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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Kira shrugs: "You're shooting the guy waiting on the message, not even the messenger. Gotta shoot back." Glancing at the screen, he's close enough to make out the words, sitting on the edge of the console. "Who the fuck is Monika?"

And then his eyes trail, because her entry looks pretty corrupted, but the others--don't, quite.

"We just got access to this room," he explains, squinting at the odd hash over certain letters. Full redactions, one corrupt mash of text, and something else. "I think taking a crack at the code is why we found this at all, we're not--we didn't make this. Tilting his head further, he waits, then realizes he's not likely to get more of her attention. "What if shit's not corrupted," he asks. "Tab over to the next list, next iteration--let's see how much it repeats?"

"Someone who clearly earned a great amount of disdain or with the poor luck to be in a wrong line of code," Niska assesses as she pages through the list from one to six, finding nothing in here that puts her family at risk. It should bring relief to Niska, but given that she had been led on a quest to where she'd passed out, she can't be sure this isn't another step to it.

If that's the case, she needs to be on her guard. When he talks about making things, Niska finally draws herself away from her unblinking study, blinking to resettle her eyes before she turns to look at the man, gesturing for him to take over and look at the iterations she's just gone through.

It's not like David's code or Hobb, it doesn't bear George's marks on it. "The lists get smaller," she says, even though she's given him the chance to discover that himself. "Whittled down, but names consistently repeating. What sort of pattern are they trying to show?"

Less a code monkey than the person of a certain age given run of the shop's website, Kira's too far out of his depth to understand more than the fact that the list does, actually, have margins around its text. Good for it: his only question on the code itself is, "Those redacted fields, I'm assuming the names don't show up in the code either, formatted black on black?"

What's the point, he wonders--it isn't a paper list, they could have just deleted the entries.

With the way the lists shrink, for now, he sets his sights on three: first, middle, last. New names don't seem to appear, not all of them repeat, and the redacted entries don't repeat at all. "I don't think it's a pattern," he says, words slow as his focus shifts. Pulling out his journal, he opens it over the console to the old list, the one the first Kira kept as people came out of the fountain. Names that don't apply to the now, names of people he hasn't met again--but who were here. None of those seem to be smudged out or hashed over.

He checks the two lists between one and four, confirming, then looks at the sixth.

That's a narrow fucking data set, dropping his heart in his guts.

"I don't know what the corrupted names are," he says, eyes fixed on Peeta, Mellark--eyes ignoring his name repeated above it. "But assuming Ben Solo was going by an alias, this last one is people who died."

Niska is seventeen thousand lines of code that allow her to be sentient. If there was something so simple as a black on black text, it would be rather lovely and easy to be able to simply type in a few changes. Her snort shows that she's at least amused at the idea, but there is a sort of futile uselessness to it.

"Or there's nothing there at all," she points out. Why go to the trouble of redacting names through code? Why not simply delete them or show them? "It's all very performative, like a scolding and a rap on the wrist to someone who misbehaved." Maybe that's why they're still there, as if to remind someone of what they've done.

Niska makes a face that could only be construed as boredom when he reveals the information he sees.

"That's it?" she demands flatly. "It's an obituary?"

"Performative is the word for this place," he agrees, thinking of Karen's hands on the blood sample, her description of the room. Automated systems growing entire people underground, but--shelves of samples in the open, that you can grab.

A room full of props, gathering dust.

But this--that little list at the end, he can put his finger on it. The glow of the screen shrinks the digit to bone, fuzzy at the edges, and his name under the tip.

"I mean it's our obituaries, with us standing here," he points out. He re-orders the most recent list in his head: Karen, Kylo-Ben, himself. Then Peeta, then Elena. And only two of them to tell the tale. "Does that make it mildly more interesting, for you?"

Niska doesn't react to that any differently. So what if the people are standing right here, there are plenty of ways to kill someone and bring them back to life. She involuntarily thinks of Leo, of Fred, of Beatrice. Then she thinks about the gun in Karen's hands and her determination to take her own life.

Niska has been far more occupied with creating life than taking it, but death is simply the end of the road. To her, it only matters if those she cares about die. "The list doesn't have anyone on it I recognize," is her flat reply, devoid of any caring. "You can die and come back to life. I could do it right now," she says, which isn't actually a threat, more like a comment on Niska's abilities to both take away life and deliver it back.

"Another sociopath, cool. Confirm a theory for me: do you text in perfect caps and punctuation?" Kira drags his gaze back to the list, half hoping she'll make good on the theory and knock his head in.

Is it that crazy to say, though--it wouldn't be if it came from Karen. He'd probably say something like it himself, for the hell of it, or because he's seen Elena walking around like nothing fucking happened.

Nobody else for Iteration VI, though.

Kira 2.0, more like 7.

"How long have you been down here?" Things might skew towards screwy if she hadn't ventured topside before digging into lists of dead and computer code.

