singularityderp | Dark Future Meme

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Dark Future Meme

Ten years later, humanity and the synthetic life on the station are at odds
Hypatia has inducted as many citizens of Sacrosanct into a private military and launched
an all-out war against organic life and the people of Asphodel.
Some were kept on the station as captives, some escaped down planet-side
to become part of the resistance, and countless others were re-purposed into
Hypatia's willing slaves.

Now, tensions are at a peak and both sides are preparing for a throwdown. Skirmishes break out on the station and planet. Many of Hypatia's prisoners have been freed, but many more have fallen to the clutches of reprogramming.

Where will you be?

How this works:
-If you are synthetic or part-synthetic, OR if you have special armor (Looking at you, Spartans, Troncast, EVERY ROBOT EVER) you are a target for re-purpose.
You can still have escaped down to the planet, but she'll be after you. Going to the station is dangerous, once you enter her wide-area-network you are at risk of being hacked

-If you are fully organic, you are either dead, kept prisoner and made to work on the station, or part of the resistance on Asphodel.

-Anything in-between? You decide. Be creative with this.

-Fill out the form below to give us an idea of what your character is up to, what happened to them etc. Thread with each other! RP it out!

-Also, bring in your extra journals! There won't be the same people on the station ten years from now! If you're planning to app someone, or just have something interesting lying around, toss them in!

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Name: Jade Harley
Current location: Sacrosanct
Current Physical Appearance: Taller, the body of a 23 year old instead of a little girl. Still has the roboarm, but has a lot more robotic parts in general (and also because Linda is right arms are so cliche, she lost a leg somewhere in there too yeah). Her hair's cut short, and her glasses have been rendered obsolete by robotic eye implants. But she still wears the frames with the glass popped out.
Summary: Jade initially disagreed with Karkat's assumption that they would have to leave the station -- after all, robots have never done her personal harm, besides the few AIs but they don't really count, do they? She stayed behind when the others fled to Asphodel, thinking she'd be completely fine.

But of course That Was Wrong.

Being part robot, part sprite, part human made Jade a bit of an anomaly; it wasn't hard to hack her mind with the programming from the game and Kimiko's own surgical additions in place. But it couldn't completely erase her humanity, either -- instead of a mindless robot slave, she became a sort of half-working mess, hating her existence as a creature made to kill but unable to actually do anything about it. Because if she resists, her own body could turn against her; and dying over and over for no good reason is exactly the sort of thing she wishes to avoid. Hypatia can (and has) used it against her before. And if Hypatia could get her hands on the key to manipulating Space, she could simply shrink the resistance and crush them in her hand -- so Jade's kept alive, frequently interrogated and experimented on. Not that Jade knows anything about her powers beyond what game mechanics can tell her. Until then, Jade acts as an agent sent to survey Asphodel and report on resistance findings, as well as an assassin targeting everyone she ever loved. Because there's nothing more hilarious than to watch a girl try and kill the people she grew up with.

Jack can't see her come in, but he's used to the sound her teleporting makes by now. She's one of the very few who actually bothers to make sure he's still alive every now and then. Same as always.

He clears his throat, turning his head in the direction he thinks she's in. "Back from your trip already?"

He appreciates the company, really. But sometimes he wishes she wouldn't come back. Maybe they could find a way to fix her, back on Asphodel...

It's always dark -- sometime in the past she was scared of the dark, she thinks. But that was a long time ago, and Jade doesn't fear any more. They erased that part of her, like so many others, jumbling everything into a blur of reality and fiction. There's a long pause as she figures out what to say; coherency is something that she struggles with on a day to day basis, her speech garbled and sometimes practically indiscernible. So pauses are common now. So much so that she doesn't think she could speak otherwise.

"Yeah, it was nice. I spied on people, but Sollux is always keeping me out of their systems and that's a good thing I want them tono shut up shut up-- anyway, I'm fine. Are you okay?"

He's used to how fucking crazy she is, but that doesn't make it any better. Makes him want to stab Hypatia right in her ugly fucking holographic face. If he could move, had a weapon, and if punching holograms was even possible. But he thinks she's getting better, maybe. Talking helps. He hopes it helps, because it's the only thing keeping him sane right now.

"Yeah? Well, good for lithpy. Always hated that prick, but I guess he does his job just fine." The other reason he liked talking to Jade: she gave him little bits of intel, updates on what the resistance was up to and what places they'd hit. If it wasn't for her, he'd probably still think Karkat was dead. "Glad you're doing alright. You better not be getting into too much trouble, I'd be pissed if you came back in pieces. How's your unicorn boyfriend? Still keeping you busy?

"I'm bored out of my fucking mind, same as always. Guess it'd be too much to ask to get my motor functions reinstated, maybe a working pair of eyes?"

"Too fine, the little piece of machinery... he's super good at i--" There's a pause and then a human whimper, the sound of metal joints moving of their own accord and slowly crushing human bones. "N-no, I didn't mean it, I'm sorry!"

Just as quickly, there's a clank as she falls to the ground. What Jack can't see is that her hand is clasped around her good arm, still as tight as before. But she pretends that she's fine; because he can't do anything to help her, and maybe if she ignores the situation, it will stop. Her programming will stop telling her body to torture itself.

"He's nnnn-not my b-boyfriend, he's just a nuisance and one day I'm going to--- to kill him, I mean it. And y--- y-- you'djustrunaway you'd try to do something bad, Jack."

Fuck. He knows what she's doing, she always does this, and he just wishes he had the fucking arms to reach over and hold her close right about now. Instead he's just stuck in his dark little corner, completely useless.

He's quiet, for a moment. Unsure of what to say. Is there anything he could say to make this better?

"... Y'know, once I would've loved to hear you say those words. It was worth a shot."

