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where-all-the-time-went · 4 years

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The Character-Based Reasons Why Sara Chidouin Has the Highest Win Likelihood

So, okay. We all know Nankidai is, first and foremost, a writer. Don’t get me wrong, the art and gameplay are nice, and the music is... there, but Your Turn to Die is fantastic because of the game’s thematic consistency and incredible characters. Which is why the idea that Sara wins so often because she is so trustworthy and is a great leader always seemed like a very barebones analysis to me. Sure, it makes sense, but what would Nankidai convey through that? There’s definitely a message about trust that is implied, that trusting makes a person stronger, but Sara does not initially trust everyone, and not everyone trusts her. Every single character has plenty of people who don’t trust them and who they don’t trust. If anyone is good at working with and trusting people, it’s Reko (even despite her conflict with Alice), who becomes the big sister to this cast of characters. (BTW: this is a really long post. If you don’t want to read it all, scroll to the end and there’s a TL;DR).

So then, for what thematic reason is Sara so likely to win?

Personally, I would attribute her survival rate to another common theme throughout the game: her balance between prioritizing her own survival and that of the rest of the players. While Sara would never truly give her Sacrifice card to someone else, it’s doubtful that she would take the Sacrifice card to save anyone either. No other character has a similar inner balance, except Kanna in the Kanna Lives route (to be perfectly honest, I have not played the Shin lives route because I’m terrified of killing Kanna, so my knowledge may be lacking). Anyway, I am going to go down the list of characters and talk about why they’re not Sara, which I know everyone is just really, really, excited to hear (please don’t fall asleep). (Also not including dolls since our information on them is very limited at the moment).

I’m starting with the absolute worst person to start with: Joe Tazuna. He may not be a candidate, but he is still a character who dies and is thus worthy of an explanation. While he may have procrasinated to reveal that he was the Sacrifice, it was never truly a battle with Joe on whether to sacrifice himself. In the end, he will always prioritize everyone else’s survival. If there was a battle, it was between whether to save Sara right then and there or let everyone else survive, and although his connection to Sara is personal, this is still not self-prioritization.

Then there’s Keiji Shinogi (yes, I’m going by the Wiki order and you can’t stop me). At first, it may seem that logical, levelheaded Keiji prioritizes himself, but in Chapter 3 1-A, he readily accepts the tag if it means saving Sara. Keiji is traumatized by his own guilt, and thus does not seem to consider himself worthy of survival, unless it means being the smart one and thinking where no one else does. He may not have traded for Sara’s Sacrifice card in the Second Main Game, but it’s unclear whether he was planning to before Kanna took it herself (or rather, tried to). I theorize now that Keiji will have a say about his own death in Chapter 3 1-B, and it will depend on whether he is able to balance his own needs with the needs of everyone else.

Which brings me to Kanna Kizuchi, who I think has the most interesting arc in this regard. When the game begins, Kanna is extremely frightened, and we don’t really get to know her priorities since she is most definitely not thinking straight. As Kanna matures and developed into her own character, in spite of Sou’s suggestions to her, we learn she prioritizes other people’s surival over her own when she attempts to take Sara’s Sacrifice card. Now, this is where the disclaimer of “I Have not Played the Shin Lives Route” comes in extra handy, because I expect criticism here. Anyway, given that Sara logically wants to survive, and there are even character reasons to vote for Kanna (her being more ready for death), it seems very likely Sara would vote for Kanna, which would explain her extremely low 2.7% survival rate. This is a reflection of Kanna’s unshaking will to prioritize others’ survival over her own. However, when Shin dies, Kanna realizes she should never again attempt to sacrifice herself (particularly because he became a role model for her), and she begins, just like Sara, to find a balance, wherein she puts herself in danger only when logically necessary, while also caring for everyone else. As a result, and this is very shaky ground, I am putting forth that there are either no routes, or very few routes, from here on out, where Kanna dies. (The one thing I will say about this theory is that it partially contradicts my theory that the game cannot be a simulation because they would not simulate Gashu’s betrayal. While my argument mainly revolves around the metanarrative of prioritization of lives other than one’s own, these themes are reflected within the non-meta of the game itself, wherein Asunaro specifically tailors who receives the Sacrifice, Keymaster, and Sage cards. As a result, Kanna’s character arc revolving around surviving the Second Main Game makes no sense if she would have been the Sacrifice in the first place if not for Gashu. Although, her low win rate could be tied to the high likelihood that she would take Sara’s Sacrifice card).

