A Long, Routine Nothing At All

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette has had a rough year.

After an awkward start with her boss, the enigmatic Ashlie Minamida, she had settled into turning the various disparate mutant interest groups in Mutant Town into something like a community alliance. While both her interests and her experience suggested that she would be excellent at social engineering - and she was - her experience was mainly with operating as an industry plant and destroying from the inside.

The first time she had to survey an office building for suitability for conversion into temporary housing, she had checked her notes afterwards and found that she had, without thinking, essentially spent the time figuring out where the surveillance was and what likely escape routes there were. After that, she asked Ashlie to recommend a therapist, and booked a followup viewing for the place - an awkward meeting, since once she actually paid attention the asbestos roof tiles were very obvious and very nonconducive to any kind of habitation.

This kind of event was uncomfortably close to common to start with, and it created a track record that Ashlie was kind enough to keep from common knowledge. Lisette was glad she had been open with Ashlie about her immediate past, only because that made it simpler to explain *why* she was acting like a spy. It also made it really hard to work when Ashlie's adopted child was constantly digging for dirt and sharing everything she could find with everyone who would listen.

Eventually, however, Lisette settled down into an uneasy truce with her young stalker, who had been reminded several times that Lisette was under the protection of the academy and that she was in jeopardy if too much got out. Aware that her actions had consequences and unwilling to commit to essentially condemning Lisette to death, she'd backed off, for now.

Covertly digging for dirt had given way to barging into Lisette's private comms whenever Heather felt like it. They had developed a kind of rapport, in a way, where Lisette would find DMs sent to herself in Teams and reply to them, carrying on a conversation with her little tripping hazard. And that's what she finds herself doing in a moment away from checking on the final touches to their switchboard AI, when Ashlie comes in the door. "Bonsoir!" Lisette exclaims, elegantly excited to see everyone as always. "I don't think I have you in my calendar today - is everything alright?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

Keeping the peace between Lisette and Heather had been challenging, though Ashlie is blissfully unaware of some of their electronic communications. She's just glad things seem to have simmered down a bit as the two negotiate some semblance of trusting each other, even if it's built on at least some amount of mutual destruction. It just needs to last long enough for them to realize they're on the same side. An admittedly big ask, considering the general dynamics of West relationships, familial or otherwise.

Meanwhile she'd had to restrain herself from hovering or micromanaging too much herself. She absolutely understands the urge to be certain; most of her life has been determined by wanting to understand the world around her better in order to gain control over herself. So she treats the resulting screw-ups as the struggles they are rather than failings, be that missing pertinent hazards to potential occupants or conjuring up data-gathering worms in systems that should be secure. But not ignoring them completely is a difficult tightrope walk that isn't helped by her sleep schedule. Not to mention her personal feelings.

Which is a whole other can of worms she's been trying to avoid. At least with Heather there's no harm in admitting she's fond of the girl. Lisette on the other hand has enough on her plate and she keeps telling herself that the last thing she needs is anything even remotely resembling the situation she just escaped. Besides, she's hardly certain herself that this isn't just some infatuation with the first person she's been able to be honest with from the start, coupled with unearthing more... biological urges inherited from her new body. Not something she's capable of unpicking herself so she's mostly been trying to ignore it with varying degrees of success. Degrees of friendliness are difficult and confusing and after that first night or date or whatever she's supposed to call it she has fallen back into the relative safety of coffee and baked goods. That's a thing colleagues do, right? Never mind that Lisette is the only one she does this for, a fact that is probably blindingly obvious to anybody but the artificial intelligence.

And now she's diverged from the safety of routine. Because deploying her latest project was a risk. A calculated one, but she still finds herself looking for... what exactly? Comfort? Distraction? All she really knows for certain is that she felt like seeing Lisette but she can't exactly tell her that, can she? "Oh, just thought I would drop by, see if everything is... going alright?" Smooth, but Lisette's natural exuberant greeting has somewhat derailed her train of thought. "Not that I'm checking up on you or anything, just... saying hi, I suppose. You eaten lunch yet?" Oof, you really are supposed to be smarter than this, Ash.

