Dillon Cole || Scorpion Shard (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
orderfromchaos) wrote2014-03-11 08:55 pm
orderfromchaos) wrote2014-03-11 08:55 pm
5. Open spam for interested Rix + private alert to Nathan
[Private to Nathan]
[He was born on Shame, Home's sister planet, and sold to the Tessitech Personal Corporation when he was ten.
Not sold. Slavery is illegal.
His parents died in a shuttle crash, an impossible billion-to-one freak coincidence he told them, he told them would happen. Instant local celebrity, insult upon injury upon crushing grief, and when Tessic bid on his wardship, the local municipality was relieved of the burden of his care, complicated by his strange abilities and unfortunate circumstances. Tessitech, so the legal logic went, could provide for him better.
This is probably true. Elon Tessic used him kindly, or he tried his best to be. He sheltered Dillon from the press, did his best to comfort a distraught child when he was better suited to working with metaprogramming and experimental q-particle materials. He gave Dillon problems to distract him, and that was all he really wanted, anyway. Dillon remembers him fondly, like a much older brother or a flashy, well-meaning uncle.
At twelve, after the death of the Empress, his care was requisitioned by the Home Planetary Police Authority, and off he went. He's been in this room more-or-less ever since, inundated with information, with traffic warnings and message board flame wars and weather drone readings and scoop bloggers and eviction notices and stock prices and zoning easements and all the multiplicitous, aggregated ephemera of Home's datasphere.
There are shunts to prevent Home from developing a worldmind, of course. That's not the concern. He's here to watch every flickering bit of data on every distributed device for signs that the Lost Senator's House - already a powerful computational entity - has made any inroads to usurping devices beyond its own physical structure and environs on the Southern pole. In the last five years, it has not appeared to have any interest in doing so. But Dillon watches, vigilant, the constant plethora of information streaming through him in five sensory layers, the living city more real to him than his own body, which he takes input from only in rare bursts. He'll be his own man at 18, of course, but what else would he do? What else could he want to do?
He sees so many patterns. Most of them curiosities, if they are of interest at all. None of them are what he is supposed to watch for, but some of them are darker, sick things, like the tendrils of a parasitic protozoan crawling through the flesh of the capital. Trafficking networks, disappearances that are not as random as they appear, spindly webs of rhetoric and half-clouded purchases that are aspirations to sedition. Some of these his handler prefers to be told about, and some of them he does not.
Dillon doesn't have a precedent for this. The sudden data restrictions on the fleet, the unannounced rearrangements of the three different Guard strata, interruptions in the regular grid pings of weather monitors, particular power consumption spikes that indicate mobilization of standby Apparatus offices from cryo - Home is twitching, raising her hackles. Home is quietly, without any declaration, under attack. One of his datastreams fades out, and he comes into awareness of his physical body again to shape words, only to find his mouth already doing so on reflex, croaking, regular but not quite monotone.]
Alert. Alert. Alert.
[Please come, Dillon thinks, with the small part of him that is still a stunted 17-year-old boy instead of a conduit for a skittish planet. Nathan, Tessic, someone please come, it's too much for me. His AI minders pick up the standard signal, and ferry it appropriately, a small colored ping in the corner of Nathan's second sight. Found something, the glyph means, even if it's not the thing he is officially employed to watch for. Something big.]
Alert.
[Spam for any Rix who are seeking the Mad Senator's House]
[A little bit of archive digging will turn him up easily enough: the intuitive analyst, the watchman - the boy - barbarically chained to his digital post. He is a ward of the Home Police. His exact location is not public, but not an official secret either, and not difficult for a clever investigator to discover. The little annex is on Police-owned property, hooked up to far more bandwidth than anything but a powerful statistics-trawling AI would require, does not draw nearly enough power to support such an entity. It is not especially protected - paralyzing electrical spikes for unauthorized intruders, alarms set to summon immediate attention if he is tampered with. Child's play, for a Rix. And no one on Home has motive to do such a thing; he is largely left to his own devices.]
[He was born on Shame, Home's sister planet, and sold to the Tessitech Personal Corporation when he was ten.
Not sold. Slavery is illegal.
His parents died in a shuttle crash, an impossible billion-to-one freak coincidence he told them, he told them would happen. Instant local celebrity, insult upon injury upon crushing grief, and when Tessic bid on his wardship, the local municipality was relieved of the burden of his care, complicated by his strange abilities and unfortunate circumstances. Tessitech, so the legal logic went, could provide for him better.
