Turn 51

--- Maya ---

(It’s easy, she said. All you have to do is keep the crowd together, she said. She didn’t mention anything about this!) Her inner passion screamed, as she tried to keep a group of eight year olds from seeing the malfunctioning robot that had caught fire.

“I really don’t think Kim was counting on this happening.” She hissed to herself, a little too stressed to remember to keep her conversations with herself silent around others.

(Shit, you’re right.) She grimaced as Carol came into the presentation area and began to hose the malfunctioning bot down with a fire extinguisher.

“Alright kids this is all part of the presentation on lab safety.” The club secretary lied. “You see when things in the lab go wrong and fire starts you need to remember a very important detail about combustion. Fire needs to breathe oxygen, so if you can separate it from air in the same way this firefighting foam does then the fire will go out.”

(Huh, nice save.)

“Now the foam in fire extinguishers covers the flames while preventing them from breathing, thus smothering the flames. What you need to be careful of there is the fact that other things you use might themselves be flammable which means they can catch fire and-”

Carol paused as the malfunctioning robot lunged at her, before having it’s head caved in with the bottom of a fire extinguisher.

“-don’t forget that if you ever come across an actually dangerous machine, you’ll want to attack it’s head. The reason for this being that most M.A.D.s tend to place their robot’s primary processing units in the head, so as to mimic the fact that people with brains keep theirs in their heads.” The club secretary continued as if this was all part of the show, even as her words made the M.A.D. responsible for this mess cower.

(Very nice save.) She nodded appreciatively, taking notes on the rapid-fire bluffing.

(And informative.) Her inner madness agreed, taking notes on the robot killing.

---

After the fiasco at the M.A.D. club she realized that her two mechanical minions were very much mortal.

(As are our non-mechanical minions.)

(Eh, we’ll fix that later.)

So having come to this revelation she set out to make a few modifications to her minion protocols that would make it easier for her to back-up their data, or -as she was quick to discover- back it up at all.

“Why the hell didn’t we make it so we could back up our minions?!” She screeched upon discovering that there was absolutely no data saving feature to be found within her minion protocols.

(I believe it has something to do with the fact that we made these protocols before we realized our minions had personalities of their own.) Her inner logic supplied, with a touch of shame.

“This needs to be fixed.” She growled beginning to type so fast and so hard that she might damage her keyboard.

(As if we give a fuck about that!) Her inner passion cried in fury. (We need to protect our babies!)

Her first attempt at righting this grievous error was to attempt to back up her drone’s memories, that way even if their bodies were destroyed they’d still have their minds intact save a few hours prior to said destruction.

Unfortunately this proved to be a frustrating deadend when it became apparent that while she could back-up their memories, she couldn’t back up the connections those memories had to the self-modifying portions of her Drone Protocol.

If she’d relied on this method it would be as if her drones had the memories of their past selves but not their personalities, which would in turn make them functionally different drones than the ones she’d come to love in her own way.

“And that is not good enough.” She snarled, before beginning to come at the problem from the opposite direction.

(If I can’t save their memories separate from their protocols, then I’ll just have to keep everything separate when I store it on my servers.)

On paper it was a simple idea, right up until one realized that thanks to the various intricacies of her various AIs’ adaptivity storing two in the same server would cause them to interact and possibly even consume bits of each other so long as they existed on the same hardware.

Which is why she had to go and apply a series of sub-protocols that would recognize other programs and keep her Drone AIs from trying to eat it like the innocently hungry children they were.

(Well, innocent right up until they accidentally eat their siblings.) Her inner madness snarked, as they began to finish out the program. An event that left all of her feeling far more secure in the safety of her little Drones’ mortality.

“Right, now I just need to let them install these updates and teach them how to use the base server’s USB ports.” She sighed, feeling a certain weight falling from her shoulders as DM-1 and DM-2 downloaded their protocol updates.

---

“Okay, please tell me I’m not the only one who has noticed how odd Tommy has been acting these last couple of weeks.”

“You’re not.” Vi admitted, watching their brother with a touch of concern. “He’s been drawing this girl for over two weeks now, and it’s getting to a point where I’m half convinced he’s under a Slaver effect.”

(Only half convinced?)

“What should we do?” She asked, dismissing that thought. “I mean, this is the kind of thing we should tell mom and dad about, right? So they can get him help?”

“Yeah.” Vi sighed before nodding. “I’ll talk to them because this really is getting out of hand, and I’m sure they’ve noticed something is up, but I doubt they’ve realized how bad it’s getting.”

“Right…” She grimaced for a number of reasons. “I’ll check if there’s any way to deal with Slaver effects outside of calling Sanctuary or a Hunter, if we’re lucky we’ll be able to snap him out of it ourselves.”

“Maybe, but even if we do break him out of… whatever this is I’d still prefer it if we had someone professional give him a once over.” Vi admitted before shaking her head. “If we’re lucky we’re just blowing this whole artist mania thing out of proportion.”

“Maybe…” (Though I kind of doubt it myself.)