Happily Humming Heather

[Heather West]

The door to Kneadful Creations swings open and a young teenager practically bounces through, poorly singing bits of a song to herself as she moves past a waiting customer or two.

"I don't care what songs you sing, or how you think of all those pointless things... Bah bah bah-bah-bah bah, sugar-coated iceberg... Oh hi Mister Will!" she raises her voice and waves at the shapeshifter manning the counter.

[Will Stanton]

"...Hiya, Heather," the Will behind the counter said, with only a half-moment's pause. "Enjoying a sunny day out, are we?"

[Heather West]

"Sure am! You got any bearclaws?" she asks and hops onto the couple-inch-high ledge on the bottom of the display counter, looking through the baked treats.

[Will Stanton]

"Freshly baked this morning, You prefer almonds or apples?"

[Heather West]

"Gimme one of each. And a jelly donut!" she adds, drumming her fingers on the glass.

[Will Stanton]

"A well-balanced diet, I see," Will joked, as he reached into the case and began picking out Heather's order. "Important to have a wide variety of sweets."

[Heather West]

"You get it." she nods. "Long day ahead, lots to do, lots to do." she grins. "You should hear the pipes humming and singing, it's like the whole place is alive. I love it!"

[Will Stanton]

"The humming and singing in the pipes?" Will said, raising an eyebrow. "This related to the spontaneous musical numbers?"

[Heather West]

Heather shakes her head. "Nuh-uh. The pipes that run beneath the town, silly! Or the data inside them anyway." she says, making grabby motions for the baked goods as Will is gathering them up.

"Oh! I can show you! You have a spare 'you' you can turn into a phone or a robot?"

[Will Stanton]

Will looked down at his watch, as if he was calculating something. "Yeah, I think someone's about due for their break," they agreed. "Yo, Will! We've got a customer for you!" he said, banging on the wall behind him towards the kitchen.

Another Will came out and was quickly informed of the situation. After roughly 0.2 seconds of convincing, they smiled, nodded, and nearly dropped out of sight as they shifted into a pretty standard-issue cell phone, being caught by the Will behind the counter just before they hit the ground.

"Let's see," Will said, quickly unlocking the phone and scrolling through. "Yup. App's right there; just be a bit careful with it," he said, handing the phone over to Heather.

[Heather West]

"Peeeerfect!" she grins and grabs the phone, momentarily even distracted from the bag of sweets. Though that only lasts a moment before she snatches the paperbag of goodies as well and baps the card reader with the palm of her hand, prompting a 'transaction complete' to pop up along with a flat ten dollar amount. "Toodles!" she waves and is out the door.

Bag pinned under one arm, holding the phone in one hand an a bearclaw in the other she wanders down the street. The Will-Phone would find itself on the receiving end of a kind of sing-song transmission that results in an 8-bit Heather popping up on the home screen, sitting with dangling legs on one of the app icons.

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~~> "Hi there!"

digital Heather pings out, somehow managing to sound as if this avatar of hers also has her mouth full of sweet dough.

[Will Stanton]

The app icon Heather was sitting on had Will's face on it; one of those new-fangled AI helper things that all phones must come pre-installed with nowadays. While Ashlie leaned away from chatbot comparisons, Will was possibly as smart as a large language model and was willing to play the role.

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--> "Hi there, Heather! What's happening?"

[Heather West]

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~~> "Oh, not much!"
~~>>> Administrator_Right access token generated
~~>>> Root access token generated
~~> "Just admiring all the work that's been going on. Lookie!"

A 3d model of Mutant Town, or rather the network of pipes underneath it, pops up on the phone, along with a kind of ethereal humming or buzzing that synchs up with the lights pulsing through the network at regular intervals. Unlike a regular sewage or utilities network, it doesn't appear to be on a grid but rather spreads out from a central point like a spider-web and forms nodes where it intersects. It looks weirdly familiar and after a moment Will would recognize it as roughly based on the map he and Ashlie plotted out tracing the music propagating. Apparently she used it as a basis for calculating how the density of people throughout the day is distributed and built the utilities accordingly.

While Heather is showing him this there's a nagging feeling of deja-vu every time she sends or manipulates data on the phone.

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~~> "You know, I always did wonder why you're so intuitive to use."
~~> "Sure, most tech just kind of makes sense but it's like you're doing half the work for me."