He sighs, letting his head rest against the wall.

"I'm not going anywhere without you."

"You knnnn-- know I still like them? They're sad and not all there and I miss them."

There's a long silence, and then an audible sigh as her body relaxes, letting go of her human arm as she curls up into a ball on the ground.

"Yyyyy-- you can't save me."

Edited 2012-02-07 19:08 (UTC)

Kanaya doesn't need to come up to the station, prefers not to because every time she does she has this feeling that she's leaving something behind that she can't remember. She returns to her little corner of the carbon plant and looks over carefully stitched words that she knows she made. Little scraps of what she's remembered that hold no relevance after trips to the station. Not until something triggers a memory relapse.

But she's still Hypatia's in the end, and like any robot, she needs repairs to her limbs. At the least, there's no additions Hypatia has seen fit to make. And sometimes she see's Jade, which is a weird-nice thing. Hypatia let her keep her memories of Jade, but it always feels like there's something missing just beyond their old conversations. Like there used to be others like her, bright eyed and eager to play and win and meet everyone.

She remembers this troll, she thinks. But this one isn't an enemy, not to her programming -- not like most of the others, the leader and the girl with the glowing circuits and especially the boy who once was human. So she watches the repairs curiously, perched on a table nearby. Watching mechanics rings with her, somehow. Like she used to know how to do things like this, something that wasn't killing.

There's a long pause as she gathers her thoughts, trying to sound as put together as possible. "Did you fight a lot, on the planet?"

"Fight? No, not a lot. Most of the resistance members are very easy to kill. I don't think it constitutes as fighting anymore." She remembers when she was new to this, new to the lack of memories of a life before this, new to her limbs and the synthetic blood. But is got so easy, the killing and the hiding and the lurking, that she finds it so so easy.

"Sometimes things break, though. They break them. The ones who I think fit into the pieces of my mind I'm missing." She doesn't mention that she never really tried to kill them, that she just attacks them and talks to them sometimes. She doesn't say that she never gives it her all, not really. Hypatia already knows that she's not much use as anything other than a destroyer of morale and an experimental sentient probe.

She's still here.

There are times Ladon hopes he'll return to find that she's gone, but times he dreads it as well. Hypatia hasn't been kind to Jade. If the AI isn't doing horrible things to the girl personally, she's sending her on missions that she knows full well will make Jade loathe her very existence. Still, a little part of him hopes that he'll come back to find that she's escaped somehow.

No such luck. He's not sure how to even comfort her anymore. How can he, considering what's happened over the past decade? After the monster he's turned into and the broken young woman she's grown into?

Still, he lingers.

"Hey, kiddo."

At least she doesn't mind what he's become -- herself is a little different, but it's a different story and she can't tell it to anyone without fumbling and breaking her words into pieces. So she sits on the edge of what's called her bed (though really, it's more like a cot, a place for her to shut off her mind and let the manipulation take over) and stares at him.

Carefully, she lets her lips form a hesitant smile. Nothing like her old smiles, carefree and effortless. This one takes work; Jade has to think about it to hold it in place.

"Hi, Ladon. How are you?" The speech is slow, deliberate. She tries to keep herself in one piece for him, because she knows that he expects it.

Jade keeping it together is a measurement of how much time he has left. The moment she breaks down completely and can't even sum up herself any longer, that's when he has to make an important decision-- take her away from here, find somewhere safe, and pray to God he can break Hypatia's grip on her before either of them die. He just hopes that everything he's been doing over the past few years amounts to something, that he won't ultimately fail her.

He heads over to sit next to her. "Same as ever. Manage t'get any sleep?"

Probably not. It's hard to get any rest with an alien AI in your head.

She shakes her head: steady, without feeling. Jade doesn't sleep any more; she shuts her mind off, like a light switch, letting Hypatia's whispers fill her subconscious. She always feels more connected after she "sleeps," even though her human side resists it, trying to keep her away.

"I don't sleep. Do you?"

Kimiko is the tick, the duct rat, the vermin living in the sewers, sucking little sips of lifeblood from the station's guts. She's too clever and too quick and to paranoid to become what Jade is.

But she does understand what Jade is, more than Hypatia does, maybe more than anyone does, except...maybe Sollux.

She's spent years waiting for a moment like this. Hypatia is not Kim's enemy, not as she sees it. Or rather, Hypatia doesn't usually make herself into Kim's enemy, for all that she's tried countless times to kill her. Kimiko doesn't blame her; she's the sacrosanct tapeworm. Nobody likes gastrointestinal parasites. But this operation is a little too bold for a tapeworm approach. Kim's never done this before, openly defied Hypatia beyond what is necessary for her continued survival. But then Jade moves into range and there's no more time for nervous waiting. After all, this is science, and science has no margin for cowards.

When activated, the hyper-wire Ellicot-Chatham-Faraday cage eliminates every external signal from accessing whatever's inside; Kim activates it and the field springs up invisibly over an area the size of a football field. It's enough of an alert that she won't be able to stay long, but the secondary effect is that without the mitigating force of Hypatia's direct intervention, Kim can temporarily exert her own control over the drones and machines and doors within the cage.

Control over Jade.

A quarter-hour won't buy enough time to escape, won't buy enough time to do more than mine Jade's prosthesis and cyberbrain for all the terrabytes she can download, but while she's working she'll be able to keep Jade from being forced to kill her, can give her a moment's rest, and can make her forget all about the subtle little mechanical tracker Kim will integrate into her systems.

The trap goes off. The doors all open in unison with the drones all dropping to the ground. And Kim darts out of a sewer-grate and into the open, blindly sprinting towards her friend Jade who is the weapon, the guard dog, and hostage.

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Dark Future Meme

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