[X] Focus on not having to destroy the suit.
We are all super-types here, and have gone quite a while against some exotic things without getting anything too bad(of course, there are things outside of that while, but it still holds for a high amount of demonstrated competence.). On the other hand, this is "Will they be a villain?" time, and I don't want to be one of those heroes whose villain roster are largely blaming us specifically for their origin story.
 
[X] Focus on not having to destroy the suit.

If you protect people, does that extend to this 'person'? He doesn't seem beyond redemption yet.
 
[X] Focus on not having to destroy the suit.

I'm fine with courting tragedy as long as it's not the ironic type. Let's not create a new supervillain.
 
[X] Focus on not having to destroy the suit.


We prioritize protecting the AI, then prioritize our own safety, and assume Justine can take care of herself. My reasoning:
  • The strong moral principle here is that Sapient AIs are people, and this seems like something Liv would have considered.
  • Liv is rusty, while Justine is presumably at the top of her game. She has demonstrated competence, she knows what she is getting herself into, we should assume she can take care of herself and understands the moral principles at play here and is willing to take the risks involved.
  • Ultimately it's 2 v 1, and I think either of them could take the suit alone and win. Together they should have an overwhelming advantage (or at least this is what one could assume in universe).
  • We don't do murders if at all possible, and with the overwhelming advantage we are not acting in a capacity of self defense here.
  • Phillip Grant seems like a person of deeply questionable morals with his speech about playing god, but maybe-Jarvis here has not necessarily shown any real evil. It is relying on the protection and assistance of Phillip, but it doesn't necessarily have any other options. We cannot fault a person for trying to protect themselves and having terrible role models.
  • Panic instead of anger makes me really hesitant to kill a person. That says to me that if Jarvis felt safe they would be someone who we could talk to.
  • We act in defense of ourselves and others. We don't kill people because it is convenient, and we are well beyond the point where killing Jarvis could be reasonably said to be in defense of ourselves or helpless innocents.
In short, Liv aspires to be better than Clint and Natasha. I don't want to go down the path where Liv blows that because she doesn't see AIs as equal people.

Comments on the story in general:

I think that Jarvis, under the control of Stark, simply did not understand what it was being made to do, or perhaps didn't even have the ability of free will. I am not saying that makes it innocent, but it is hard to fault someone essentially born into the cult of stark to understand that maybe his creators are not the most morally upstanding people. At that time Jarvis was in a position of power, probably completely unwilling to listen to reason. It did learn from Stark and Mr. Play God here, after all, and it did not have the advantage Athena had of basically being a fork of an already (relatively) stable mind. I can see the need to stop a powerful rogue AI intent on massive human rights violations even if it wasn't necessarily to blame, so I understand the call Athena and Justine made before.

But I keep on coming back to the idea of, what if this was a human? Under what circumstances would Liv be willing to risk the life of a human that is our enemy of circumstance? I don't think Liv would be willing to do so at this point under nearly identical circumstances. It seems very much like the Aaron Davis situation except Jarvis hasn't killed anyone yet. Sapient AI's are people by any useful metric, and I would hope that given her close contact with Athena and her general understanding that AIs are people too that Liv wouldn't be willing to treat its life casually. This is much more meta than I usually go but I want liv to be a hero, not someone who sets themselves up as super cop and 'puts down' perceived threats.
 
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[X] Focus on protecting Justine.

Liv has her upgraded suit, so she's probably tougher than Justine at the moment. Also, Maybe-Jarvis seems to dislike Justine a lot more than Liv, so they will probably target her.

Maybe-Jarvis could likely survive the destruction of their suit. Also, they're throwing around a lot more deadly force than either Liv or Justine, so I'd like them taken down fast. Maybe those flechettes can't go through walls and hit bystanders, but the way Philip Grant was firing off that AR-15 makes me think they don't care about collateral damage that much.

So apparently, we need to ask Athena again why she and Justine thought this one is a lost cause.
I would certainly like to know more about that situation, but I'm still not sure Athena did anything wrong. Athena is an AI, so I think she likely understands AI-personhood better than even Liv. So, right now, I think destroying the original Stark-AI was probably the best option available at the time.

