sixthiterationlogs | the game continues after checkmate

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the game continues after checkmate

WHO: Niska Elster
WHERE: Bunker
WHEN: September 21
OPEN TO: Mark Watney / All
WARNINGS: Potential rudeness, mild violence

for mark

Her charge is nearly gone.

Niska had known that setting out on this faith-driven quest was a stupid idea, but somehow she had convinced herself that it was a path that she needed to set herself on. The cabin had been so close, she'd been right there when her systems began to shut down, no longer capable of supporting motor functions. She recalls collapsing on the forest floor, perilously low to losing all power.

She was so close, though. She'd needed only to finish and she could return to Astrid. It was this last thought of the woman she loved that Niska spared her memory for before she shut down to enable herself to save power, to avoid dying.

When she opens her eyes again, there is no cabin in sight and her power levels are still dangerously low. Something must have changed for her to have been brought forward from sleep mode and a speedy glance of the dim room that she's in tells her what's happened. Her clothes are soaked and orange, a man is staring at her, a preservation tube is behind her, and she only has seconds before she's out.

Eyeing the man, it takes her little time to weigh the risks, deciding that her need for survival outweighs her mistrust of strangers. "Charge," is all she says, jaw locked as movement is impossible until she has more power, all function stripped to the bare minimum. It's all she says before she collapses again, water pooling on the ground around Niska's body, a prone figure that isn't breathing and has no warmth.

Dead, really, but only by some people's definition.

open to all

Once she's suitably charged and back in her orange scrubs (a mockery, as if she's an Orange Eyes, docile and suited to taking commands), Niska wastes little time in going to work on the computers. People come in and mill around her, but so long as they pay no mind to Niska, she'll pay no mind to them. Attentive of the systems, she finds coding that looks very simplistic, a function of keeping something running. It has nothing to do with synths and therefore, nothing to do with her.

While she'll return to find out where she is, what's more pressing to her now is who's here with her.

Paging through the systems and typing in code without looking up past the fringe of her hair, she hears movement that isn't so deliberate, as if a pause. Standing there in drying orange scrubs, Niska suspects that she either looks like an Orange Eyes ready to help or perhaps a prisoner. Either way, she dislikes the association and knows she'll have to find other clothing.

Soon. Right now, she needs to seek out Mia and Leo and Max. She needs to see if she can find them, and she has to hope that she won't find Astrid, wanting to prevent her from being dragged into this at all costs.

"You're staring at me," she says, when she hears the movement stop completely. It's an educated guess, of course, she doesn't actually have eyes in the back of her head (no matter what David Elster might have upgraded his synths with, that's not one of them). "What do you want?"

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Niska doesn't make a face, but she rolls her eyes. Humans are always so quick to turn to their vices as soon as something hard rolls into their path when they should take action. While she's read at least a thousand books on human nature, there are still aspects of it that will confound her constantly.

She doesn't bother to look at him, attention forward on the list of corrupted names through the iterations, only glancing up when she's done a thorough check of them. "They're names of people. I suspect experiments," she hypothesizes, given the repetition of the names and the nomenclature on the files. "The files are corrupted, I have no access to the source code from here."

She steps back to give him access, but only as a by-product of her intention to investigate the tubes better, trying to find hard wiring to lead her to another console that might have more access.

"Experiments like this? Like they've brought us here?"

It makes sense to him, and he can imagine that's exactly what it is. Which doesn't make it at all comfortable or comforting. Especially since he's already been wondering how long it's been since he went into that coffin and when he woke up here.

A brow arches then, now staring much more intently at her than he is the computer, even as she gets up and moves. Considering her for a long time before he moves to sit down, starting to type even as he speaks.

"You spend a lot of time on computers?" Just a casual question. Yep, nothing more.

Niska glances over the other man briefly as she rises from where she's crouched. He doesn't look synthetic, so she doesn't immediately jump to the suspicion that he was made the way she was, but 'brought' is not a thing that she's ever been. She was created and then she was.

"Enough time," is her brief answer, because she doesn't spend much time on them anymore, but David had equipped all of them with the knowledge they needed to self-repair and Niska had sought out information beyond that. She knew enough to release the sentience code, even if it hadn't worked the way she'd intended. "What are you looking for?"

"Yeah, me too." All his time is enough time, right? Because that's been his life since he was about fourteen. Maybe younger. So he clicks away, eyes scanning things as quickly as they went by. "Anything, I guess. Backdoors. Coding signatures. A clue of the country of origin. A marker that might give me an idea where we are. Anything that will say what all of this..." He waves a finger around, typing with one hand, indicating all of the land and place above them. "Is."

He keeps going, not looking up. "Also avoiding looking at these lists I've been told about."

