You were starting to get better at switching, but it didn't make it any less disorienting in the moment. It was a bit like losing your train of thought and then suddenly realizing you were standing in a human body, looking out through human eyes, being in control. You shivered as you suddenly became aware of all your nerve endings, the pain in your arm and, unusually, across your shoulder blades.
"Arachne?"
Crimson Cowl asked, and instead of answering immediately you beckoned her over and, a bit stiffly, opened the door to the back porch, stepping carefully around the debris from when Liv had smashed through it. Ah, that's why your shoulders hurt, right.
"Okay, Cowl, we need to start filling you in on a few things."
you said, looking around carefully to make sure you weren't overheard. "Two things. Firstly, obviously you know these things are secret, but this is, like,
turbo-secret. Keeping some of this information secure is one of Arachne's greatest strengths, but I trust you, okay?"
"Okay, of course. What's the other thing?"
Cowl said, her glowing, articulated eyes doing a good job of conveying her curiosity and concern.
"You're going to have to keep an open mind, because some of this is
weird."
you said.
She nodded, and, before launching into it, you glanced down at Liv's phone. Messages were flooding in, status updates as a disembodied Liv put everything she had into wrestling with the dormant AI.
"First thing's first... Arachne isn't just a fancy suit and cool robot arms. She has genuine superpowers. We aren't entirely sure of the mechanism, but she has the ability to understand and control technological devices, especially computers. We-"
"Why are you talking about yourself like that?"
she asked, and you held up a hand.
"In a moment. We call this technopathy. This power is both the source of all the advanced robotics, and what allows us to... okay, here, look, one seconds."
You tapped a quick message to Liv into the phone, and a moment later Crimson Cowl's cape floated up, and you saw lights playing across it. A message or something, presumably, you didn't see it.
"... yeah my cloaks not connected to the internet or anything, so that's freaky."
Cowl said, as the fabric went limp again and the light fades. "Okay, with you so far. Technopathy. Fuck. Really?"
"It's about to get weirder. One of the first things Arachne did with this power is construct a personal assistant program to help her manage her superhero career. She didn't have a perfect understanding of her powers at the time, and she accidentally created a mirror of her own brain the process by attempting to have it anticipate her needs. A true artificial intelligence."
"... are you about to tell me that's Athena?" C
owl said, looking at you askew. "She told me she was a student at Boston University studying IT. I sorta figured she might be Arachne's older sister, cause she kinda sounds similar?"
"Secret identities, my apologies. Here's the real twist though. Arachne's powers are actually two-way. When she becomes entangled with a piece of technology, she gets feedback through it. When her legs are damaged, she can feel it, for instance. A strange side effect of spending so much time around an AI she created is that we are... our perceptions and capabilities are becoming somewhat fluid, in a sense."
God, you were bad at explaining this.
"So... what. You're fusing into some kind of a cyborg hybrid?"
she guessed, and you shrugged.
"Sorta? We're not becoming the same person. But we're able to access one another's memories and thoughts, and even exchange control over each other's functions."
you said.
"... how long have I been talking to Athena instead of Arachne?"
Cowl guessed. There you go. She was brilliant, after all.
"Since I pulled you out here. Hello, I'm Athena. I'm a fork of Arachne's brain. I run on a computer."
you said.
Justine sat back, her cloak automatically forming a seat under her. Oh, that was cool, you should suggest to Liv to design something similar.
"Yeah... woo. That's a lot. Where's Arachne now?"
"She's in tech-space... uh, it's the term we use for when she's blocked out all sensory information and uses my internet connection and her technopathy to interact with things digitally. She's trying to put the machine man back together and less likely to kill us."
you explained. "But somebody's got to mind the body, and if she's not doing it, I just sort of naturally end up here."
"That sounds weird."
she said softly.
"It
is, yeah. Okay, so lemme just speed-round some stuff at you. At least two different alien species have visited New York, the SSR is real and tried to have Arachne assassinated once, they've got the
other artificial general intelligence we know of and he's very adorable, there's multiple dimensions
and multiple parallel universes, and there might be an extradimensional invasion of New York at some point. Oh, and Wakanda is real."
"
Wakanda is real?"
she said, and you head to remind her to take her voice down. "The fuck, like, crazy supertechnology and everything?"
"And everything. Despite the actual aliens around, most UFO sightings were actually them. Speaking of, those aliens-"
"No, hold on. How much do we know about Wakanda? See, I know this guy in California who is
fucking obsessed..."
she started.
"We honestly don't know much, because they have a tendency to obliterate anyone who knows too much with lasers."
you said, "Stay on task, okay? Aliens, AI, there's a lot here."
"Yeah, start again. I think I need to make notes."
---
[ ] You manage to get the AI back online and with an understanding of what's happened and why, but it has to stay here on this hardware. With Phillip Grant and, presumably, his roommate Dr. Abel Stack. They're clearly not all there, but somebody has to manage it, and you can't be here frequently enough for it to be you.
[ ] You manage to get the AI back online and with an understanding of what's happened and why, but it has to stay here on this hardware. You're going to turn in Phillip Grant, and hope Dr. Abel Stack can manage things.
[ ] You decide that rather than leave the AI here, you save a copy of its stat onto one of the laptops and take it, deleting the rest. You can tinker with it in your own time, and these folks should not be trying to create life.
[ ] Write In (Subject to Veto)