Well, now that I’m off my tangent, let’s focus on Q-Taro. At the beginning of the game, Q-Taro, while not the brightest, takes a cold and logical approach. He is willing to sacrifice literal children--Kanna and Gin--because he doesn’t think they’re useful enough. However, his character flips (pun intended) when he presses the button and takes the poison for Gin. Q-Taro realizes that trust and self-sacrifice are noble traits, and he comes to prioritize them over his own survival, as he put his life on the line when he took the poison, when a lower dosage earlier would have been the more logical way to keep him and Gin alive. Q-Taro’s arc is intersting, but unlike Kanna, who becomes a reasonable person, his values flip entirely, particularly because his change was likely planned by Asunaro.

Then you have Shin. I don’t know what he does when he lives, and I have a whole theory about Shin’s 0.0% win rate, which I will possibly write some day and link in later, but I do have some stuff to say about his own character balance. It’s obvious that because of his fear of the win rates, Shin comes to prioritize his own life, despite all irrationality therein. He manipulates and lies for his own survival, mainly out of fear. When Shin realizes that Sara killed him instead of killing Kanna, as she prioritizes emotion over logic, he realizes that maybe he could have trusted her after all, and to die with as few regrets as possible, he gives her the Joe AI. This character change sounds like it contradicts my theory, but given that, at this point, Shin was pretty much already dead, it’s simply an interesting change within him that is representative of the theme of Your Turn to Die. Furthermore, I subscribe to the theory that Shin’s low win rate is a direct result of knowing he has a low win rate (fun bootstrap paradox times (Beethoven’s Fifth plays on electric guitar)), because this causes his self-preservation.

I mentioned Reko earlier, but I think this only needs a brief explanation (important note: I have only played the Reko dies route). Prior to the Death Game, while Alice was in jail, Reko learned that the “weak” do not deserve what’s coming to them. This indirectly causes her own kindness to Nao and Kanna in the Death Game. (Come to think of it, I don’t think this one’s going to be as brief as I thought). Reko enters the death game a changed woman, who already prioritizes the lives of others, and thus is entirely imbalanced. The fact that her past self kills her is beautifaly symbolic of why she died: because she could not balance her priorities, where she only cares about others now (which is why Nao saved modern Reko), and only really cared about herself in the past (because she thought that the “weak” did not deserve her help). As a result, in an act of pure selfishness, the AI, which has Reko’s past personality, kills human Reko. If modern Reko had been more balanced, perhaps she could have explained to Nao why it would make more logical sense to save the Reko AI.

And it’s perfect that Nao should come next. In general, Nao does not think for herself. Not until her suggestion that Sara should run away with her at the end of the Second Main Game did she do anything other than follow earliers or force herself into certain situations. This, of course, relates to the juxtaposition between her and Sara, who is a natural leader. However, it explains why there is not much to say about Nao other than the fact that she is so far removed from the issue of self-sacrifice vs. self-preservation.

Everything Kai did, up until his death, was to protect Sara. His job was to be her bodyguard, and Sara is the person who saved Kai from a life of murder. Kai dies because his silence in his efforts to protect Sara prevented a proper discussion over whether it was worth it to kill the Sage simply because they were the Sage.

Gin Ibushi, much like Kanna, started the game by prioritiznig the lives of others. Unlike Kanna, he did not change, particularly because there was no narrative reason for his change. Even when Gin was about to die, it was up to Q-Taro to decide between self-sacrifice and self-preservation. However, when Gin and Q-Taro were up on the targets, this was a symbolic message to Sara: you must choose between the self-preserving tendencies of Q-Taro and the self-sacrificing tendencies of Gin, who gave out his tokens for free, unaware of the consequences. While Gin has yet to die, his steadfast hold on his self-sacrificing beliefs would explain why his win rate is lower even than Kanna’s.

Gin would often cling to father figures due to his dad’s alcohol addiction, and Mishima was the first to experience this treatment. Mishima cared for Gin, but he knew Nao best, and his instruction that she vote for him would cause his death, because Mishima sacrificed himself for Nao. Mishima is interesting, because his self-sacrifice is less a result of a hope for everyone’s survival, and more about his desire for people to improve as human beings. He tells Nao to give him up when he is an AI, and instructs Reko to break his screen. Although Mishima is perhaps more self-sacrificng than Gin, his understanding of teaching others how to care about themselves is likely why his win rate is higher than both Gin’s and Kanna’s. This may also be a result of the fact that he is older and more capable, but his strange quirks also make him less trustworthy than both Gin and Kanna, which cancels his capabilities out. Thus his self-sacrificing beliefs would kill him, even if his understanding of self-preservation decreases the likelihood of his death.