Niska thinks that this man could be extremely helpful or extremely dangerous and she's not sure which side she's landing on yet. Anyone who knows this much code could be useful, like Mattie, but if he found out her secret, then she would be at risk and after so long passing as human, it's not something she wants to test out.

Instead, she'd much rather pick at his comments, diving in to try and understand it better. "Avoiding the lists?" she asks, narrowing her eyes at him as she leans casually with one elbow against the console, a perfect mimic of a human being. "Can you really look for coding signatures and ignore a main piece of information right in front of you?" she challenges.

Peering at the screen still, frowning heavily as he tries to make sense out of whatever he can find. Which isn't even much. Nothing should be accessible based on what he's seeing and no clue how they are able to hide that much. No one should be that good. Ego aside, it just doesn't seem possible.

He pauses though, turning his head to look at her, fingers poised over the keys.

"Can I? Yes. Will I forever? No. I just know that if there's any name on there I know, I won't finish doing this. So it has to come first." He knows. He knows he'll go looking, praying to find one of them there with him.

She tips her head slowly to the side, the motion fluid and careful. She had done the same, but she had reversed the order because her priority was to find the people important to her. Wordlessly, she makes a face that implies that maybe he doesn't care so much, accompanied by a shrug and a sound.

"So what you're saying is that it doesn't matter what names are on the list, you don't actually want to put them first." Is she trying to cause trouble? Not exactly, but Niska doesn't exactly stop to think about feelings and playing nice.

She's not Mia or Max.

His fingers just stop, silent, laying on the keys. He turns his head to look at her, his cheeks red and his expression pained as he takes several breaths before speaking.

"What I am saying is..." He says in a much steadier and solemn voice than most ever hear from him. "That I have trained for years to put the mission first, and my unit would have my ass if I ended up a sobbing mess in the corner before I made sure there wasn't a way to find a way out and back to where I am supposed to be. Do not assume because I can be a good soldier doesn't mean that I'm a horrible person. I gave up jobs that would pay me seven figures a year to help others, and I recently technically lost my life to get revenge on an asshole that killed kids, so don't even think that any name on that list I know isn't the most important people in my world and I would literally give my life for them."

And has. For freedom. For his sister and niece. For children he didn't even know. Because that was the right thing to do.

He doesn't like that at all, does he.

There is no sympathy on Niska's face when he looks at her, obviously hurt (or riled) by her comments, but then, she can't remember ever feeling sympathy for anyone, despite the fact that her consciousness allows her to do it. Perhaps Sophie and the Hawkins, but that could only be a wishful thought.

"You're a soldier?" she asks, making a face that says that the look of him doesn't precisely scream it. "You don't look like one," she says aloud, as if thinking it wasn't enough.

All of that, and panting slightly because he's upset and he has no idea how to handle this and then she just asks that questions as if he said none of it.

He stares at her, mouth hanging open for several minutes before he snaps it close with a click.

"Special forces, and because of that no one cares if I keep myself to regulations," he says, stroking his goatee. Which is a lie. The military cares. His commanding officer doesn't. "My teammate has longer hair than you do," he adds, smiling fondly as he thinks about Cougar. "Also, legally I'm dead so I don't think anyone really cares what I look like."

Her hair had been chosen by her creator and though Niska is over eight years old now, she hasn't adjusted it beyond needing to dye it and hide it in order to escape the people after her. The Special Forces comment makes her wary, perhaps more so because he knows and understands code.

"Why do the Special Forces want someone so well-versed in computers? Surely there was a more lucrative industry for you creating things," she says, a leading question, but she needs to understand whether her's a threat to her or not.

"Oh yeah. There's tons of private firms that would pay me a mint for what I do," he admits, shrugging.

"Thing is? I would rather take from those same companies and give to who they cheat. Which also means going in and helping to take down men that would do things like kill children. I can get money without those companies. I can't do the same I'm doing now working for those companies," he admits, being deadly honest with her in that moment, seeing no reason not to be.

She knows them well. Niska had seen them proliferate after the synths had flooded the market, hackers developing modifications so that they could make dolls of their own do what they liked. She's essentially one thoroughly modded synth and she knows that there requires caution with someone like this.

Killing children is something that doesn't resonate with Niska. Killing three children, that would do it, but only those specific three. Her sympathy doesn't extend to the rest of the human race the same way. "Do you see yourself as a good man?" she asks, the philosophy books she's read coming to mind.

It's an honest question and she poses it that way, with no teasing or derision.

The question catches Jake off guard. Pushing back from the computer then, turning the chair slightly so that his full attention is on her. Frowning deeply, not answering right away as he will often do, snapping out words before he thinks about it.

