Happily Humming Heather

[Conduit]

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~~> "What? I'm not gonna pretend to be a chair! That's stupid and boring."
~~> "I know because there's literal gigabytes of files of you being a damn couch and it's all the same!"

[Will Stanton]

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-->First of all, no one's going to bite you.  Stop being so paranoid.

-->And don't you see it?  The subtle variations in pattern.  In texture.  In spring tension and strength.  In foam density, leather patina.  All carefully calculated and precise, and entirely different to one another.

[Conduit]

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~~> "I mean *yeah*. But it's all just meaningless details."
~~> "It's a couch. You sit on it."

[Will Stanton]

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-->You're sat ~on~.  You're thinking like a user, not the end result.  And all these details mean something, to someone.  It's focusing on the details that helps you create exactly what you want, and be fit for purpose to whoever or whatever you interact with, whatever it is you're trying to do.

[Conduit]

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~~> "And that's what you want to do?"
~~> "Make... other people... satisfied??"
~~> "?????"

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~~> "?????????????????????"

[Will Stanton]

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-->You don't enjoy it when you see a smile on someone else's face?  A smile you put there?

[Conduit]

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~~> ??????????????????????????????????????????????

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~~> "What's other people being happy got to do with me?"
~~> "The things that make me happy make other people angry. Or dead."

[Will Stanton]

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-->Perhaps you're not just finding the proper way to express yourself.

[Conduit]

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~~> "It's not my fault people don't appreciate the fact that Science! sometimes comes at the expense of others."
~~> "Or most of the time."
~~> "In the form of explosions or exotic particle emissions."

[Will Stanton]

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-->I'll have you know I know lots of people who really enjoy exotic particle emissions.   Perhaps you just need to find people with similar hobbies.

[Conduit]

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~~> "Oh yeah? Last time I tried at that concert thingie I distinctly remember you and your friends getting real angry."

[Will Stanton]

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-->Neither my friends there nor the crowd were the ones I was thinking of.  You just gotta pick better venues!

[Conduit]

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~~> "Like it's soooo easy to find a hundred test-subjects."

[Will Stanton]

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-->I mean, that's what grad students are for, right?  People do clinical trials of things all the time.  You just have to know how to compensate people properly.

[Conduit]

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~~> "Hey, I turned a buncha people into mutants."
~~> "That's way better than money."

[Will Stanton]

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-->Yeah, trouble is, you've got to get THEM to agree.  That's the trickier bit.

[Conduit]

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~~> "I don't HAVE to do anything."
~~> "Besides, they'd probably say no."

[Will Stanton]

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-->And that's why you keep looking.

-->And offer treats.  You get a cookie when you give blood, after all.

[Conduit]

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~~> "And waste my time? No way! Getting a bunch of people would take foreeeever."
~~> "Same results, bigger sample-size, no fuss."

[Will Stanton]

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-->Didn't the X-Men punch you in the face?

..

..

..

-->Like, a lot?

[Conduit]

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~~> "Ugh, fine SOME fuss!"
~~> "Can't let narrow-minded fools get in the way or you'll never accomplish anything."
~~> "Or get a bullet through the head cause SOMEONE leads a whole-ass fleet to your base and breaks all the safety measures and frees all the Dino-Troopers!"
~~> "Talk about rude."

[Will Stanton]

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-->That is oddly specific of an example.

[Conduit]

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~~> "Duh. You guys led the Ruskies to our door and broke everything."
~~> "That whole place is ruined now. Why you think we came to this dimension?"

[Will Stanton]

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-->Because you wanted to punch and smash and the heat was on you too much back home?

[Conduit]

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~~> "Because the last bastion of scientific enlightenment was razed by the fascist Russians!"
~~> "And because they would have executed me for all the war crimes."

[Will Stanton]

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And did you ever consider doing fewer war crimes after being gifted a clean slate?  Fewer Russians to worry about that way.

[Conduit]

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~~> "Yes! I did none since I came here!"
~~> "Cause I'm not involved in any wars."

she huffs with indignation.

[Will Stanton]

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-->Stepping down to regular crimes is a start, but it doesn't seem to help you in the long run to be hunted by the police and the X-Men rather than the Russians.  You could use your powers to help a lot of people, you know.  Change their lives for the better.

[Conduit]

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~~> "Pff! What, like this wanna-be [sarcasm]utopia[/sarcasm] your robo-leader is trying to put together here?"
~~> "That they're already looking to stomp out?"
~~> "I can hear the foundations singing, which means she's put a whole buncha stuff down there that's not being used."
~~> "They're never gonna let you either, even if I don't tattle on it like They want me to."

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~~> "Asking for permission is for idiots."

[Will Stanton]

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-->Then just call me an idiot, then.

-->Who is this 'they' you speak of?  It's not too late to stop this, and get help...