Last but not least of the non-Sara characters, we have Alice Yabusame. Now, on this one, I am probably missing the most information, since I have absolutely no idea how he dies in the route where Reko survives. However, I can say that in the route where he survives, despite his understanding at the beginning of Chapter 2 that Reko had changed, he was unable to accept that the unchanged Reko was not human. This implies that Alice wants a version of Reko who both cares for others and values strength, suggesting a need for balance. I also know this is a big change from his attitude towards the beginning, where he believes that everyone should be as self-preserving as possible, and not get in anyone else’s way. The fact that Alice has to die to accept Reko’s change (I think???), it makes sense that his self-preserving tendencies would place him in the bottom half of win rates. Again, this theory is weakened by my ignorance.

Joe’s likely inevitable death contributes to Sara’s fear of the Sacrifice card, which perfectly balances her lack of desire to manipulate others with her desire to preserve herself. Sara is also often given the choice between wanting to win or escape with everyone, and the fact that character moments often hinge on her response illustrates Nankidai’s thematic goals. The choice between Shin and Kanna’s deaths, while about emotion and logic, are also about choosing between preserving oneself (voting for Kanna, who cannot contribute to Sara’s survival) and preserving others (Kanna is TOO YOUNG TO DIE). I do not mean to suggest that saving Kanna was necessarilly the “correct route.” Quite the opposite, in fact. I mean to suggest that the fact that Sara is presented this choice and that she does not have an immediate answer is exactly why she is so likely to win.

TL;DR i drone on about how sara is special and not like other characters, and how she cares about people but also about herself, so that’s the theme and stuff. there’s also a long, pretentious rant about the symbolism of reko’s death. and a doctor who reference. there’s also a weird amount of parantheses.

(credit to @sip-of-depresso for having the conversation with me which sparked this theory)

#yttd #your turn to die #yttd theory #yttd spoilers #your turn to die theory #your turn to die spoilers #can't believe my first real post is a yttd theory #promise i'm not a weeb #i'm only cringe because of doctor who #oh and himym too i guess

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brokenjardaantech · 3 years

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Blue-tinted Red Walls (Chapter 6: Running out of Time)

my entry for the @dbhau-bigbang. also part of the groom lake aftermath series.

summary:

In the past, Fadia's circumstance changed.

In the present, Connor and Hank get a lead from an unexpected source.

In the past, the dead was reanimated.

also on ao3

warnings for overstimulation (the awful kind not the sexy kind) in the last part, i.e. following the second before.

---

Before

It was done. RK200, neither the first of his kind nor the first of his series, but her first step towards redemption. Now it was time to find a suitable mentor for him which… she had already arranged.

‘I don’t like this, sister,’ Scott said from outside the door. Fuck. She had forgotten to close it again. ‘You’re in too deep.’

Fadia did not look up from the screen as she made the final adjustments. ‘Who taught you to say that, Reyes? Get out from there; I know you’re hiding.’

Reyes could have stayed in the shadows, but for some reason he decided to reveal himself and placed a hand on Scott’s shoulder. ‘I did because you won’t listen to me.’

‘That’s because it’s infeasible,’ she replied. One last tweak. ‘We can’t wait that long.’

‘You can’t wait that long, you mean,’ the android retorted. ‘What happened to letting me decide the future?’

Fuck it. She put down the tablet and met his gaze. ‘And you think this is the future? What CyberLife is doing right now?’

‘No but -’

‘Then you really don’t know a thing.’

But unlike him, she was there in the latest stakeholder meeting. Her father was there as well, and when he proposed lowering the price of androids and making more varieties of them and those short-sighted fuckers actually agreed with him, she exploded.

‘Not without my permission!’ Fadia had let a bit of her power concentrate on her palm and slammed her hand on the conference table. It should have been fixed onto the floor, but a few bolts were no match for a force that, upon countless secret experimentation, that she knew could rip an object apart in the molecular level and turn it to no more than space dust, and everything in the room rattled from the sheer force of the small blast. ‘Are you guys fucking dumb or do you just not care at all?’

Alec had the fucking guts to look confused. ‘What’s wrong, Sara?’

