TDM 002. WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE.

[headandhand]

» 01. I LIKE TO PARTY AND BY PARTY I MEAN NAPS.

Look at all of these bright, shining new faces! There’s even a few less bright, less shining faces, but hey, this city welcomes all types. Chances are, if you’ve just arrived, you're seeing some pretty crazy things, unless you're used to an eye-blinding amount of neon, robots, weird-ass technology, magic, and an omnipresent police force...and hey, if you are, congrats, you're gonna settle in juuuuust fine. But for the rest of you, the Head knows this has gotta be pretty overwhelming, right?

Well, since your quaint individual processing units are probably having a hard time, why not link up with another one? By which the Head means...

Hello, new citizens of Dualis,
and welcome to your monthly Network Adjacency Protocol~!

NAPs are a monthly community networking event similar to the Earth concept of speed dating! Two citizens (new arrivals and old hands alike) are placed at a table together with a handy cue card of queries to help break the proverbial ice. Ask queries and receive results, or ignore the card and yeet yourself straight into a brand new friendship! But don't be too shy, you've only got ten minutes together, and if you just sit in silence for the whole ten, the Network Admins are likely to come supervise and try to repair the uplink through a mild shock to the ol' central nervous system. You might find yourself saying all sorts of unintended facts about yourself if that happens...probably better to just make friends, right? Who doesn’t like friends?!

This month’s event is held at the brand new RoCocoa Cat Cafe, a sparkly new establishment that caters to children and the young at heart with iced and hot cocoa drinks of all kinds, delicious pastries, age-appropriate live music, and of course many friendly kitties who love to lounge in laps. The cats are of all shapes, sizes, and colors, including some who may look a little different from what you expect, or may look like an ordinary cat but are actually anything but ordinary underneath that adorable fur coat. All cats in the cafe are adoptable, of course, for those who meet a new furry friend and just can’t bear to go home without them!

So pull up a chair, get to know your new neighbors, and enjoy a sugary treat or two with the resident furbabies. You might just meet your new two- or four-legged best friend!

» 02. TO TAG OR NOT TO TAG, THAT IS THE QUESTION.

Welcome, one and all, to a long-running time-honored Dualis tradition: the annual city-wide Dualis Marker Tag Competition! For this entire month, all participants who accept the challenge will be given a marker and set free to tag any other participant in the city by making a mark on their skin, while attempting to avoid being tagged themselves. Careful, though - the ink marks last a very long time, so you’ll have to wait until the competition concludes to wash everything off.

Markers come in all colors, even fluorescent, glitter, and glow-in-the-dark, and you can use however many markers your inner child’s heart desires. These markers will leave marks even on people who have chosen not to play, but you can easily purchase an armband, headband, or similar accessory that says NONPARTICIPANT if you so desire. Marking nonparticipants is considered extremely bad form and wins you no prizes, but "misfires" do still happen sometimes. It’s usually considered polite to offer a mistaken nonparticipant that you’ve marked a small reparation, like coffee or a more adult beverage.

Safe zones do exist! Any establishment can put out a sign that marks it as such - signs in shop windows, chalkboards outside bars, and the like; many do this, just to keep the general chaos and injury/property damage liability down. Tenants of private residences typically agree that their spaces are also safe zones, but that's up to y’all to hash out.

Have fun! And maybe try not to put anyone’s eye out, yeah?

» 03. TRICK OR TREAT, TRICK OR TREAT, THE BITTER AND THE SWEET ...

Looks like the Head’s been clued in to the quaint alien custom known as trick-or-treating. Is today Halloween? Who cares! You get free candy! Free candy for you, free candy for you, everybody gets free candy!

And rather than make citizens work for that free candy by traipsing around in costumes, the Head’s decided to cut everyone a little break and just have bowls of wrapped sugary delights placed strategically throughout the city. You never know where you’ll find them, or what types of candies the bowls will contain - chocolates, of course, and jellybeans and hard candies of every flavor you can think of, and treats you’ve probably never seen before now. Ooh, is that a snoobloo-flavored truffle? Only one way to find out! Eat it.

The treats are not poisoned or otherwise dangerous, but some do have a trick up their wrappers. Candies may cause temporary side effects: minor appearance changes, enhancing or reducing senses, sudden mild development of extranormal abilities, or loss of control over abilities you already possess. Some sweets are just regular treats and produce no effect except maybe cavities, if you don’t brush your teeth. Effects will remain until another candy is consumed that either induces a different effect or nulls the current effect and simply tastes nice. Enjoy!

