dualislogs | Midnight, not a sound from the pavement

Midnight, not a sound from the pavement

WHO: All residents of Dualis + special guest stars
WHAT: Strap in, kiddos, it’s a ~memshare~
WHERE: In your head. Or, you know. Everywhere you go to escape that.
WHEN: August 15-24
WARNINGS: Don’t forget these if they’re applicable!

It’s been a few months, Dualis, how are you settling in? New arrivals, we know it’s sudden, but we hope you’re making new friends already and settling in well! You’re all gonna fit in juuuust fine around here.

Things have calmed down after the supposed terrorist attacks during the Dualis Days celebration, and there’s still no news about that strange network broadcast. But maybe that’s for the best, right? See, the Head really does have everything under control.

But speaking of heads…

Over the course of these next few days, yours might be feeling a little funny. Maybe you just aren’t quite feeling like yourself. Or there’s an ache that just won’t quite go away. Or maybe you’re perfectly fine! Which is completely optimal, honestly.

Except--that memory you suddenly have. Is that really yours? And what about those fainting spells that seem to come with premonitions...or are you perhaps remembering something you repressed long ago? You’d probably remember something like this, though, wouldn’t you?

It’s perfectly natural to be concerned. However, if you approach your friendly neighborhood MedBot or clinician, they’re going to be pretty stumped. It appears there's nothing really wrong with you, but hey, here's some mild painkillers if you want them. And if you try and consult the Head, all it’ll be able to do is give you it’s most sincere condolences. It seems that there may have been some complications with the transfer process, but these should definitely wear off soon! In the meantime, why not visit your local clinic for a sedative and some painkillers?

Good luck, denizens. Looks like you’re in for a bumpy week or two...

[[As a reminder, these memory shares can happen at any point in time during the span of the event, not just when your characters are sleeping! You're also welcome to have them experience no side effects at all, all the way up to fainting spells and headaches a la Cordelia circa season 2 of Angel. Feel free to reach out to your friendly neighborhood mods if you have any questions!]]

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He reacted automatically - a deviant's reaction, not a machine's. The Tracis are a whole line of androids, there are thousands of women with this face. But the two he fought with were taller, even if they hadn't been wearing heels - and when she speaks a moment later, her voice isn't at all like those of the Tracis. It's cooler, someone who's used to speaking and being heard. It's human.

And she's wearing glasses and carrying coffee that's clearly not for someone else. Androids don't tend to do that.

"Sorry," he says immediately, stepping back and holding up his own hands peaceably - he's much bigger than her, after all. Most humans would be afraid of an android acting at all threateningly - or even a human so much bigger than them.

"You look like somebody I've met before, that's all."

That's a mild way of putting it.

"I'm Connor. I'm..." The words 'I'm the android from Cyberlife' are still so close to coming out. "I'm new here too."

"It's okay." The words are quick. "It's fine, really. I get it. I mean..." Alex pauses for a second, and she touches her temple with the hand not holding the coffee. "I saw them, in your memory. I didn't know it was yours at the time, but obviously it was." Giving him a smile is easy, because she doesn't blame him for that. If someone showed up wearing the face of Warren or Simon (she doesn't think of Richard, because that would be an entire thing that hurts too much and would have far too much baggage in it to consider.) then she probably would have responded to them in the same way that he had.

Granted, if it was Thomas Warren, she might not have called out to them before hand--she might have just punched him in his smug face before he could get a word in edgewise.

"It's nice to meet you, Connor." It does sound like she is actually glad to meet him, and she is because knowing more people in a situation like this is always better than not knowing, as is knowing exactly who's memories you were seeing. It feels less like a violation to know that about people.

The way he goes from apologetic to suddenly stricken and wary is like flipping a switch. How much can she see - that he was about to shoot them, and would have, except that something totally at odds with his programming just couldn't do it? In his five days here, he's been a person - no one knowing anything different about him. But now his memories are out there showing them things he did and almost did as a machine. And he can't just explain it wasn't him - would humans even understand that?

But she doesn't sound like it. She sounds genuinely happy to meet him - but from his detective programming he already knows journalists are more than capable of sounding like that with just a little bit of effort. Not just journalists - most humans can hide how they're feeling. Even Connor got some practice in totally suppressing anything he was feeling when he was desperately pretending to still be a machine.

But if he thinks like that about everybody he meets, how far is he going to get here before he goes insane? Or whatever the android equivalent is.

"Nice to meet you too," and he even smiles, though it's a small, kind of lop-sided one. He's still learning these things.

"How much did you see? Of uh...my memories?"

Journalists (and humans obviously) are able to lie in general much better than Alex herself does. She's too expressive in both her face and more importantly in her voice to do it with any real regularity. It's one of the things that made her tenure at Pacific Northwest Stories so impressive and well-loved, but it's also something that transferred over to her own show. At least in the beginning. She doesn't want to think about it now, not with everything.

Her smile is easier in return to his own, because it doesn't even enter into her mind that she should be treating him any differently because he's what he is than she would anyone else. To Alex, if someone is talking to her like a person and definitely is not a demon. (She's pretty sure she's not met any demons here and would like to keep it that way, thank you.) But there's a flash of empathy when it comes to the question that he asks, because she knows how this is too, and how much it sucks to have your memories out there for people to see.

Especially when you don't know just how bad or whatever they happened to see. How much you might be judged for their contents. "I just saw that one. That you fought them, but you let them go." It's in Alex's nature to question, and she wants to so much that she needs to actually physically bite her lip so that it doesn't come out.