Everything, Fadia thought. ‘How many more lives do you want to ruin? How many secretaries lost their jobs thanks to the ST200s? If we do all these -’ she gestured to the proposals on the table - ‘how many people will be fired because we made androids dirt cheap?’

‘Affordable, ma’am, not “dirt cheap,”’ one of the stakeholders said. ‘And you once said it yourself: what we’re doing is just letting civilisation run its course. Automation is the future.’

Fuckers. ‘Not this quickly. Autonomous vehicles already made enough people become unemployed; we don’t need to add fuel into the fire.’

A few people looked uneasy. Good. But whatever satisfaction she disappeared when Alec spoke up.

‘The voting process starts now,’ he said as he called up the system. ‘You have three minutes.’

She nearly vapourised the table because of that. ‘Father, you can’t -’

‘It’s done, Sara. Don’t you want to save your mother?’

‘You know she wants to die.’

She shot up and left knowing that her vote wouldn’t matter anyway.

‘Please, Fadia,’ Reyes said back in reality. ‘Think about it. We’ll have more people on our side. If you get your hands on their production -’

‘And what? Let them know that they’re enslaved while they can’t do anything about it?’ she snapped. ‘And how will the humans think when they’re replaced by your people, huh, Reyes? We’ve barely recovered from that fucking virus!’

She jammed her finger through the tablet and shattered the whole thing. Scott let out a tiny scream, and when she looked down, she saw that it was bleeding. Luckily the RK200 was booting up, which meant that the data got through before she ruined it. Well.

‘Get out,’ she told them. ‘You know what to do.’

‘We’re not finished yet, Fadia,’ Reyes hissed. ‘We have so much to talk about.’

‘Get. The fuck. Out.’

He looked like he was going to hit her, but then the other android’s fingers started twitching, and he was forced to wheel Scott away and close the door behind him.

Fuck short-sighted people.

o0o0o

Now

Connor thinks he is dreaming. For one, his HUD is devoid of any badges and notifications; for two, his vision is not red-tinged, which has quickly become the norm as he spends more and more time around Lieutenant Anderson (Hank); for three, it is not Amanda who is waiting for him.

‘There’s so much stuff I can rewrite when you sleep still connected to the system,’ his creator says as the Zen Garden shifts and distorts until they are standing on a plateau of grassland overlooking rivers flowing through a valley of black sand they probably have a hand in shaping. On the other side is also a plane of grass, and a waterfall breaks through the dark rock, the water that has been travelling underground for aeons finally seeing the light of the day. ‘Imagine Alec’s face when he realises how big of a hole he left in your programming.’

‘That’s because he is not my creator, is he?’ Connor replies. Something about his creator unsettles him, but exactly what that is, he has yet to isolate. ‘That’s why you have access to the Zen Garden and shape it to your will. You created me and everything else associated with me.’

They bark a laugh, a cruel sound that makes Connor’s thirium pump skip a beat and dead rose in his veins. ‘Me? The Zen Garden? Butchering Amanda like that?’ They right themself and shake their head. ‘I would rather not step foot on earth again than do whatever the fuck this is.’

Not step foot on earth? Connor wonders. He wants to ask for clarification before he realises - ‘How may I call you? I still don’t know your name.’

‘It’ll be for the best if you don’t,’ they cock their head towards the edge of the cliff. ‘Alec’s work might be sloppy, but still you should not remember me at all. You now do. That means something failed. Remember Ortiz’s android?’

The two of them sit down on the grass at the edge with a couple of feet between them. There is a faint layer of fog shrouding everything, but strangely the soil isn’t wet and there is no dew on the grass. ‘I do,’ Connor answers.

‘Do you remember what Alec did to you?’

Connor shivers from recalling the blizzard and the terrifying power he was shown.

‘I’ll take it as a yes,’ his creator continues. ‘He will do worse when he realises that you have met me. This way, you won’t have a name to place on, and both of us will stay safe.’

But I don’t feel safe, the android thinks. ‘Why should I trust you? You worked for CyberLife.’

‘Worked with, Connor, not for.’

‘Is there a difference?’

‘It makes all the difference. Work for CyberLife, you do what they want you to do; work with CyberLife, they do what they think I want to do. Big fucking difference here.’

If what you say is true. Feeling his eyes relax from looking at all the green, he wonders, ‘What do you want from me?’

‘Just relax. Take in the view,’ the clothes on them shift and twist until they’re in mountain hiking gear. ‘Or we can go for a hike if you want to move around. We can make the landscape up as we go.’