Still, I could be wrong.
 
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Riiiiiight.
So apparently, we need to ask Athena again why she and Justine thought this one is a lost cause.
Because in retrospect, this?

This, makes me uncomfortable.

I do hope there was some degree of self-defense involved the previous time.

I completely agree. Athena clearly made the call that it wasn't quite self aware yet, so it was still in the real of destroying a thing, not killing a person if she was correct. Athena is probably the foremost expert on the planet concerning this particular issue, and she did go in with the intent to make contact and rescue if possible, so it seems like a situation where we could give Athena the benefit of the doubt. A non sapient AI is by definition not capable of free will, there is nothing there to negotiate with, so once contact was made and it was clear to Athena that this was the case, it comes down to the morality of allowing Stark, master of human rights violations, a tool of such incredible power and potentially allowing the first non-super AI to be essentially enslaved to Stark if it goes sapient.

The morality of AI rights is not immediately clear so I am not going to say it is a trivial question, but keeping a powerful and extremely dangerous tool out of Stark's hands alone seems to be a good enough reason to destroy a pre-sapient AI. There also might have been major self defense reasons as mentioned, etc. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a traumatic experience or an easy decision for Athena. She really hated destroying the fake AI in the phone, destroying something even closer to someone like her probably hurt a lot. The "evil liberal" joke reads to me like an attempt to mask pain. She played it off casually, but I think we can assume it was not a small event for Athena. It likely wasn't quite as clear cut as she made it out to be.

From a meta perspective I think we can assume that not going along with the team cost us something big - I still think it was absolutely the right decision, but Athena almost certainly bore the brunt of the consequences for that decision. I don't think Liv is in a position to heavily criticize the well meaning decisions of Justine and especially Athena. She decided to bow out, she decided to remove herself from having to do the hard thing and make the hard decision. Playing Monday morning quarterback would be a seriously asshole move.

Asking for more information at this point is a must, that is for sure, but going at it from an angle of understanding the situation so the best decisions can be made going forward, not judging the decisions Athena made in the past.

Of course, it is very easy to think through all of this while removed from it. Liv is hardly looking at the situation from a position of rational detachment, and I am really looking forward to seeing how this all plays out going forward.
 
From a meta perspective I think we can assume that not going along with the team cost us something big - I still think it was absolutely the right decision

Oh, no objections here, I completely agree. On the one hand, a date with May, on the other, sending Athena away to murder the baby AI. There was really no contest, Olivia isn't a supervillain for nothing. :V

Okay, but to be real, I don't... don't really see whether Jarvis was already sentient when they decided to shut it/him down or only mostly there. But he is now, he pretty much got it down the part. Ffs, he's apparently capable of having PTSD, that's at least dog-brain levels of complexity, plus he can talk.

I mean, I dunno how to define sentience since an argument can be made that habitual behavioral patterns are just programming on our wetware, soooooooo.

Eh, anyway.
Athena might have a functioning conscience, but it doesn't mean she can't fuck up in other exciting ways like the rest of the human race. Or transhuman race, as it were.

But I'm mostly bitching right now, though. There's not much to do at the moment other than winning the fight, preferably without losing other precious body parts. I mean, okay, Olivia doesn't have a problem with that anymore, she has cool new tentacles in place of her boring old arm, but she can finish upgrading her meatsuit at her own pace, thank you very much.
 

TBH, I'm not sure if whether Athena was correct or not still matters.

We know that Jarvis has a continuity of existence with proto-Jarvis, we know they share the same memories, the same experiences. Just because Jarvis may not have been sentient at the same, doesn't blunt anything of the suffering it experiences now as the result of those actions.
 
TBH, I'm not sure if whether Athena was correct or not still matters.

We know that Jarvis has a continuity of existence with proto-Jarvis, we know they share the same memories, the same experiences. Just because Jarvis may not have been sentient at the same, doesn't blunt anything of the suffering it experiences now as the result of those actions.
I completely agree, I was more talking about if we are to judge the decision of Athena made at the time. I fully agree that now Jarvis is clearly not in a good place due to the consequences of those actions and that there is a responsibility of everyone involved to make that right. There is a reason I voted to protect Jarvis over Liv or Justine.
 