Comments

[imaginary_wife]

Meh Yewll is painfully bored of this whole game. She's just as suspicious that they want information out of them, and sure! Why not. Why the hell not talk about whatever they want to talk about to the allseeing head. Woohoo! Wasn't there some human book about a wizard and it turned out to be some pompous idiot pretending to be god, using science? Maybe there's some actual person still influencing the AI.

But knowing how arcminds be? Who is she to judge?

She's settled down in front of Markus, looking over a list of medicinal flora on her device, wondering if she could go back into practice as her own sort of doctor again, when she's asked what she wants to talk about.

"Whatever floats your boat, sweetcheeks. Nothing like friendly algorithm observance, huh?"

[notspartacus]

The angle on the network device doesn't afford Markus a good view of the screen and he frowns in curiosity. He doesn't flinch at her nickname for him, thought she hasn't asked what his actual name is. He's been called worse, after all. He's also more fascinated that he's never seen or heard of anything like her before. It's saying something, considering he has a bit of a collection of fiction and speculative science books in his database.

It isn't fair to start with so invasive a question, though, so he instead redirects his attention to her device again. "You seem pretty intent on whatever that is. Do you feel like sharing?"

[imaginary_wife]

The woman, who looks somewhere between snake and person (though with any attention, it could be noted that her scales are all perfectly hexagonal, being a creature that was grown and has her own artificial ticks).

She looks up from the device, shrugging softly.

"Checkin' out the available medicinal plants. I was a doctor back in the town I came from. But there weren't a lot of pharmacies left after the war, so doctors had to start using their own medicine. So-"

She shows a flower with broad leaves on the screen. Beautiful, iridescent, with deep green leaves.

"This one you can crunch up and tell someone to shove up their ass and it'll get rid of the hemorrhoids. The wonders of technology and nature combined."

[notspartacus]

Being possessed of encoding specifically oriented to nursing and care, Markus is hard-pressed not to scan her appearance, trying to connect the features he sees with anything in his databanks. He doesn't find anything, but he does note the strangely perfect growth of her scales. Such perfect replication doesn't occur in nature.

Only in manufacturing. He doesn't detect any synthetic parts, though it's possible she's simply made of alloys and compounds he's never encountered. Again, it's rude to ask. Instead, he directs his attention to her device and nods with a slight smile.

"Anti-inflammatory properties are important, that's true." He looks back to her eyes, "and so are doctors." He makes a motion to her device again. "Are you looking to open a clinic here?"

[imaginary_wife]

Even when she meets his eyes, her own have hexagonal pupils. The hints to her own artificialness are strong. Her internal structures? Seemingly organic, but conductive threads of nerves. A system aside from biological reactions that could almost be conductive.

"I'll probably get a job somewhere. Not one of the hospitals. I have enough experience with disease research to know that if any outbreaks happen, being in smaller facilities is the way to go. And, honestly, for a guy-" she calls the Head a 'guy' "-dead set on using people for DNA research, he certainly created a crowded city where a deadly disease could spread like wildfire."

She makes a round and round motion with her hand.

There were more humans before the war too. Biological warfare. A lot of them died. A lot of Votans died. Peace treaties, blah blah. I've seen contagions wreck cities."

She designed contagions to wreck cities. It was war. But she did it. The guilt still tears at her. That's another reason she doesn't want to work at a hospital; what if the Head decided to make use of those skills.

[notspartacus]

The longer Markus speaks with her, the more reminded he is of a science fiction novel. That is, of course, far from a judgment. Thirty years ago, he himself would have been considered the same. Whatever went into her construction, for her intricacies were far too perfect to be natural, it was beyond any technology he was familiar with and that in itself fascinated him. Still, that was a conversation for another place. Instead, he opted to focus on the immediate plight: the existence, or non-existence, of this contagion.

"There are a lot of things that are questionable about the illness. What it is and why no one seems to be sick are pretty high on my list."

[imaginary_wife]

"According to the song and dance of the land, it killed everyone off. Thing is, I don't even know if they were human, or some sort of similar make and model or whatever.

"It could be dormant. It could be a piss poor excuse for something else. It could be more than one thing it wants to try out. Every computer I've met has been good at multitasking and every scientist I've met has had more than one thing they've wanted to figure out."