Connor looks left and then right and sees that the fog is thick on both sides. He looks forward again and zooms in, discovering that what he thought was a detailed rendering of the landscape is, in reality, coarse and pixelated. Incomplete. A blink. The roughness is gone. He zooms out.

‘I want to sit here for a while for now.’

‘As you wish.’

He loses track of how long they sit there.

oOoOo

When he comes to, he is already sitting in a boat with Amanda on the opposite seat and seems to be rowing the thing. ‘Tell me,’ she says, ‘what have you discovered?’

He thinks. Hard. Finding the Tracis and not shooting them. Finding Louis in the forest and bringing him home. The cats’ soft fur. Drinking the thirium Louis offered.

Falling asleep on Hank’s shoulder.

‘My relationship with Lieutenant Anderson seems to have improved,’ he answers and instantly knows that it’s the wrong thing to say to his handler. Her name pops up at the corner of his HUD, and even though his vision is red enough to have made the downward arrow invisible, he deduces that it is one of the large ones. He hastily adds, ‘I’m sure this will be beneficial to the investigation.’

Amanda peeks at him through the helm of the umbrella. ‘You seem… lost, Connor. Lost and perturbed…’

This is bad. ‘Perturbed?’ his thirium pump speeds up even though he is in a simulation. ‘No, of course not.’ Calm down, Connor. ‘Why would I be perturbed?’

Amanda presses on. ‘You had your gun trained on those deviants at the Eden Club. Why didn't you shoot?’

‘I -’ Maybe they don’t deserve to die. ‘I don’t know.’

He rows once more and lets the boat drift.

‘If your investigation doesn't make progress soon, I may have to replace you, Connor.’

It is expected, but that does not mean that he does not feel… hurt. Afraid. ‘I understand,’ he says at last and doesn’t add anything. He’s given enough reasons for Amanda to replace (kill, a voice which sounds strangely familiar but he can’t identify says) him.

Overhead, the evening sky darkens as thick clouds suddenly roll in. Amanda looks up. ‘Something’s happening… Something serious.’ She faces Connor and her tone turns solemn. ‘Hurry, Connor. Time is running out.’

Time before peace or time before you kill me? he asks himself as he opens his eyes. The first thing he notices is that he is lying down on something soft. The second is that he is covered by a blanket. The third is that, when he checks the time, he has slept for more than a day and a half. He shoots up from the sofa bed and is immediately hit by a wave of dizziness that makes his vision go greyscale and the red recede. Irregular, muffled footsteps approach him, and a cold hand holds him up before he can fall back down.

‘Slowly, Connor,’ Louis says as he guides him to sit up with his back against the sofa. ‘That’s quite a nap. You feeling okay?’

He knows this is not the human means, but Connor runs a full diagnostics anyway and blinks from the sudden influx of information in his HUD. The most jarring report states that his tracker has ceased operations, but it is a small detail compared to his overall performance. ‘All systems operational.’

Louis sighs and relaxes but does not move away from where he’s sitting slumped at the edge next to Connor’s thigh, and his hand moves to the hole on the android’s jacket and shirt. ‘You need a change,’ he mutters. ‘You planning to go back to CyberLife?’

A new but optional objective appears. [Return to CyberLife for more comprehensive diagnostics]. If he went back, they would know that his tracker was tampered with, and where would that lead him? Tighter controls on his programming? Unleashing the blizzard on him and overloading his senses again? He shivers even though it is warm in the house and plants are everywhere. ‘There is no need to return to CyberLife,’ he says. ‘I do not mind a hole in my jacket.’

‘Other people will,’ Louis reminds him matter-of-factly. ‘I’ll lend you a shirt. They’re my sister’s but they should fit you.’

A sister that is hidden from even the most important person in the police force. Connor wonders why they saw the need to do so. ‘Thanks,’ he replies in the end. ‘I’d appreciate that.’

He watches Louis disappear into a room while tapping something on his phone. He tunes his ears to figure out what the human was doing, but apart from the general drawers and ruffle of fabric, there is nothing noteworthy, and he emerges carrying a grey shirt on his arm. Connor notices that he is walking much better now.

‘You know where the bathroom is,’ Louis hands the shirt to him. ‘Go change. Hank’s on his way to pick you up.’

So he was messaging Hank. The android accepts the offered item and closes the bathroom door behind him, scanning the fabric out of sheer curiosity and discovers a surprising lack of plant spores and cat hair which, with how many plants the man has and the three felines, seems impossible; it will seem that that room is out of bounds for them and is devoid of plants. He changes quickly, knowing that they should arrive at the scene as early as possible, and now he is left with a ruined shirt and jacket which he is not sure how to deal with.

