sitting in the back of a cabinet for way too long. Sticking out of it are a nail and a pence coin, connected to wires wrapped around and stuck back into the tuber at random. "Alright, time to experiment!" she says and slaps the potato down next to the laptop before jamming an USB cable into it. Not soon after Will (the one she's pulled from the simulated test chambers any way) would feel that tugging sensation again as Conduit tries to transfer him over into the starch-based object that you'd have to be generous to call a battery, much less an electronic appliance.

[Will Stanton]

Conduit attempted to move this Will file from her computer to her potato, in a sentence that's probably never been said before.

But, for the first time, she was encountering resistance. Whatever was the...minimum operating requirements of this 'file' she was trying to move didn't seem to be met by a piece of starch with a processing power of 0. Sure, a potato could store a very weak charge, but Will wasn't just an electric charge; there was more to him than that.

This did not mean Conduit couldn't keep pushing to see what would happen, but it was fairly clear that it wouldn't 'run' like it did on her laptop.

[Conduit]

"Aw scrap! But it means you need a substrate!" she claps. "Cause you're locked into being a program, I bet. That's how your power works, isn't it?" she asks, scrolling through some of the results of the array of force-shifting Wills. "You're like a compiler and as long as it makes sense to you it runs, doesn't it? I wonder if I can ram that up against reality enough to break something."

Code: Select all

~~> "Tell me something about how you think the world works. Like physics and stuff! Why does water boil or how gravity works or how does a super-conductor field generate a manifold?

Those might not be even remotely comparable in terms of complexity, but Conduit has caught on to the possibility of an unstoppable force hitting an immovable object so she's not entirely tailoring her questions to her audience. Not that she has a good grasp of what is common knowledge and what isn't, having been educated by a transhumanist megalomaniac in a fortress of super-science.

[Will Stanton]

Code: Select all

>>Water boils because you add heat to it.  Matter exists in one of three states...well, a few more than that, but that's complicated.  Get something too cold, it solidifies.  Get something too hot, it melts.  Get it even hotter, and it boils.

>>Gravity is the force of objects pulling on one another.  Larger...erm, more dense, typically...objects have stronger gravity than smaller objects, and so their pull is stronger, but technically everything is pulling on everything else all the time.

>>...I have no idea what you're talking about.

[Conduit]

Code: Select all

~~> "Hrm, well you're not completely wrong and I made that last one up as a test."

Conduit scrunches up her face and drums her fingers on the laptop keys without actually hitting any. She'd thought she was on to something but now she has trouble coming up with something actionable. She's got a physics-breaking lever, there's gotta be something she can do with it. Even if it currently only exists in digital form. Unless... if the only reason she couldn't cram him into the potato was because he knows just enough about computers to recognize when something isn't one... And if that's true then maybe the only reason he can't shift the laptop or whatever not-his-body he's inhabiting is because he thinks he's not supposed to be able to...

Fingers now drumming on the table in excitement she starts going through Will's files and she starts taking out whatever academic knowledge she can find. How electricity works, what a computer is, really any kind of understanding of the world that pertains to electronics. And then she tries again to shove him into the potato. When she encounters the same resistance as before she makes her power push harder and harder until suddenly something feels like it gives.

Except instead of transferring Will into the potato, the tuber violently explodes, splattering bits of starch all over the place.

"Fuckcicles!" Conduit shouts and falls off the couch from where she'd been hunching over the laptop.

Code: Select all

~~> "Well the good news is I'm pretty confident the rules governing your power aren't entirely in your own head."
~~> "Wait, that's not good news at all! It woulda been way better if I could rewrite you into some universal reality manipulator just by making you dumb as a rock!"

[Will Stanton]

Interestingly, removing those bits from Will's files doesn't actually make his overall size any smaller on disk. Not that that helped Conduit in any way shape or form.

Code: Select all

>>I can't warp reality or something.  Things work because they work; it's not more complicated than that.

[Conduit]

Code: Select all

~~> "Boo! You're warping reality right now by running a hundred entire people-simulations on a shitty laptop."
~~> "There's no good reason why it shouldn't work on a po-tay-toe that's got electricity running through it."
~~> "And if it works on a tater then it can work on anything and if it stays a program then I can control it and I want a virus that'll let me infect and control anything!"
~~> "Boooooo!"

