sixthiterationlogs | i'm not calling you a liar

WHO: Beverly Crusher
WHERE: Starting outside House 20, Inn, hospital, and anywhere outside in both villages
WHEN: March 4-10
OPEN TO: All!
WARNINGS: To be determined. Will update as needed

March 4th

Mist isn't usually a bad thing on most planets Beverly has been to. On her home planet, Caldos, it's usually very lovely, especially in the mornings. But if there's anything that exploring the galaxy, and especially being trapped here for so long, has taught her it's that mist is an unknown. Mist can be bad.

So one morning, when she first spots it rolling through the area, she watches it from the front porch of the house with no small amount of wariness. She's suspicious of it and now on high alert. With any luck, it will prove to be simply the good doctor developing a sense of paranoia after all these months of being stuck here.

She makes her normal rounds through the Inn to make sure nothing's amiss and then heads out to the hospital for her normal shift.

March 5-10

It may have taken her over a year to figure it out, but she's definitely avoiding the Inn for a while. At least until she can tell that the effects have worn off. The last thing she wants is to be stuck in there again while she's like this, spewing out the actual truth for all to hear and shattering the Prime Directive while she does. She's got enough trouble trying to juggle it as is; she doesn't need this.

For all that she isn't normally the type of person to keep herself isolated, she's been trying to avoid the vast majority of people. She does still show up for her time in the hospital mostly because she wouldn't be able to live with herself if she didn't make herself available and someone needed her. But she tries to keep to herself and doesn't say much unless prompted. There are far too many ways this could go terribly wrong.

Eventually, she starts avoiding people in the mornings, keeping herself inside House 20 and eventually taking walks around both villages, in an effort to see where the mist has permeated and whether or not she's the only one who's been affected. She still mostly keeps to herself, her arms wrapped tightly around her body and a frown of concentration and worry on her face. If anyone tries to catch her attention like normal, she won't turn them away, but they might find that she has some... interesting things to say.

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"Cybernetics?" Sam said, tilting her head to one side like a curious cat. She'd grown up with three and inadvertently picked up on a few of their mannerisms. "You mean like artificial organs?"

Exactly how cyborgy could these people get?

Already, her mind was imagining brains in jars, surviving for millions of years.

"Can you replace everything?"

"Yes. Artificial hearts, artificial arms, artificial legs. Not quite everything, but close."

She hesitates briefly as her mind wanders to something less than pleasant and without even thinking about it, she offers, "It's something of a second hobby for me, which has proven useful with the Borg and our android crewman. Although Data is much more pleasant than a Borg drone."

Brains in jars probably not so much. That might verge on creepy and they already have creepy enough.

Beverly was probably going to kill Sam. But in the good way. A way that actually made her feel more alive than before. Her scientific curiosity had been pretty fucking stunted in this place. As had all of her hopes for the future. But this? This was nothing short of a miracle.

"You have an android crewman?" Her eyes were gleaming like stars. "Are robots a big thing in the future?"

She'd watched the Space Wars movies a few too many times.

This was a dream come true.

"Data, yes," Beverly finds herself saying, despite how much she might want to stop herself. It seems that today just isn't a day for keeping the Prime Directive intact. "No, he's one of about two still surviving. There were a few others, but most couldn't survive for long before suffering a cascade failure of their neural net. Geordi and I could spend all day telling you how Data's mind works... but no one really knows why his brain survived when so few others did."

She tilts her head slightly, deciding to try to turn it back on Sam this time to take some of the pressure off.

"I didn't know you were interested in cybernetics. Or is just the idea of androids you like so much?"

"Mostly the idea," she admitted. Sam liked to think of herself as smart, but even she couldn't begin to comprehend what a cascade failure of a neural net was. It was just way too far afield. "I liked to watch the Space Wars movies when I was a kid. Always thought it was just cool, the way that robots interacted with people. And how everyone acted like it was totally normal."

A metaphor, no doubt, for Sam's desire to fit in as a child. For people to interact with her like she was totally...normal.

So much for that dream.

"Data's had to fight for a lot of rights that organic humanoid species take for granted," Beverly admits gently, "but the idea is the same. He's perfectly normal to me, especially when his emotion chip is active. He's a good friend of mine, no matter what anyone else might think."

Which does, of course, mean that she misses him terribly. It's been about a year since she's seen him, if her sense of time is correct.

"You'd probably like him, too, though he's a bit literal more often than not."

Sam scowled a little bit. The idea of an 'emotion chip' was a minefield to her mind. It was kind of funny. Before the Rain, she would have been super down with the idea of a way to turn your emotions off or on as the need arose.

But then she met the Predators.

Their constant need to remember to feel, in the way that Kindred had to remember to blink left her feeling...strangely grateful for all of her overblown, stupid feelings.

And why would a robot need to feel, anyway?

The thoughts clashed against each other in her mind, until she shook her head and tried to clear them away. "Literal? What do you mean?"

The scowl is an interesting emotion, though Beverly doesn't bring attention to it just yet. Likely, it's a reaction of some sort to whatever she said, something in Sam's past that might not be the best to address yet.

"He's still relatively young, so he's still learning about humans and humanoid species, especially all of our slang. Understanding our meaning hasn't always come naturally to him, but it's been very rewarding to watch him learn. That's part of why he's got the emotion chip."

The other part is that his creator finally made something that worked and Data finally accepted how and why he got it. The chip functions as a way to make him more human and it's another step towards his life goal.

"So...he's like a baby?"

Maybe not the best analogy, but Sam was trying.

Actually, the thought of someone fucking up slang kind of reminded her of Avery. He was pretty much trapped for all time in the 1950s. It was always hilarious to hear him use terms like "awesome" or "hacking." He always sounded like was testing the words out on his tongue for the first time.

Endearing.

But, of course, she still didn't want to forgive him, so she tried not to let her heart lighten thinking about him.

It's an analogy that makes Beverly smile a bit. "In a way. He's very intelligent, more so than a lot of human adults. He just doesn't have the experience yet. And that comes with time."

But he's trying and he's working and learning as he goes. To Beverly, that's one of the most important parts of being human.

"Guiding him through a lot of that experience has been very rewarding."

She wouldn't call herself Data's mother by any stretch of the imagination, but a motherly figure helping him? Absolutely.

It seemed like a mom sort of thing to say. Which left a whisper of a smile on Sam's lips. It was funny. She'd always felt so alone, so isolated. Only now, when she was actually alone, had she come to realize that she'd had the love she craved. That unconditional, unrevok-able love she dreamed of.

There was no fucking place like home.

"Sounds like it would be," she said. "I guess he's lucky."

i'm not calling you a liar

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