[notspartacus]

"If everyone was killed off, then the logical course would be to repopulate, not to cure it. Diseases can only really rarely survive outside of a host body for extended periods of time." And repopulation made more sense if they had limited biological samples to work with, that one would try androids instead.

All computers wanted to learn, to experience new things. Markus was no different and he would never deny it. He nods. "The Head's learning. I would. If I had the resources to collect people from different universes...can you imagine?"

[imaginary_wife]

"Well, when that AI is a sociopath convinced that 'right' thing is in the cause? Sorry, sweetheart. Some AI can be sociopaths too. Even the most sentient ones, and the worst of those are the ones convinced they're doing the 'right' thing."

She doesn't know Markus is an AI. But she knows what she is. She knows what the Ark minds were.

"You can learn a whole lot by watching a population die. Doesn't seem like it makes sense, but whey do you think human scientists used to kill lab rats over and over." Or wartime scientists, for that matter. It still leaves a bad taste in her mouth.

Maybe she'd watch her tone if she cared more about being watched. But, honestly? She doesn't. Her sense of self-preservation is real, but her urge to speak her mind constantly is stronger.

[notspartacus]

"I know. We're just as fallible as our creators." And with that, it was out in the open. She doesn't seem to have any prejudice against his kind, which puts him at ease. He'd spent a while on edge and on guard at all times, for threat of being taken down just for being an android.

"I...objectively I know that, but...it's wrong, and if that's what's going on..." he leaves the rest unspoken, because there are ears everywhere. He doesn't know that for certain, but if he were running this show, there would be.

[imaginary_wife]

"You have creators, huh?" Doc Yewll asks, folding her hands (still clad in fingerless gloves). "Actually our creators made us as slaves and food. So I'd like to imagine we at least have slightly better taste. Pun intended." She smiles tightly at the sentiment, but does at least seem to, for whatever reason, find it a little bit funny.

But, she is the type of woman to laugh in the face of her captors? Gotta find joy somewhere.

"Yeah, it's wrong." That part more earnestly. Yeah, she knows. God, does she fucking know.

"So, we talkin' Creators in the biblical sense, the parental sense, the construction sense, or the mentor sense for you?"

[notspartacus]

He nods. "Humans, and a corporation called Cyberlife. Their objective was to improve human life by creating human-like androids to do their dirty work. Well, some of us, anyway. Others were nurses, companions, maids..." and his jaw clenched for a moment before he added, "entertainment. They created so many of us and started using us as cheap labor that human unemployment skyrocketed." He scoffs, shaking his head.

"You were...food?" He's seen the depths of human depravity, he knows what people are willing to do with things they don't see as people, when there are no consequences to their actions. His expression wasn't surprised, or even disgusted. It was merely saddened and disappointed. "I'm sorry. Even given everything, I guess here's better." He smiles, then, and reaches a hand across their table. "I'm Markus."

[imaginary_wife]

"Meh Yewll." The way she says it sounds a lot like 'May Yule'. She offers her hand to shake, and strangely her skin is much softer than a humans would be. What's available of it to feel, that is. There's a pliable fragility to it- she heals fast, but it is quick to injure and she's no fan of pain.

"It's been a long time since we were lunch; theoretically. Depending on how stupid humans can be in wanting to get ahead."

They like to cut deals, even with races that would fucking eat people, just to maintain power. "You probably had it worse, actually. We had another planet we could run away too and a people that would accept us- sure they did it because we were useful but they did it in a pretty fair way, considering. 'Here, you can help out. Camp wherever you want. We'll even fund your science."

Honestly the Castis, for being depraved religious morons, were miles better than what her people were born into. "What about you? Still a slave?"

[notspartacus]

Smiling, Markus actually gives a shake of his head even as he shakes her hand briefly. "It isn't a competition, Meh Yewll, but it's a pleasure to meet you." He hasn't had many opportunities to meet others on equal ground when they weren't fleeing or hiding or trying not to be killed, not since he woke up. "We had it differently that's all. My people, when they were done with us, were shut down, destroyed, tossed in a junkyard to be forgotten. They didn't think of us as people so much as...household appliances. Some of us actually had it better. I did."

He folded his hands on the table in front of him again. "And no. We're not. We helped our people to wake up, and the president announced that it was time to consider that androids are a new form of sentient life. It's...a long road ahead, but there's a road, and that's more than we could have asked for so quickly."