Conduit stomps her feet a couple times at reality and a dumb shapeshifter not adhering to her every whim. "Stupid, stupid, stupid! Why doesn't it work like that?"

Code: Select all

~~> "Fine! Be that way!"
~~> "What other weird stuff can you do? You got an instruction manual for your power in that code of yours somewhere? A list of known functions?"

[Will Stanton]

Code: Select all

>> A virus?  Fairly sure that's weak to modern medicine.  And what the hell's a 'laptop', anyway?

Will did, apparently, have a healthy man page, and documentation; the results of literal eons of experimentation. Addendums and notes apparently 'written' by the various forces that at one point or another had worked on Will -- Black Air, Sara Stanton, Melpomene, Wyll Wyldclay, even Conduit herself in notes she wouldn't remember writing. The shoulders of giants, as it were.

[Conduit]

"Hey! That's trademark infringement! I never wrote those notes. Writing notes is for goobers!" Conduits complains. "But they are extensive. I shoulda kept the actual body. This is all very... body-based. Hmmm..." She hops off the couch and goes to retrieve the discarded platter she'd used to smack Will back into tablet-shape. She holds it up to the light and puts her head at an angle to check the underside for any possible residue of, well, Will.

[Will Stanton]

No dice. The impact was clean as a whistle; no DNA or clay or anything along those lines left in Conduit's apartment.

Maybe throwing him out entirely was a childish, impulsive act after all!

[Conduit]

That couldn't possibly be right since that would mean she's an impulsive child, so really this was just the universe continuing to go against her wishes. Probably out of spite.

"Ugh, fine! Fine!" she chucks the platter across the room dismissively and stomps back over to the laptop.

Code: Select all

~~> "What are you even good for right now?"
~~> "Do you really need proprietary hardware? Can't you appropriate other biological material?"

[Will Stanton]

Code: Select all

>>I like to think I'm good for a lot of things.
>>And as for 'appropriating' biological material...the clay's kind of important, you know?  I can integrate stuff into it, but replacing it outright?  I think that's a no-go.

[Conduit]

Code: Select all

~~> "Lame!"

says the girl who is nothing without technology to hijack.

She directs her attention to the hundreds of Will-in-boxes, still being fed random combinations of shifting-commands. It has generated a lot of data already and combined with all the 'research notes' there's a lot to go through. A truly staggeringly boring amount and as much of a code-wiz she is, engaging with it still takes conscious effort and - more importantly - focus. For no immediately obvious payoff. Still, it's like a bajillion-piece jigsaw puzzle, in a way. The notes are "edge-pieces" and rules for how pieces fit together, the pieces all the countless combinations and results that interlink. [Rocks] + [Small] makes [Sand], add [Brick] for [Sandstone] and so on, at times wrapping back around or feeding into other chains and loops. Before she knows it she's actually put together quite a large chunk of connections, forming a large 3-dimensional map. Though some connections indicate it could probably be put into a neater arrangement by utilizing an extra dimension or two.

Code: Select all

~~> "It's you! Just a bunch of stupid blobs stuck together."

[Will Stanton]

Code: Select all

-->I don't know; I'm not quite sure you captured my [i]joie de vivre[/i].
-->I don't really think of it this way, you know.  It's more about --embodying-- the material, letting yourself become one with the oneness.  But this is neat.  For what it is.

That being said, the map was getting fairly concrete. It could probably never be perfected, because of the endless variety of options Will had (how do you divide every single variety of chair on a map, down to the slightest variations in texture or pattern?), but once you got a hang of Will's odd logic, things began to follow in their own sort of way...

[Conduit]

Code: Select all

~~> "Yeah, well, your dshu duh vee is just a lot of pointless details."

How in the world she manages to mispronounce in the medium of electronics borders on intentional.

Code: Select all

~~> "How can you ~embody~ a chair, it's just a thing for people to sit on."
~~> "Are you ~embodying~ a disembodied piece of code right now?"

[Will Stanton]

Code: Select all

--> You're going to have to explain what 'code' is.

...said the piece of code who had had all knowledge of electronics and computers deleted from it's head. And yet, it still was working...

Code: Select all

And it's a very zen process.  I could talk you through it, if you'd like to try, though you won't get all the benefits because you're a monoform.