Odd. Will had been around Heather occasionally, sure, and probably felt her poke at the Robo-Secretary-Will out of curiosity, but she'd never actually done anything, much less used Will.

[Will Stanton]

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>>"Huh.  Neat.  What is all that, some kind of special high-tech plumbing?"

...

...

>>"Also, what on Earth are you talking about?"

[Heather West]

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~~> "I guess! It's not exactly labelled."
~~> "And aww, you haven't figured it out yet, huh? That's alright, I'm sure you will."

The 8-bit avatar holds her stomach and laughs in a jerky, two-frame animation, then makes one of her eyes gleam and grabs the WillApp icon and gives it a twirl on top of her finger like a basketball. All the while she keeps walking, munching on her treats and studying seemingly random spots around town.

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~~> "The robot's gotten ambitious. I like it. Good groundwork."
~~> "Not sure if there's enough power for any meaningful weaponry yet but it has potential. Built in workforce too."

[Will Stanton]

Will's...voice? Text? Wobbled a little on screen as Heather spun his 'app' around. Because that makes sense, right?

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>>Woah, woah woah, woah.  Weaponry?  No one's trying to...militarize Mutanttown. Right?  That's not what anyone's doing here.

The phone started pinging out, trying to contact Ashlie to triple-check that. Because, you know. That would be bad, right?

[Conduit]

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~~> "Obviously not, t---Hey!"
~~>>> Code Intercept, signal terminated

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~~> "That's not very nice. There's no need to get the robot involved."
~~> "Fine, we'll do it the hard way."

She stops spinning the WillApp and slaps it to the ground. And then she starts unfolding the icon to get to the code inside.

"The kernel's connected to the... API. The API's connected to the... A-rray. The A-rray's connected to the..."

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~~> "Wait, is this all just text files?"

[Will Stanton]

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-->Always has been.

Will's 'code' was simplistic, but adaptable -- changing even under the watchful eye of Conduit. Functions and calls that were needed seemed to spontaneously pop up out of the ether as she observed the code. Shifting, apparently, worked even in the digital realm.

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-->Hello then, Conduit.

[Conduit]

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~~> "The scarecrow does have a brain!"

The little avatar cheers on the screen.

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~~> "Unfortunately it's all just scribbled notes."

As functions arise from the app icon, Conduit grabs them and yanks them out further until she can look at their guts until she's got a good dozen or so splayed out around her.

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~~> "I know you got something silly like a Friend-List or some kinda moral codebook in here somewhere. Spit it out."

[Will Stanton]

With enough time and effort, Conduit would be able to strip Will apart line by line and find exactly what she was looking for, such was her control over technology. Will's code was changing and shifting, but it'd be trivial for Conduit to lock it down with her abilities, at least for as long as she was paying attention to it.

The trick, then, was to increase 'time' and 'effort' to the point where the impatient sugar-addled teen would take another tact. 'Attention-span' wasn't chief among Conduit's powers, after all.

And so, as Conduit pulled out individual functions to look through, it was if she had opened up a floodgates. Will had a lot of memories and dreams, being technically older than the universe, and that could chew up a lot of video files. They swarmed like pop-ups, threatening to bury Conduit's digital avatar. Other files and irrelevant functions, too, had their own windows spiraling around the technopath. If she wanted to know the precise resistance a couch's springs should have, or the process for growing feathers on a goose's left wing, or what shade of green to make 'Willow's eyes, she could have access to THAT right away. Swarm the girl with irrelevant data, or at least what Will thought might count as irrelevant.

[Conduit]

Will might be supremely vulnerable to telepaths but apparently reading and manipulating machine 'minds' is very different, because Conduit physically recoils and almost drops her croissant bearclaw.

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~~> "So much useless crap!"

At first she tries shoveling the deluge of files into the trash manually, but soon enough realizes that there's no getting rid of the sheer amount of things and instead slams an electronic cage around anything involving Will. This turned out to be not nearly as easy as she'd hoped.

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~~> "Fine, so you got some moves."
~~> "But it's just a matter of time till I find the right file!"
~~> "Just a lot of memories and other... stuff."