This is probably true. Elon Tessic used him kindly, or he tried his best to be. He sheltered Dillon from the press, did his best to comfort a distraught child when he was better suited to working with metaprogramming and experimental q-particle materials. He gave Dillon problems to distract him, and that was all he really wanted, anyway. Dillon remembers him fondly, like a much older brother or a flashy, well-meaning uncle.
At twelve, after the death of the Empress, his care was requisitioned by the Home Planetary Police Authority, and off he went. He's been in this room more-or-less ever since, inundated with information, with traffic warnings and message board flame wars and weather drone readings and scoop bloggers and eviction notices and stock prices and zoning easements and all the multiplicitous, aggregated ephemera of Home's datasphere.
There are shunts to prevent Home from developing a worldmind, of course. That's not the concern. He's here to watch every flickering bit of data on every distributed device for signs that the Lost Senator's House - already a powerful computational entity - has made any inroads to usurping devices beyond its own physical structure and environs on the Southern pole. In the last five years, it has not appeared to have any interest in doing so. But Dillon watches, vigilant, the constant plethora of information streaming through him in five sensory layers, the living city more real to him than his own body, which he takes input from only in rare bursts. He'll be his own man at 18, of course, but what else would he do? What else could he want to do?
He sees so many patterns. Most of them curiosities, if they are of interest at all. None of them are what he is supposed to watch for, but some of them are darker, sick things, like the tendrils of a parasitic protozoan crawling through the flesh of the capital. Trafficking networks, disappearances that are not as random as they appear, spindly webs of rhetoric and half-clouded purchases that are aspirations to sedition. Some of these his handler prefers to be told about, and some of them he does not.
Dillon doesn't have a precedent for this. The sudden data restrictions on the fleet, the unannounced rearrangements of the three different Guard strata, interruptions in the regular grid pings of weather monitors, particular power consumption spikes that indicate mobilization of standby Apparatus offices from cryo - Home is twitching, raising her hackles. Home is quietly, without any declaration, under attack. One of his datastreams fades out, and he comes into awareness of his physical body again to shape words, only to find his mouth already doing so on reflex, croaking, regular but not quite monotone.]
Alert. Alert. Alert.
[Please come, Dillon thinks, with the small part of him that is still a stunted 17-year-old boy instead of a conduit for a skittish planet. Nathan, Tessic, someone please come, it's too much for me. His AI minders pick up the standard signal, and ferry it appropriately, a small colored ping in the corner of Nathan's second sight. Found something, the glyph means, even if it's not the thing he is officially employed to watch for. Something big.]
Alert.
[Spam for any Rix who are seeking the Mad Senator's House]
[A little bit of archive digging will turn him up easily enough: the intuitive analyst, the watchman - the boy - barbarically chained to his digital post. He is a ward of the Home Police. His exact location is not public, but not an official secret either, and not difficult for a clever investigator to discover. The little annex is on Police-owned property, hooked up to far more bandwidth than anything but a powerful statistics-trawling AI would require, does not draw nearly enough power to support such an entity. It is not especially protected - paralyzing electrical spikes for unauthorized intruders, alarms set to summon immediate attention if he is tampered with. Child's play, for a Rix. And no one on Home has motive to do such a thing; he is largely left to his own devices.]
no subject
Unintentionally, of course. A splinter in something, somewhere, uncaught and unnoticed; he didn't realize until he spotted the blood on the collar of his shirt and had to change.
It could have gotten him thinking, and didn't beyond the fact that he was annoyed about the prospect of being late. The vast majority of what drives every person's life is invisible, and Nathan is no exception, it's just that what requires his awareness rests on slightly different precedent.
To wit: he's never sure, exactly, how much it benefits Dillon to know that he was Nathan's 'informant' for approximately five seconds, and after that became a responsibility. So instead of dwelling on this - invisible; but not, because Nathan thinks about these things more and more lately, except that Dillon isn't a thing, he's a seventeen year old - he adds, to the minutiae anyone else would bring to such a meeting, odds and ends. Hard candy in butterscotch and cinnamon and peppermint. Salted peanuts. Also minutiae, just different precedent.
