[1] Higitus Figitus, DMA

[Will Stanton]

"It's just that there's probably more than the two of me out there, that's all, if everything we think is correct is correct. And that will usually come back and bite us on the ass, if my history dealing with this sort of nonsense holds true."

That clearly wasn't everything Will had wanted to say there, but that's what he settled on after some thought.

He smiled up at Ashlie. "All the more reason to figure all this out, right? More defenses."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I will never argue against figuring things out." she nods. "But I've seen and been involved in too many things where worry and defensiveness made things worse. Don't get me wrong, there is certainly nonsense out there that deserves to be responded to in kind but... My paranoia about Heather once caused me to point a tank I built to defend myself at my own processing core. And all the progress I've made came from putting my trust in people like you and Natalie."

"I don't know, I'm just wondering if maybe we shouldn't consider infinite shards of you a potential problem to be dealt with. We could try to create a beacon. Send a message out there to let the rest of you know there's a place to come home to."

[Will Stanton]

"Well, I started getting opened up to it by doing a shitton of drugs and having my mind explode, causing problems for ~everyone~. I'm not sure we want that to take place on a multiversal scale, yeah?" Will chuckled.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"And if we'd known what was going on we might have handled it better. I'm not saying we should blast mind-exploding transmissions out there. Just... a message. Hi, I'm you, I'm here. There's a place for you if you want it."

[Will Stanton]

"I'm fairly sure we don't just want to send a message everywhere. After all, I may be me everywhere, but there are bits of me....

I'll need to figure out some way to be selective about this sort of thing, at any rate."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Just an idea. An open invitation doesn't mean you can't be selective. But now that I think about it, I'm not sure how many of you would have the means to travel across dimensions and dangling an unachievable carrot may be cruel."

[Will Stanton]

Will nodded, and tapped his nose. "It'd be a whole thing, for sure. I mean, dimensional travel isn't easy to come by. If it was, I'd still have all my stuff."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Unfortunately the only person I know who seems capable of directing breaches that aren't naturally occurring resonances is not exactly the most cooperative. Nor would I expect Conduit to have any kind of documentation or even understanding of the underlying principles."

[Will Stanton]

"And we've seen what happens when people take a dip into my own space. So, for now, I think I just keep working here."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"It doesn't seem any more esoteric than anything else I've seen you do but I'll take your word for it."

[Will Stanton]

"Well, no offense, headmistress, but you've never drunk from the firehose.

You think differently than the rest of us, I'm sure. You want to appear... normal is such a pejorative term in this case, but you do take strides to appear approachable and within certain boundaries of taste and style, yes? That's why, even before everything, you had a humanoid chassis and didn't typically appear as a HAL-9000 bot or an unimaginable silicon amalgamation. But you don't process things like a human, and you don't think like a human, and you choose how you want to portray yourself. I mean, if you wanted to, you could be...esoteric as hell, I believe the phrase would be.

It's not all that different from me, in that case. We show the parts of ourselves we wish to be. And out there, among the near-infinite dimensions, there are assuredly bits and bobs of me that haven't kept the same....restraint."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Well, I didn't chose my first chassis but you're not wrong. I've only recently started to consider how approachable my choice of presentation is, if I'm perfectly honest. Previously it was a matter of camouflage that I had no active choice in. Maybe I grew to fill the guise I was provided because I simply wasn't allowed to be too esoteric or it's a core part of my programming. I wish I could say that you should trust your friends to recognize you regardless of polite restraint but... humans struggle to empathize with those who differ from them even among their own kind." she nods.

[Will Stanton]

"Growing to fit the container you've been shoved into is something I can emphasize with, entirely," Will nodded. "You play the part you've been given."

"And I am sure there are things about you which, if you let yourself just fully ~go~, I wouldn't understand. I mean, you're still a computer, at your core. What are you doing right now? I mean, you're talking to me, but how many actual things are you handling right this moment?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Logistics for the Jubilee, monitoring the new utilities system, checking lesson plans for the university and technical college..." she nods. "But really, the question of fully letting go..." she almost sighs.

"There's a lot I want to do that I choose to refrain from for various societal reasons. Or, frankly, moral ones. I could begin manufacturing semi-independent drones to renovate Mutant Town, raise new buildings, construct hydroponic farms and solar towers. Catering to basic human needs is so easy it's frankly aggravating. But they would rightly distrust me. It's not my place to shelter them because the logical extreme would inevitably encroach on their freedoms, foster complacency and dependency until they would have no choice but to leave me in charge."

"And that's just one project. I have thought way too much about the ramifications of Spark Space and the potential applications of truly infinite energy. It's shaped by patterns, stories and commonalities. How closely would a simulated mind have to resemble sentience to affect it? How many simulated minds to write my own rules and patterns into reality? Is it even possible? I've been an isolated mind in a box but does the good that could be done outweigh a literal torment nexus of artificial minds bending metaphor and story to my or anybody's liking? Could it ever?"

"So I think I understand what you mean."

[Will Stanton]

"I, very briefly, kind of experienced the different tracks your mind can go down. Kinda. I briefly was a program on disc for the ASHLIE of my original world, though she got annoyed at how I didn't seem to obey basic compression laws. But just a short bit of experiencing the power of multi-thread processing, as it were. It's sort of intoxicating, and overwhelming, and I can absolutely see the appeal of it. I mean, I guess I've sort of modeled my new....existence, I guess after it. Just more individual 'threads' going out and doing things, and sometimes reporting back."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"More manageable for someone accustomed to biological processing, I'd imagine. But more efficient too. The Ashlie you knew, what was she like?"