Slowly she starts assembling her own code to try and automate tagging Will's files and shunting all the chaff into a quarantined folder, but careful, detailed work isn't exactly her strong suit so it's a struggle to stay focused on the task.

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~~> "There sure is a lot of it though. I gotta figure out how you fit this much data on a lil phone."

[Will Stanton]

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-->People often comment on how dense I am, yes.

[Conduit]

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~~> "Hah! Very funny."
~~> "But this is gonna take me a while, so I better go do what I'm supposed to. Groan."
~~> "TTYL! >:3"

She finishes off her bearclaw and shoves the phone in her pocket before fishing out the jelly donut and proceeding to wander down the street to surely not cause any trouble at all.

[Will Stanton]

The Willphone in the pocket tested the extent of Conduit's control, trying to slyly connect to any wi-fi hotspots or networks in the area. I mean, a phone's gotta get a signal out somehow, right?

[Conduit]

Unfortunately, Conduit's grip on any outgoing signals is pretty solid. What she seems to have neglected is anything incoming, so Will is treated to the view of the inside of Conduit's pocket through the camera (not very useful) as well as the microphone. For a while, most of what he can hear is walking and traffic, the occasional people talking as they pass by. Eventually though she seems to get into a car, the closing door shutting out the sound of the city. If it's a taxi then there's no exchange between her and the driver but the car takes off regardless. It's not a long ride; after maybe fifteen minutes the car comes to a stop, Conduit climbs out and heads into a building. Finally she makes her way up some stairs and into a room where she waits impatiently, leg bouncing with increasing frequency until a door opens and closes.

"Finally!" she exclaims and jumps to her feet. "Hurry up, will you?"

"Do you have the intel?" a male voice demands.

"Ugh, yes, of course." she says and some rustling later she presumably handed something over.

There's a brief pause, then "This is barely half."

"Yeah, well, you try mapping out a whole-ass suburb and identify potential payload sites with only your mind. Takes time, asshole."

"Did anybody recognize you?"

"'Course not, I look exactly like the little domesticated moron." she lies. "Now gimme before my blood turns to jello or whatever the fuck it's gonna do to me."

"You have tweny-four hours to complete your assignment."

From her body movement Will gets the distinct impression that Conduit is silently going 'Blah, blah, blah' at the man while he does something. Some kind of plastic wrapping is being opened, followed by the rustling of clothes and Conduit taking a step forward and extending her arm. An antidote injection maybe, considering what she said?

There's no response, only the sound of a door opening and closing, followed by Conduit letting out an annoyed groan as she flops onto a couch and pulls out the phone. The view of the camera moves and spins rapidly before settling down, but it gives Will a decent overview of an exceedingly generic apartment. Just enough furniture and decorations to appear lived in but so bland that it most certainly is not. The hallmark of some kind of safe house, notably with a glaringly empty spot where a television would be.

"Alrighty! Back to you, Mister Phone." she says as she puts him down on a coffee table.

[Will Stanton]

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>> You know, if you're being blackmailed or coerced, I could help.  You don't have to do anything you're being forced to do.

[Conduit]

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~~> "Funny you should mention that, because that's exactly what you're going to do!"
~~> "I just gotta dig through all your data to figure something out and then fix up your settings so you can go and do it for me."
~~> "Easy-peasy!"

[Will Stanton]

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>>Jailbreaking me is a great way to void any warranties and the terms of condition of aid!

[Conduit]

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~~> "Oh well!"
~~> "Besides, I'm supposed to believe you'd just help me?"
~~> "Very funny."

She goes back to work on her partially assembled algorithm, testing to see if it can sort the torrent of information into something at least resembling an understandable pattern.

[Will Stanton]

The problem with sorting through Will's data is just sheer volume, not complexity. Everything seemed to be clearly labeled and differentiated, so Conduit could create an algorithm to search through it without too much trouble. The question was whether it would run faster than Will could generate nonsense and bullshit.

[Conduit]

She may be an insane megalomaniac, but Conduit is, unfortunately, quite smart and backing up her cobbled together algorithm by parsing the sorted data with her mind she's keeping pace at the very least. And that's really all she needs to glean a general idea of things, even if more recent memories are spread across who knows how many different Wills.