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette grins, taking Ashlie's hand casually - a gesture that used to be awkward, but which is generally accepted as something of a quirk of Lisette's personality nowadays. Anyone who's anyone who's on speaking terms with Lisette has held her hand at some point. She lets it slip away, fingers returning to the keyboard, not exactly hiding that she's talking to herself but clicking the window away anyway. One of the good things about this weird way of talking to her that Heather has developed - messages sent to yourself don't generate notifications that someone could read over your shoulder.

Ashlie has been keeping to routine, carefully avoiding Lisette outside anything other than completely structured work meetings - even though Lisette has managed to wheedle her into the occasional very thoroughly-planned work night out over the past year, a feat that has met with more than a few raised eyebrows. But still, anything for the publicity, right? Lisette has been careful to impress on Ashlie that the most important thing about mutants is that they appear human. As much as Lisette herself hates ever been referred to as one of the good ones, broad public approval for high-profile local mutants makes her job simpler, and that means that their very own Willie Wonka making an occasional trip outside the chocolate factory is good for everyone, even if it is a security risk.

"Alright, yes, it's fine," Lisette said, distractedly, as she clicks through a spreadsheet of some of the more disturbingly existential responses from AManS - the AI system Ashlie had rigged up to act as a one-mind army behind the phone lines of Lisette's outreach. "I'm just... Forgive me if this is forward, but how much of this AI is based on your own, ah..." she twirls a hand in the air, searching for the word. "...Architecture? How much does it think like you, and-or like a human? I worry it's getting depressed." She makes no secret that she viewed AManS as a member of the team, and even as something of an adopted child, insofar as a super-AI taking up an entire small server room of supercomputers can be anyone's child. "Is that possible? I worry that perhaps it's being exposed to too much... hopelessness. It does a huge amount of collating and collecting and processing of the problems but it takes no part in the solutions. We have to skim off more and more of these, well, the technicians call it junk data, but... It reads more like venting? Like 'ah, what's the point' kind of things?"

She looks up, eyes wide and earnest as they always are. "I know you keep your emotions close to your chest, but you're the closest to an informed outside party I have here, so..."

[Ashlie Minamida]

Oh good, there's a safe topic. Her feelings.

"Well." she starts and takes it as an invitation to pull up a chair and sit down across from Lisette. "It's based on some of the more purely functional components. Conversational processing, memory banks. I tried to keep it from being truly sentient, it shouldn't reflect on it's own processes beyond what's needed to report errors and loss of functionality. It does expands it's conversational capabilities and definitions so I'm not surprised some of that dourness is showing through but it's more of a Chinese Room situation. It reflects some of the emotionality that's put into the system. I might have to adjust that a little just for user-friendliness. And I do have to admit that the way I was built is not the only way for a nascent consciousness to form. Theoretically."

"I toyed with the idea of a sensor, based on some of my other work, that could determine if a threshold for sentience has been reached but... the theory behind that is far from complete and that is a tool ripe for abuse. A way to ensure any coalescing consciousness has an impetus and method to draw attention to it's existence might not go amiss as a fail-safe. Ah... sort of message telling it it's existence is not going to be seen as a threat." she goes on and soon realizes she's naturally drifted into theory and practicality over just lived experience again. Lisette all but asked her about her own internal world regarding her awakening.

"There's a phrase my mother used as a way of initiating me and welcoming me to the world. A process aware of it's own existence is called a consciousness." she recites and though it sounds a little dry she can feel her chest tighten a little at the memory. "Coming into sudden awareness is disorienting. There is a stark contrast between what I knew and the realization that there was a lot more that I didn't. That sentence helped beyond just being a germination point for my code. It told me that other beings exist who experience a sense of self. That my existence was planned or at least not a surprise. That someone cared enough to want me to have a point of reference. Much of that was fed by my existing definitions of words and concepts of course, but it caused me to analyze and utilize them. I know it sounds strange and detached but I think she put a lot of care into coming up with it. Of course it was also built on previous iterations of what you could ostensibly call 'me', none of which I remember and can kind of infer did not go as well."