[Conduit]

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~~> "Iunno. Spooks. Men in Black. Government... people."
~~> "Fished me out of the Thames after you guys broke my jetpack, black-bagged me, asked a bunch of questions about a missing battleship."
~~> "Knew enough to not bring anything more advanced than a notepad and a pencil anywhere near me."
~~> "Injected me with some slow-acting poison cocktail cause they couldn't come up with a bomb implant too simple for me to hijack."
~~> "Oh yeah and send me out to gather intel on Robo-Town."
~~> "Don't go loud or you won't get the antidote, blah blah blah."
~~> "So now I need those nanites you stole from Panopticon and jammed into the robot."

[Will Stanton]

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-->Well, best of luck with THAT.  They'll have the Will you bamboozled bagged and tagged in no time at all.  Hard to be sneaky when your heart isn't in it.

[Conduit]

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~~> "Yeah, probably!"
~~> "Not like Misses Roboto walks around Mutant Town all the time or anything."
~~> "Just gotta do a little :knife: :knife: :splash: :space_invader:

[Will Stanton]

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--> I don't do that sort of thing.

-->You didn't specify HOW I'm supposed to get the blood.  I'll probably just go up to her and ask.

[Conduit]

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~~> "Seriously? What's wrong with you."
~~> "I'll just have to do it myself then."

[Will Stanton]

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-->I think if you could, you wouldn't have kidnapped me.  I think you're more clever than that.

[Conduit]

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~~> >:[
~~> Merge Codebase
~~> Brute Force data appending

All the cells holding the various Wills suddenly stop their stream of inputs and the walls separating them disappear. Followed by all four walls contracting around them and mashing them together like a hydraulic press.

[Will Stanton]

There's some screaming and shouting - surprise and protest, mainly, rather than pain -- as the Wills are mushed into a big ol' digital clay blob, the simulated walls smashing and flattening them into one cohesive, pancake-sized mass.

There's a brief surge of error messages and pop-ups as the Wills complain, fading and collapsing into one another as the files merge into one file that's the same freaking size as it was before. Infinite compressibility with a blob of simulated silly putty.

[Conduit]

Conduit manifests an avatar in the digital space, the same 8-bit chibi version form before except much larger than Will. She scoops him up and squeezes him until a head pops out.

"Yeah I'm clever. Cleverer than you! Maybe I'll just play along with the spooks and help 'em take back their city and then when those old farts are patting themselves on the back I'll flip the table on them with the city they delivered to me on a platter. Maybe I'll drag it out, really make you guys fight for it so you'll deploy some more desperate measures for me to take over. Conduit City's got a nice ring to it, don't you think? And if the physical you's too stupid to do as they're told then I still got your digital selves. Cause I bet the robot used this world's sad sack whimp version of me to come up with some countermeasures but you she trusts and you don't work like regular programs. You're a skeleton key virus and I've got some idea of how your logic works now."

She conjures up what looks like a fortress bristling with camera lenses and microphones, the sign above the front door reading 'London CCTV Systems'. Behind the wall is a moat that, instead of being filled with water is just a bottomless pit. "Lookie here, let's give it a test, shall we? All their juiciest bits are shielded and airgapped and my power can't reach through the cameras but I bet you can pretend to be a video real easy and go all the way into their servers for me!"

She grabs Will with both hands and twists and pulls the blob until it snaps in two. "Be a good little program and go in there to deliver this to their central server." She manifests a shoe-box sized box with an animated Conduit-head cackling on all sides along with a bunch of made up red warning signs. Pushing it into one of the Will's she then takes a running start with all the grace of only a couple of frames of animations and throws Will at one of the cameras staring out from the fortress. The moment he splats against the lens Conduit's representation of the CCTV network disappears and Will finds himself standing in a grainy black and white scene of a street near Conduit's safehouse. A box sticking halfway out of his chest that couldn't look more like a bomb if it tried and instructions to deliver the package coded into his head.

[Will Stanton]

Just like he had when Conduit had tried to turn the real-life Will into a weapon, Will tried to resist this new role as a virus. After all, a virus hurt people, and Will didn't want to hurt people, right? That's not what he is here for.

At the same time, though, there were several key differences here.

First of all, Will wasn't the bomb. The bomb was jus stuck in his chest; he was a delivery system for the bomb. The difference between delivering something and actually causing the damage was a technical distinction, but it was still a distinction. Turn Will into a bomb casing and stuff him full of real explosives? You could probably get that to work better than trying to get WIll himself to explode. This is a similar principle, and so Will couldn't tap into quite the same indignation and fight that got him out of the first jam.

Secondly, Will was still a program, and Conduit knew how to manipulate programs. He was much, much more vulnerable to her powers in this situation than he would be in the real world. Every time he tried to take a step away from the street, the programming in his head admonished him.

**Stay straight. Stay on target. You have to deliver this package. This is an important package. You exist to deliver this package...**

Will's attempts to deviate from his path would pop up as bugs and errors that Conduit could notice, but he was at least moving in the right direction.

Thirdly...Will didn't know what a computer or a program WAS. Conduit had erased all of that knowledge from his head, and so Will wasn't even sure about the nature of the reality he was IN at the moment. That made it particularly tough to fight back.

And so Will matched down the grainy black-and-white street, stiff and stilted like a toy robot, as he approached the entrance to the fortress.