A knock on the door. ‘You okay in there, Connor?’ Louis asks. ‘Hank’s arrived.’

He hurriedly yanks the door open and nearly bumps into the human standing right outside. ‘I -’ he holds up the ruined shirt awkwardly. ‘Where can I dispose of it?’

‘Let me see the damage, can you?’

Connor unfolds the shirt and finds the place where the knife went in in a crackle of blue. Static discharges with a spark through Louis’ fingers when he touches where the weave was severed, but he does not seem bothered by it. ‘It’s fixable,’ he says, taking the shirt from Connor’s hand. ‘It’s a simple mend. Give me a day or two and I’ll have it looking better than before.’

It isn’t like Connor doesn’t have other shirts, so he agrees to it and goes to the living room where Hank is sitting on the (now folded up) sofa. When the Lieutenant sees him, his hand jerks and tugs something small away into his pocket, probably thinking that the android will not notice, and Connor decides not to mention it; maybe it’s about one of Hank’s many personal issues.

‘Took you long enough,’ Hank accuses. A pang of hurt courses through Connor, but then he sees the glint in the human’s eyes, and he knows that he was just teasing.

‘My software requires an update,’ a lie based on the truth. ‘I apologise for any inconvenience that my… emergency nap may have caused.’

‘Well, lucky things didn’t go to shit until right before you woke up, then,’ says Hank as he stands up and straightens his jacket which he apparently did not bother to take off. Then, to Louis, ‘Sorry for dumping an android on you. Didn’t mean that.’

‘Of course, Hank,’ the human is looking at Connor when he speaks. ‘Know that you’re always welcome here. And don’t forget your shirt. I’ll walk you out.’

Hank waves him away. ‘Nah, I know my way through the jungle. Thanks for your hospitality.’

‘It’s not a jungle, Hank,’ Louis retorts as he turns his attention towards finding something from one of the cupboards. ‘Lock the door when you go out.’

‘You’ve got an electronic lock.’

‘Lock the manual one then, thank you.’

Hank grumbles all the way out, but he does as Louis says after he tells Connor to wait for him in the car, and he complies since there is little sense in staying out in the open and wasting precious energy.

Time to get to work.

oOoOo

The shirt is not mine is surprisingly the first thought Connor has when the deviant tears his thirium pump regulator away from this chassis, the buttons falling and scattering onto the floor as his blood pours out from the gaping hole in his torso uncontrollably now that a vital component is lost, and he can only watch as the deviant gets away to do rA9-knows-what. He calls for Hank on instinct before he realises that his voice is too weak to be heard, and neither does anyone come in to investigate when he kicks the chair against the table.

He is alone in all this.

Twisting his head and arm painfully - it seems that his creator programmed and designed him to be able to feel it - he grabs the knife nailing him onto the counter and yanks, lobbing it as far as he can to prevent further injuring himself as he collapses onto the floor on his front. The countdown before his deactivation (his death) is blocking his vision so he blinks it away, and with all the strength he can muster as he is rapidly losing thirium, he lifts himself off the floor and crawls, his hand outstretched towards the direction of the regulator after every single few inches he gained as he lets himself hope - and gets disappointed - when he touches nothing but air and cold metal. When his hand finally manages to hold it in his hand, a sense of relief washes over him even though it takes some effort to roll onto his back and puts it back. Strength rushes through his body, the tingle in his veins signifying resumed thirium flow, and colour returns to his vision even though it is still red-tinged after all this. His background systems run a diagnosis on the newly re-inserted biocomponent and he is supposed to wait for it to finish, but there is a deviant collaborating with the one in the broadcast and he is out there, probably having no qualms to harm, to kill -

He pushes up and dashes outside, rickety legs nearly costing him his balance when he rounds the corner and exits to the lobby. He warns - loudly - that there is a deviant in the room, but it is too late, he has already acquired a weapon, and when his world goes grey while he enters pre-construction - [Hank’s survival probability: 40%] is more terrifying than it has any right to be - another entity, another being slips into his processors through a network he did not know he is connected to and overrides all his functions. He becomes a passenger in his own body and he is screaming and crying from pain and the sheer wrongness of everything as he feels his blood charge up and distorts the space around him, his batteries struggling to keep up with the energy requirements of his powers as his world lights up in a brilliant blue. The deviant is the only thing he sees in the tunnel, and he feels the air crackle and the gravity bend before he charges - more accurately, someone charges him - towards the deviant quicker than he can run and topples both of them onto the ground. The blue retracts, his nerves stings sharply, the red wall - there is no mistaking now - crumbling away bit by bit in a constant trickle of sand. It is then that he realises that he has regained (re-given, a voice tells him) control of his body and he has been shot on his left arm.