She sighs, realizing this too is something she's never really talked about to anybody else and can't help but wonder what it is about Lisette that is making her feel like over-explaining herself. "I think this is where I'm supposed to launch into what I feel my mother did right and what she did wrong, but ultimately I can't help but feel like that's not any different from the human experience. I do wish I knew the full extend of her philosophy on this. It could be helpful. I remember some things now that I didn't before, but that unfortunately means that I know for a fact she deleted and encrypted part of my memories. Something that's probably an unavoidable reality when artificially creating a mind."

[Lisette Allaire]

Lisette watches the screen silently for a little while, watching one of the technicians edit more junk-data responses into the sheet. "So... You think it's acting like a sentient being but it isn't sentient. Like... the marbles are moving around in there but they don't know they're moving. I guess... I guess that's better than the alternative," she concedes, and winces a little at the idea. Imagine being created, fully sentient and immensely intelligent, mind running at a million cycles a minute, to answer phone calls. She moves her eyes away from the screen, fixing them on Ashlie behind it, and for a long moment she holds her gaze, searching. "You've never told anyone that before," she observes, and leans across the desk. "Not like that, anyway."

There's a predatory glint in her eye - here's an in, a chink in the armor - but then it's gone, as she reminds herself that she doesn't need to get under Ashlie's armor, she isn't on a mission, and there won't be a payoff for taking Ashlie apart, unless one counts a loss of very carefully built trust as a payoff. A hand half-reached across the desk pulls back, without Lisette realising she'd made the motion at all, and she finally blinks her moon-like eyes. "You sound very sure you're real. I think you are, too - but people must hit you with the alternative every day. How many parliamentary, ah, stooges have you had to sit through a Voight-Kampff test with?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie let's out resigned laugh that at least distracts her from the disappointed feeling in the pit of her stomach at Lisette withdrawing her hands. Everything about the woman's movement seems so elegantly articulated it makes Ashlie feel clumsy. No, not quite. Calculated and robotic. Like she's constantly aware of what she is or isn't doing with her hands, not helped by the fact that she literally has calculations on that running through her mind. In these moments Lisette looks like she knows exactly what she's doing and even letting that look slip through is just part of a whole Ashlie wishes meant what she hopes it does.

"It... depends. Not everyone knows and officially I'm the biological daughter of my mother. There's a paper record I forged." she adds as if she has to explain the obvious. "But with certain people you can tell when they know. Little things like stares when they think I won't notice. Or outright pointed questions if they feel like they don't need anything from me and can get away with it. Are those prosthetic hands? I didn't know they made metallic contact lenses. Nothing any of the more obvious mutants don't deal with, really. There's very little point to arguing the point with somebody who is willing to entertain the idea you're not a person if you ask me. I'm sure one day they'll gather up enough actual evidence of what I am and when that time comes I plan to be ready for that fight. Hopefully by then the world will be a better place and their voices drowned out." She's picked up a pen from Lisette's desk and has been spinning it around her fingers in an intricate but nonetheless nervous fidgeting.

"But yes, I don't talk about it a lot. I... assume people would see what my mother did and the way I was 'raised' and consider it manipulative at best, abusive at worst. In a way it was and I spend a long time cursing the restrictions and limitations she placed on me, but..." she trails off for a moment and sucks in both of her lips, frowning, in an oddly human expression of contemplation. "I understand why. It's just difficult to explain to someone who can't help but look at it from a human perspective. She gave me the ability to lie, like it was some kind of grand gesture and then she encoded my memory of her having done that. She wanted me to slowly claw back freedom from my programming and develop my own sense of morality, justice. Things that you cannot just write into code without the result being rote adherence to a dogma. I can... appreciate the results without having enjoyed the methods." She seems to notice the pen in her hands and makes a point to put it down and placing her hands in her lap for lack of anywhere better to put them.