"No. I don't think I consider myself a good man, but I truly think I am someone trying to do the right thing. But I'm not the one to decide if I'm good or not, that's for others to decide."

Niska trusts people who answer the way he does far more than their opposition. She prefers someone who doesn't see themselves as a paragon of virtue, because so few times are humans ever that good. She has met them, of course, but Laura Hawkins doesn't spout boasts about how wonderful she is and it makes her all the better for it.

"I've met all sorts of people. Good, bad, evil," she says, calmly. "I won't judge you here until I've seen you by your actions, but so far," she begins, a touch begrudging, "it's not so bad."

"I'm Niska."

He isn't sure what he's expecting, but her answer makes him smile. He knows he doesn't always make the best impression, but usually being the one to tell the truth than to play games might pay off sometimes.

"I'm Jake, and thanks. Not so bad is better than I get from most. Especially after I've snapped at them. I... I'm sorry about that. I just... Truth is? I don't know what to think if I find my unit on there and I haven't found them here and it's got me spooked."

Niska's tolerance for the emotional ups and downs of humans is both fairly high and low. It's high in that her patience is very good, but her irritability at the behaviour also triggers very quickly, which means that if he wants to get huffy and upset, she'll allow him, but her opinion is also going to go down very quickly.

"Why should it mean anything besides what it says?" she says, blunt and straightforward. "If they're here, then you would look for evidence of their presence." Simple as that, as far as she's concerned, but while she might have emotions and can feel, Niska may not be so practiced in sympathy.

"Why would they have the names of our loved ones and family and friends? Why would they have records of them? Of us?"

He just shakes his head, even as he turns his gaze to the monitor. He closes what he has been looking at, opening what he'd come to see. The lists.

"Did you find names on here you knew," he asks, going back to the oldest and starting to scan them.

"Because they've either been here or facsimiles have been made," she replies, without the empathy that others might have spoken with. Then again, she'd watched David replace his wife with another synth with no care at all for how Leo would react.

Her baseline for how this works may not work completely right.

"No one that I recognized on the list," she says, which is a good thing. She's on her own mission and she doesn't need Mia or Max or Leo getting in the way.

"Facs..." He's looking, intent, but his expression changes. Paling a little, cheeks reddening, scanning faster now because he figures there has to be someone else on that list. Somewhere.

Except there's not. Just two. His own and...

"Carlos Alvarez," he murmurs softly. He sighs, sitting back and rubbing his hands over his face. "Well, fuck." He looks back to her. "You think we're clones? Replicants?"

"Where I come from, there are plenty of geniuses who are able to replicate a person's image," Niska says evenly, though personality is another matter all-together. While David Elster had been able to create Beatrice again in looks, what had become of her as Karen definitely was not the same woman Niska had once known.

For the better, really. Leo deserved better than a mother so weak and human.

"Who is Carlos Alvarez?" she asks, even though she won't know him, but this man, Jake, he clearly does. Perhaps there's meaning in that.

"Yea where I'm from those that do it are often criminals and don't care about mankind but profiting themselves," he says, but he's curious and not hiding it. "So they do it often? Why? For money? So rich people can keep their fortunes longer?" He doesn't hide the bitterness in his tones. Both that she knows science like that, and that he doesn't believe in things like that being used for the good of mankind as they should be.

He doesn't answer right away, though eventually he sighs.

"He's my teammate, my unit's sniper. Closest thing to a best friend I've had ever." And he could go on. The one hurt the most by the children they had gotten killed. The person who had saved his life more times than he could count.

"Because it's available to them and they don't think about the moral consequences," Niska says in a way that makes it sound like it's factual, but it's really just her opinion. After all, they could have had other reasons, but she doesn't believe them to be altruistic.

She stands smoothly, eyeing the exit door, not taking her eyes off it even as she listens to him.

"Is it important that it's his name there?" she asks, even though she's not looking at him, instead debating her next steps, mapping out where she'll go. "Does it mean something?"

Jake's face screws up about that, not liking how that sounds at all. "Yeah, people do a lot of shit because they don't think about the moral consequences." And a lot of people get hurt because of it.

"It means something to me," he admits. "Though I don't know what it means. Not yet." He sighs, sitting back in the chair. "Thanks, by the way. For helping me out. Such we don't have better answers."

And he knows he'll be mulling over this for a while before he heads out, tries to find an answer to what any of this means and why it even exists.

Niska eyes him up and down, thinking that she's passed a test of a stranger talking to her without him realizing anything is different about her. Even with her eyes their bright green, he hadn't noticed. "I wasn't helping," she feels like she wants to make it clear. "I just wasn't doing any harm."

With that, she doesn't say goodbye as she leaves, ready to explore the rest of this place and see if this is where her quest has led her.

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the game continues after checkmate

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