He doesn't actually draw attention to this array of sensory feedback when he arrives, bringing with him a four-cornered air of exhausted competence, contained and expressly forbidden to spill over. They're just there. Nathan sits within touching distance, and doesn't touch; he doesn't initiate that anymore. "Hey."
It's one syllable. Nothing extravagant. Minutiae. "What've you got?"
no subject
Well, he'd probably trip, but it would be a failure of coordination, not strength.
The door tells him when Nathan arrives, and he blinks one of his sightlayers away, the kaleidoscopic tide of information pulling back out to sea, leaving him with the static, meditative simplicity of his room, the bare smooth sand of physical space and the arbitrary detritus of the present moment: the folds of Nathan's shirt, the lines around his mouth, the edge of his hair, a little shorter than last time. Dillon knows the schedule of his trims. It's so still, the real world, so full of permanent objects. It's grounding, and Nathan is too.
Dillon swallows, once, three times - he's never dehydrated but his mouth gets dry - and curls his fingers into a tight gesture, a shortcut he coded himself, shuts down all the audio connected to his minders. He maybe isn't technically supposed to be allowed to do that, but his minders are there to help him, to process for him, and he's better at holism, at lateral thinking. It was an easy hack. He doesn't want them to hear this. He can tell Nathan, he thinks, dimly aware of his heart pounding as he cuts down more feeds and lets himself feel his body. Like a kid telling a nightmare. But if the minders pick it up, if there's a record - once the machine knows, then it'll be real.
"War," he says hoarsely, and he doesn't glance away, but the focus of his eyes goes slack and distant, blurring the closeness of Nathan's face, which for him is ultimately the same gesture. "The war came to Home."
He wants to be told he's overreacting, that he's seeing things. No one has ever said that to him since his parents died - Nathan is, in fact, not allowed to say that, because it is a matter of Police record that being right is what Dillon is for, that his instincts are not to be dismissed out of incredulity or wishfulness.
Dillon isn't wrong - sometimes he is, about little details, about things which he has a skewed sample of, but not this time. Still. For a few more seconds, he pretends that's what Nathan will say.
no subject
So this, he remembers. It's one of the things they don't talk about; they don't talk about much of anything beyond the information that collects along Dillon's bones like sand wearing down an oyster. Nathan remains unaware his charge can disconnect himself from his AI, and so soul-baring was never on the table. That's none of anyone's business. A lack of verbalized emotion has never kept him from communicating, though; someday, if he ever meets a version of this young man on the street of his own volition, he may ask how much got through.
Now they have time for none of this. Nathan's expression fills in not blank, but wide open, processing. Even if he weren't very slightly mechanized himself, that's all the brain is, an organic computer. "Okay," he says, at length, pinching the bridge of his nose with fingertips he can't tell have drained with cold, "okay. You did good, it's okay."
Not questions, not yet. He can put aside war for thirty seconds while Dillon maybe takes a breath, can latch onto Nathan's presence and roll under it like a wave, and maybe that's not doing his job, or--it's the only way he knows how to do it; his job only works one person at a time.
no subject
He does this, though. Tells Nathan things that are beyond his official parameters, which is how he knows he's still not an AI. He cares about things that aren't, actually, his lookout.
It makes him a little antsy, cutting down his bandwidth this far, like he's been blinded, like he's turned his back on a massive river, can still faintly feel the spray, has no idea when the next surge is coming. He dry-swallows, nibbles his own lips - his version of fidgeting fingers, since babbling with his hands might trigger a gestural code for his machinery accidentally. It's okay, he repeats, imagines it in Nathan's voice, he's okay, he's good.
Dillon breathes - he doesn't need to, technically, he gets a higher O2 intake from his IVs than the atmosphere, but the motions of it, the half-voluntary muscles, the rib cage shift all hook up to the parasympathetic system in some deep part of his brain, whisper that the adrenal response situation is over, that he can afford to be calm and rational. Flesh hacks are crude, but generally effective.
"It's small. But serious. Dead serious, but they aren't telling - they won't, Reason's name, of course they won't, you can't - you can't tell anyone either, the planet will eat itself if this gets out wrong."
Breathe. Slow. Mind over matter. Be not afraid, and the Risen Father will protect you. He doesn't do the quick three-tap gesture of allegiance, heart with the right hand, top of the spine with the left, lips with the right again, but only because it's awkward in his chair, in his clay-meat body.
"Promise me you won't tell."