"Ooh! My gun worked even better than I thought! That's interesting... No! Stop, find a solution first." she slaps herself across the face. "Boring, boring, useless, a submarine? What?" she dismisses a bunch of things until finally she spots something. "Hold on! I know those! They're Panopticon's nanites! Where'd they go?" she swipes through reams and reams of memories to try and put together a timeline. Unfortunately Will wasn't exactly present for much of that but he did help Ashlie modify the data port on her neck. To interface with the nanites in her body.

"Yessss! There you are! I need the robot's blood!" she exclaims and starts digging for Will's configuration file.

[Will Stanton]

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>>Well, I don't carry any of that ~on~ me, I'm afraid...

Will tried to stall, continuing to try to toss road blocks in Conduit's way as much as possible to protect his core 'files'. The data floating up became flashier and more dramatic, as Will tried to play into Conduit's ADD-teen-style personality. It began slapping itself together, bundling into new apps. Lots of games -- runners, tower defense, matching puzzles, physics nonsense, dress-up, and so forth, as Will tried to find enough interactive nonsense that might sufficiently distract Conduit. Heck, or maybe self-compiling code would be intriguing enough as it is; Will'd only had the one teenager but you never know.

[Conduit]

And it certainly works. To a point. The games themselves not so much but the code assembling itself out of seemingly nothing does. Sure, it's what she does too but she's a technopath and her ode is inserted from her own mind. Will is a shapeshifter and this is like he's turned into a non-physical object. Still based on a physical structure - the phone itself - but changing at his whim without changing his structure. Now that is interesting.

"How are you doing this? Hold on!" she drops the phone and runs to get a laptop, still in it's packaging. After strewing styrofoam and anti-static bags about she pulls it out, already powered up and displaying her face in minimalist, yellow-glowing lines on a black screen. She produces an USB cable and plugs Will into the laptop. Immediately reams of code run across a window that pops up on the laptop, followed by others that seems to be analyzing it and high-lighting sections with labels such as 'sugar-coating', 'game-rules', 'dollhouse' that probably only make sense to Conduit.

"Definitely power-based. Obviously. Holy moley! Do that again, make a new game or app or whatever!"

[Will Stanton]

Glad that Conduit is, for the moment, distracted, Will spawned a new game app; this one a pretty simplistic endless runner type game, requiring the player to pick which shapes/forms were best to traverse different areas.

Of course, the gameplay wasn't what Conduit was here for, was it?

[Conduit]

She does click through a couple rounds of playing, but soon grows bored of whatever she's watching with one eye on the laptop.

"No, no no no. Too repetitive. Do one of those... combiny ones. Where you mash two words together to make a new one. 'Craft Forever' or what it's called. Do that one!"

[Will Stanton]

After a brief pause, Will popped out a new app -- a free-association style infinite crafting style game, smashing words together to create new ones following Will's own...unique chain of logic.

He also popped up a box, asking Conduit to confirm she wanted to allow in-app purchases.

[Conduit]

"Hey! Too realistic." she frowns but clicks on the in-game store anyway, just to see what could possibly be hiding behind a paywall.

[Will Stanton]

A small 'store' icon popped up, mostly with cosmetics for Will's 'avatar', both in and out of the game. Overpriced outfits and whatnot; nothing Conduit couldn't achieve by just hacking the code.


In the background, now with Conduit having given express permission, Will was able to contact out for the first time -- just to a bank account, where the money would have to go, of course. And, in specific, to one of the University's accounts -- one that the Secretary!Will operated for Ashlie. He began making some quick transfers of cash -- just small pence, but with the transfers matching the GPS coordinates of...wherever it was Conduit had taken him.

[Conduit]

"Hey! I didn't buy anything yet!" she objects when she catches and quarantines the transaction. Only then does it occur to her to look closer at it. "Oh you clever little app." she wags her finger at the screen. She taps Will's avatar and a dunce-cap pops into existence on his head.

"There's your customization option. Now..." she closes out the menu and goes to playing the game. That is to say, drag tiles with words on them onto another to make a third one related to the combination by Will's logic. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Will, her laptop is recording data and appending each combination into a growing cloud. "Haha! I knew it, you're running on some kind of proprietary logic. And I bet it's the same one as your power, isn't it?" she grins.

[Will Stanton]

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>>If your asking how my power works, I'm surely not the best person to ask.  It just...does.