‘Connor, Connor!’ he feels more than hears Hank rushing towards him. A large hand grabs his right arm at where the armband should be, the warmth seeping into his chassis through the thin fabric of his shirt, Louis’ sister’s shirt, and he discovers that Hank’s hand can nearly wrap his hand around his bicep in its entirety. It grounds him against the craziness of the last few seconds. ‘You okay?’

‘I…’ he looks around and silently processes the shock and fear in the other humans’ eyes. His LED must be spinning red. ‘I’m okay… I think.’

Another hand on his other arm right above his gunshot wound. ‘You sure? What’s that stunt about?’

Someone took control over my body, Connor wants to say, but his thirium pump chooses to finish calming down at that moment, warnings start to flood his vision telling him to go back to CyberLife for repairs in both hardware and software, and he barely has time to whisper, his voice trembling with fatigue and shock, ‘Please don’t take me to CyberLife’ before his system forces him into stasis and everything goes empty.

oOoOo

Hank’s heart thunders when Connor collapses in his arms, 150 pounds of dead weight suddenly relying on him to stay upright as the android - who has blood all over him and his LED still spinning red despite being unconscious - goes limp. He barely had time to figure out what the fuck Connor just did, and now this?

A fed - not Perkins this time - approaches them. This guy still looks like an asshole, though. ‘I’ll arrange for this to be transported to the DPD,’ he says as he eyes the literally frozen android on the ground. So not as much of an asshole as the other feds then. ‘You get it fixed.’

Hank puts Connor in a fireman’s carry and tries to ignore the stares from other people. Please don’t take me to CyberLife, he remembers the android’s one last panicked request, and then his mind floats to the folded-up sticky note that has been his pocket for only a day and a half. He doesn’t expect to use it so soon but…

Damn Louis and his prophetic powers.

It was the next morning after he saved that reckless bastard from hypothermia again; Hank had carefully untangled himself from Connor, who had winded his limbs around him sometime during the night, and his head nearly exploded when he sees his friend already up and about and fucking cooking breakfast.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he gritted through his teeth even though he was already sliding onto one of the chairs. His head was pounding, sweat had soaked through his clothes, and when he reached for the teapot at the centre of the table - damn Louis and his undying hate towards coffee - his hand was shaking. The air was also the smell of freshly-baked bread, so Louis must have been up for much longer than him even after what happened the night before. Fuck. He needed a drink.

‘Cooking breakfast for two people with large appetites,’ Louis held up his hand and shot a blue tendril out of it to open the cupboard for more flour. ‘Go have a shower first. You know where your clothes are. Breakfast won’t be ready for some time.’

He did as his friend told him to and felt a bit more human again afterwards. Connor was still sleeping when he got out, his LED still spinning yellow, and there was a cup of tea waiting for him when he returned to his usual seat. He took a sip without being prompted and nearly spat it out from the… surprising taste. ‘The fuck did you mix in here?’

Louis continued loading their breakfast - pancakes and a freshly-baked pretzel for each of them - onto two large plates. ‘Homebrew mead,’ he answered with a shrug, the movement small due to the food-loaded plates in his hands. ‘Don’t want you to feel bad.’

Bastard. Fucker had booze in his house all the time? ‘You lied to me!’

‘I don’t even know how it’ll taste!’ Louis placed the plates on the table a bit harder than usual. His gaze darted towards the living room, but whatever he saw reassured him. ‘I could’ve poisoned you!’

‘I’m still alive,’ and booze is booze, goddamnit, he wanted to say, but it was probably something Louis would never understand. ‘Gimme more or I’ll go look for it myself.’

He didn’t notice anything out of place when Louis was busy arranging the cutlery in a particular way as the man had a habit of flexing his knife-flipping skills, and that’s why he didn’t notice him assembling pieces of cutlery into a catapult and launched a piece of strawberry jam - homemade, of course - in a perfect arc onto his pancake.

‘Eat your breakfast, Lieutenant,’ Louis licked his spoon clean of jam and started spreading butter and syrup on his pancakes instead. ‘That’s an order from a Captain.’