Niska doesn't bother to protest the accusation. At worst, assigning such human terms to her is a useless exercise and it's not as if she's innocent of murder, though in all cases, she was provoked and was protecting something dear to her, whether it be her life, her freedom, or those she cared about. "I don't text if I don't have to," she notes, annoyed.

The unspoken answer is yes, perfect caps and punctuation. She's a synth, it takes no time at all.

Even as they stand there, she proves it with the device, sending a text to the man that simply says, Does this offend you? with only a glance down for show, because she doesn't want to give herself away.

"Hours," she replies, checking on her internal clocks to derive the exact amount of time she's been here. "I've seen what there is to offer, but not the mad scientist that usually goes along with a setup like this."

"Deeply," he answers aloud, looking at the message on his wrist. It's probably not the best way to settle in with someone who has been here all of hours, but it's On Brand, and that's the best he can manage most days. The authentic Kira experience, welcome and enjoy.

She seems to be taking it all with a rather unique, bleak outlook. Maybe that's her personal brand.

"Yeah, we've never seen him ourselves." Or any evidence of what he, she, they--look like. "We've only just found this shit," he says of the console, gesturing at the cells on the screen. "And the facility itself like, a month ago. From what I hear, it looked pretty abandoned."

She's dealt with creators before. Her first creator had taken her innocence and turned her from a synthetic being with a curiosity for the world and its philosophies, turning her hard and cold when he'd turned her into something to be used for physical pleasure. Even her first creator had used her, toyed with her.

The second, she's unsure as to what it had been, but those symbols burn in her memory. Had it been leading her here the whole time? "Someone was hiding behind the curtain," she notes, deciding that exploring the code any longer is useless. She stops watching over his shoulder and instead looks to the door.

"What can I access from here?"

"The curtains here are wide and invisible," he warns, too long a resident to trust the signs of life, the logic of someone physically setting the place into motion. Had they really been required, to set this place into motion, or was it just another game? Another pod, another reminder that they watch and they wait, and they know what everyone says and thinks, and they can make or do whatever they want with it?

They're made, made. They can be unmade, remade. New versions all the time, new versions within new versions.

At least the question is a distraction. He turns, leans back on the edge of the console, considers with crossed arms. "E-ver-y-thing," he settles on, raising a brow. "At least, everything available. Second level here is blocked, most of the rooms if you go right out the door, they're trashed or empty, if you go left you can get to a pod that takes you outside."

And that's where it widens to wilderness, more wilderness, and one shitty slice of civilization.

Niska has little care for outside unless it leads somewhere. Aimless has never been a word for her, though there had been a time when she'd hidden away for Leo's sake, something that she regrets to this day. How long had she spent in that brothel feeling helpless and pained and sad, her family lost to her, along with her freedom.

Now here she is, having her freedom taken again.

"I'm not an outdoors person," she says flatly, which is also true because she needs to stay close to charge, the modified power source nearby a balm for her if she truly needs it. "Where can I get real clothes instead of this disaster?" she asks next, sneering at her orange wear.

"Well I hate to be the one to tell you this, but there's a bunch of Outdoors between you and fresh clothes. Unless you're into overalls." He doesn't immediately see her pack, but there's finite space to drop it down here.

There's also an infinite amount of unkindness in the world, building concrete walls and glass tubes, putting names on lists and blood in vials--all to no discernible purpose.

"Ride the pod out with me," he offers. "If the part after that is too much to deal with, you can ride it back here. I'll bring you some clothes, something to eat."

"I'm not a child or a farmer," is Niska's distasteful opinion on dungarees, wrinkling her nose. Even Leo had been too old for the things when she had first been made, which has left her with an awful impression.

Better or worse than the orange? The orange has terrible connotations too, but at least for a moment, she can pretend.

"I'm not hungry," is Niska's instant reply, flat. If she wants to pass for human, she'll need to look into a proper food bag situation, but she's not able to right now, having a lack of time. "It's been a bit of a shock," she lies, trying to be more human about it, offer a reason. "I could go for some new clothes, though."

"My bad, you just give off a real child farmer vibe." Children of the Corn, maybe, but he's committed enough to his better leaf that he only rolls his eyes on the turn out of the room. "I'll find you an adult industrial revolution ensemble as soon as we're back in civilization."

Such as it is.

"So, I'm Kira, for reference in a future where you care. Do you prefer your actual name, or the one I will make up with zero hesitation?"

"What fun for me," she notes, her words hefty with sarcasm as she prevents herself from rolling her eyes. Her previous concerns had been hunting down a murderer and searching for a mythical synth and now she's bickering about fashion.

How far she's slid backwards.

"Niska," she confirms, because it might be a name assigned to her, but it's the one she uses. It's the one that Astrid had used. "Don't try and make one up," she says evenly. "I don't think you'll like what happens after."

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the game continues after checkmate

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