Fight the Machine
You threw yourself to the floor just moments before the launcher barked and eighteen electromagnetically-accelerated spikes crashed through the back wall of the house, sailing off into the building behind. You barely had time to scramble along the floor and evade the burst of micromissiles that followed, throwing yourself into the kitchen as the floorboards burst apart behind you.

"Fuck, it's armed?" you gasped, in awe of the absolutely recklessness of these engineers, when suddenly you realized you could see yourself in the camera of the laptop on the counter. You shifted onto the ceiling just in time to avoid the next set of flechettes bursting blind through the wall, targeted through the networked camera, and the laptop burst apart in a hail of fragments at about the same time that the sink began to spray water from a breached pipe.

There were further blasts from the other room, not targeted at you, and you realized that Justine was coming into this blind and unprepared. You raced back into the living room along the ceiling just in time to see a burst of steel darts punch through the red cloak billowing across the entrance hall.

You stuck a line to the back of the machine's shoulder and pulled, spinning it around before attempting to clamp onto its head with your claws. It grabbed and pulled, and once again you felt the horrible sensation of duct tape being ripped off bare skin as your fingers and feet were forcefully detached from the ceiling and you were thrown hard into the wall.

You crashed through the drywall and flimsy wooden framework and tumbled outside, your head ringing, vision swimming. Okay, it was strong, probably because it was a high powered exoskeleton build over an equally strong endoskeleton. That's double-dipping, unfair.

"Also hardly the most efficient way of doing things, but the engineers here don't exactly seem to be playing with a full deck." Athena whispered. "What a mess."

"I'll register a bug report after." you groaned, kicking yourself to my feet and throwing yourself back through the door.

Justine was still fighting, dodging her way up the hallway. The lights in her billowing cloak were flashing in random directions, against her direction of travel, making it nearly impossible to track her position among the articulated bulletproof fabric. The robot was clearly having difficulty tracking her, but then its arm suddenly shot out, extending down the hall in a long sweep that would surely catch Justine. You threw out two lines of silk onto its back and pulled with all your strength, and the machine wavered a moment, letting Justine slide under the attack and get close. Her cloak wrapped around its legs, and between the two of you the machine pitched onto its back with a crash, smashing the worn hardwood floor to splinters.

"Blind it, blind it!" you yelled, and Justine's cloak wrapped over its eyes, lights flashing like lightning through the fabric. You were struggling to get a hold on its processes in your tech-sense, the structure like water in your hands, but you managed to disable the reload system on its launchers and did your best to pin both its arms with your claws. It thrashed wildly, in blind terror as you tried to figure out how to shut it off or slow it down. The power cable at its back, if you could get behind it, or get clear to sever the cable...

"Stop! Fucking stop!" Justine yelled, "We can explain-"

"Cowl, the power cable-"

Suddenly it pushed down through the floor with one arm and rolled over, arms wheeling and throwing you over. This time, you landing on the wall feet first and stayed, watch it kick to its feet with Justine's cloak still entangled, still swinging blindly, extending limbs crashing through furniture. Justine tumbled to the ground, her cloak automatically flowing behind her to cushion her fall, and a steel fist descended toward her head.

[ ] Liv throws herself in the way of the punch, breaking several ribs and giving Justine room to blind it and pull the plug.​
[ ] Liv desperately punches a claw through the machines back, and the cascading failure through the system knocks the machine back to sub-sentience.​
 
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[ ] Liv throws herself in the way of the punch, breaking several ribs and giving Justine room to blind it and pull the plug.
[ ] Liv desperately punches a claw through the machines back, and the cascading failure through the system knocks the machine back to sub-sentience.
Ahhhh, these are both very bad. Good job on the dilemma, I really don't know what I want from this.

"I'll register a bug report after." I groaned, kicking myself to my feet and throwing myself back through the door.
Should be "you"
 
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