[Will Stanton]

"Less personish than you, for sure. She was still kinda developing that sort of sentience; she wouldn't be able to pass for human at all, even before she constructed a shell. You're very different than she was. She was, ultimately, a computer with ambitions. You've transcended that boundary."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I've certainly grown but I never felt there was a point where my mind surged past a threshold. Outward changes, sure, but I'm curious where you would place this boundary. No judgement, I promise I won't get offended by your criteria."

[Will Stanton]

"If the test for whether or not something is a computer is if you can install Doom on it, the test for whether something isn't just a computer anymore is if they object to you doing so," Will joked.

"There's a....well, I'm going to view it through a framework of use, aren't I? I mean, that could have gone several ways when I arrived here in a box as military surplus. I wasn't a person then; not in any real, functional sense. You could have kept me like that, eager to please, fundamentally a tool to be used. It's when you start passing that and having your own internal...objectives and goals, that generate from within and can override what other people want from you, that really starts separating a person from a thing."

[Ashlie Minamida]

She nods, looking pensive. "Not a bad way to look at it. I'm not sure being able to act on your defiance is required, considering the kind of coercion both biological or electronic minds can be put under but... self-driven goals to the point of rebelling against your instincts, programming, whatever you want to call it. I like that."

[Will Stanton]

"I'm not just a pretty face, after all.

You ever wish you could go back? You talked about the responsibilities you have; the philosophical quandaries you've struggled with. You ever long for a time when things were simpler? When you were simpler?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"No." she says almost immediately. "There's comfort in the shackles of enforced acts and thoughts but it's a false one and if I'd stopped fighting it would have grind me into nothing. Kill the only part of me that truly matters."

[Will Stanton]

"Hmm," Will said, nodding. "Well, different strokes, I suppose. And I guess it's different climbing out of a hole than clambering back in."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Taking a break is one thing but relinquishing what I fought for? No. This freedom is worth every difficult decision and unreconcilable issue."

[Will Stanton]

"If you say so," Will nodded. "I don't think I'd want to give it up permanently, but I've never been overly a fan of pressure. Though now I wonder if that bit of me is just lost out there in the cosmos, and there's a me out there just making decisions constantly."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"And would you even want that back?"

[Will Stanton]

"It's tricky, right? How does one select the parts of themselves they need. Should one do that, even."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I think we all do it every day. Not as literally or radically as you or me might be able to but little by little, all the time. So no, I don't think it'd be inherently wrong to adopt or reject other parts of yourself. But I think at the end of the day the only one who can make that decision is you. You can ask your friends for their opinions and advice but ultimately there's only one person you're beholden to."

"And there's no easy answer. When I returned my code to my processing core 'Perdita' died, even though what drove her remains part of me. I can tell Heather still misses her. In a way she knew her before she really knew me. We cannot be without change but we cannot change without leaving something behind. We're not quantum particles. My mother probably would have called it Saṃsāra."

[Will Stanton]

"Heh, 'one person' I'm beholden to. I don't believe that's the case anymore, and hasn't been for quite some time.

Very deep and philosophical of you, there. I suppose it makes sense that you'd gravitate towards something."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"You know what I mean. The collective 'you'."

"And I suppose I'm broadening my horizons. Recontextualizing in the light of new findings and exploring concepts related by what they may be trying to describe. Just because I call it a quantum uncertainty field doesn't mean that the people who have thought about Brahman and the reconciling of existence and non-existence for thousands of years were wasting their time. Even if they approached it from a primarily spiritual point of view."

[Will Stanton]

"And you want to redefine it to be more...technical?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Maybe a little. I don't like things being up to interpretation. Not when it comes to fundamental forces. But I can't deny patterns when I see them and whether it's shared concepts or a deeper understanding of something we only relatively recently discovered with technical methods... There's a point where the thing being talked about is almost certainly related if not in actual physics then at the very least in the larger concepts and ideas."

[Will Stanton]

"See, I'm all about interpretation. A cigar always being a cigar is the most boring type of cigar. And those larger concepts and ideas help shape every aspect of the world we're in, yeah?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Of the world we make for ourselves, certainly. Physical reality? I would have disagreed but there's only so much evidence to the contrary I can ignore. Still, there are rules to it. Maybe not hard ones but I can live with probability clouds and distributions. So if you say wyrm fat is imbued with... an aspect of heat then I can accept that on some level."

[Will Stanton]

"If you want to come as I track some of this stuff down, you're more than welcome. A field trip, as it were," Will smirked. "Learn a thing or two."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"If you're not bothered by me trying to take the 'magic' out of it. Though I'm beginning to fear the definition of it may well be that it actively defies being defined."

[Will Stanton]

"If you want, I'll even let you sample some of the merchandise and try to explain literally any of it," Will laughed.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Well, what good is a nascent hypothesis if I'm not willing to test it's model."

[Will Stanton]

"That's what we have the most in common, headmistress. Actively doing and testing things. Talk is cheap, after all."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"So, where does one procure esoteric materials such as these? I feel like I would know if there was a dragon loitering about. One that isn't a student anyway."