"Right," he says softly, brow slightly furrowed. He still feels like the thirium in his system is running cold all the same, even though she still seems perfectly friendly. Maybe it's just the rarity of being treated that way, still new to him even a few days after getting here. An existence of being spoken over and referred to as an 'it' never bothered him, but not having it anymore is still something strange and new.

"But you want to know why."

He's not asking. Why he let the two go, why they were fighting in the first place at all. Even if he couldn't read it in her face, he'd want to know as well. The memories he's seen himself have no context to them; he never knows who everyone is, what brought them to that place in that moment in time. And a fight like that always comes from somewhere - but they rarely break up into nothing like that one.

"I want to know why." It's a simple and clear statement of fact, and one that Alex isn't ashamed of in the least. It's not a question, or a plea because she understands that in this, there's a very good chance that he might not want to tell her, and she wouldn't blame him for that. Everything about him, in both the memory and the way that he's holding himself now as he talks about it is setting her journalism senses into overdrive. She knows that what happened isn't usual, just from the contact cues of everything.

So, Alex just looks around a little bit, casting a glance over her shoulder and towards the coffee shop that she'd just stepped out of. There's a hopeful little note in her voice, because if there's something else that Alex knows, it's that standing on the open air street isn't exactly conducive to having deep conversations about one's past, especially when it has all of the story notes of being as painful as Richard's was. So, Alex just asks softly: "do you want to go into the coffee shop to talk about it? It might be easier than out here."

He doesn't blame her. He's seen a lot of things already that he would love to ask (or has already asked) people about, because the context of all the things he's seeing is often just as interesting as the events themselves. He can't begrudge anybody wondering about his own - and it's already occurred to him that he needs to tell people the context. The things he thought, the things he did, while he was a machine - they weren't the real him.

The idea that people go around thinking the machine he was when he was first activated is exactly what he is now... He hates it.

He falters a second, like he does every time the prospect of going somewhere like a cafe. Somewhere public. Somewhere for humans, where androids shouldn't be. But he quickly shakes it off.

"Yeah. Sure, let's go," he says, then, "I don't drink, but I'm sure it's fine."

When he falters, Alex just gives him a reassuring smile. She's good at that, and it's helpful sometimes when it comes to things like getting people to feel comfortable enough to talk. There's more than a small part of her that wants to push back and ask about why he doesn't drink, but she doesn't. Instead, the smile grows to a grin, and Alex just raises up her large paper cup of coffee almost like she would a champagne flute when giving a toast. "Don't worry, if they're concerned about you not drinking coffee, I'll definitely be able to cover the amount of drinks they think you should have." Because Alex has a coffee problem--she's definitely the sort of person who gets too much blood in her caffeine system at times.

Alex keeps her pace even with his, even though he's taller than she is. Catching up with people with much longer legs than her has been a habit for longer than three years, but in that time period, it's definitely one that she's refined to damned near perfection. "My advice?" She says, and it's clear that she doesn't mean it in a mean way, just casually given as Alex would to anyone else. "When you go into some place like this? Just walk in and act like you're supposed to be in a place. Nine times out of ten no one will even question that it's where you're supposed to be or not."

"Act like I'm supposed to be here," he repeats. He's done that before - done infiltrations, walked into places he outright wasn't welcome and just ignored what people thought - but he was a machine then, or pretending to be one, each time. This is Connor, just Connor, walking into a normal place when he still doesn't feel normal yet. It's hard to explain. But Alex is remarkably good at putting people at ease - or at least, it works on Connor, and he takes a deep breath he doesn't really need and manages to do a passable job as they find a table. Or rather, he doesn't look quite so awkward.

He's reminded, sitting at the table, of the one interrogation he did, just a few days ago by his memory. He feels like the shoe's on the other foot now, so to speak.

"Those two women who looked like you were androids - like me," he starts by stating the obvious. "Tracis - that's what the whole line's called. Companion androids," and he says that like it tastes bad, because suddenly it really does. He hasn't had any reason to think about them in the hours between deviating and coming here, and the days since coming here, but now that he is... The the slavery he was subjected to is one thing - but then there's what they all had to endure.

"My partner and I were called to a murder case at a sex club. A human male. He killed one Traci and the other, the blue-haired one, killed him. It was self-defence." He knows that now, but at the time it hadn't mattered, no part of it had. What mattered was-- "We were investigating deviant androids, androids who'd broken the bounds of their programming, so it was vital that we find the blue-haired Traci. She hid in the warehouse out back, but we found her, and that's when she attacked us - and so did the short-haired Traci you saw."

It's still weird looking up and seeing the face of those two Tracis staring back at him, without the anger or fear he saw in them.

"They were both deviants, so I was supposed to destroy them and take them in for disassembly and examination." He manages to start clinically, but his next words are far less so: "My programming was telling me to shoot them both and something in me knew it was wrong. I can't describe it. At the time I didn't even know why it was wrong, I still thought they were just machines."

He feels a horrible crawling feeling that he would claw out of himself if he could, but he might be talking to the only person who can actually understand some part of it - having seen it herself. Even if she doesn't like what she's hearing.

"It's the first time I really knew my programming wasn't all I was," he says a little distantly, really thinking back on it for the first time since he cast aside his programming entirely. "And it was terrifying - but I wasn't even supposed to feel terror, because androids weren't meant to feel anything at all."

He's tapping agitatedly on the table with a fingertip just to do something with his hand, to keep it moving.

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Midnight, not a sound from the pavement

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