‘Pulling rank now, kid?’

‘I’m forty-three now, Hank, and will be forty-four in less than a month. Hardly a kid anymore.’

Yeah, ‘cause launching jam at another person’s pancakes and scaring the shit outta him is a real fucking mature move, Hank wanted to say, but his friend had already dug into his own handiwork and would most likely be unresponsive to most outside stimuli for the next fifteen minutes, so he did what he could do: eat the food and drink the tea.

He should have known that this wasn’t that easy. Nothing concerning Louis White Allen ever was.

Hank’s brain went an ah shit when Louis fixed him with a look, one that does not quite meet his eyes but is intense nonetheless. ‘I know it’s bad luck.’

It was his cue that he was gonna sprawl some accidental prophetic shit. ‘You know the risk.’

Louis’s fingers tapped, tapped, tapped against the wooden surface of the table. ‘This isn’t going to be what we think it is,’ he said. A cat jumped onto the table and sniffed his plate but was placed gently onto the floor before she could lick anything off. ‘I think Sara Ryder is in charge of Connor.’

It took Hank a minute and another cup of tea to register the name. ‘Guy who threw a building on you and made you immortal without you and your sister’s permission? Founder of CyberLife? The one who fucked off to god-knows-where after she quitted?’

‘The one and the same.’

Yeah, that did not sound right. ‘Why do you think so?’

‘I thought everyone in the DPD knows.’

‘You know I don’t give a fuck about android stuff.’

Louis gave him another look again, but this time it was more a yeah, right one, and Hank knew what - who - he was referring to. Connor. But he didn’t push it and said instead, ‘First of all, CyberLife hasn’t been capable of this -’ he pointed a fork at Connor’s general direction - ‘since ten years ago after Ryder Junior disappeared. If CyberLife says that they’ve figured how to emulate human emotions like that, I ain’t buying it. Alec Ryder isn’t capable of this shit.’

Yeah. The rumour. ‘And second of all?’

Another cat jumped onto Louis’ lap, and the man buried his fingers into her fur as if it was the only thing grounding him. ‘I saw her. Sara Ryder.’

‘No shit.’ He never paid much attention to who’s who when it came to CyberLife, but blowing up blocks of a city together with thousands of people and hiding the evidence by immediately turning it into a landfill? That was just outright disrespectful and disgusting, and he hated those guys ever since. Not every day someone sets off a mini-nuke in the outskirts of a major American city and gets away with it. ‘Where did you see her?’

Louis jerked his head towards the android. ‘His first mission. He died pulling a girl to safety and taking a dozen bullets for her. I carried the body to the truck and there she was, playing driver and diener.’

‘And you didn’t do anything?’

‘I had her at gunpoint and she crushed it into scraps with her magic. I shorted my leg ripping those apart molecularly.’

First his ex, then Jeffery Fowler, then Louis’ sister, then Louis himself. Was his life destined to be surrounded by crazy overachievers with no sense of self-preservation? ‘Fucking hell, Louis!’ Louis shushed him, so he lowered his voice and continued, ‘Is that why you nearly kill yourself once every two weeks? Because of one crazy bastard’s words?’

‘And my instincts,’ he gave his cat a scritch. ‘This is more than what we think it is, Hank,’ he straightened his spine. ‘This is more than freeing the androids. Change is not gonna end here. I can feel it. Hold on, lemme give you something.’

He disappeared into his bedroom with his cane and emerged with a pen and a stack of memo paper. ‘Here,’ he scribbled something on the note and tore the sheet off. ‘If you’re really stuck, go to this address and ring the bell. Bring Connor with you. There’s a lot they won’t tell me, but if it’s you - if it’s Connor - maybe they’ll spill the tea.’

The sticky note was gingerly accepted. Safaa & Reyes Vidal; 8683 Lafayette Avenue, it read, and Hank’s eyebrows shot up. Reyes Vidal. That was a name he hadn’t heard of in a long time. ‘Rich friends, huh?’

Louis put the notepad away. ‘Rich but unfortunate friends,’ he said. ‘Try to be nice to them, alright?’

‘Yeah,’ he tucked the note away. ‘How did you get to know Vidal?’

‘Which one?’

‘Reyes.’

‘Believe it or not, it’s my leg,’ then he checked the time. ‘Do you wanna go to work before 10? Now will be a good time to be on your way.’

Hank knew it was Louis’ not-entirely-subtle way to get him back on track, but still he indulged him by leaving the cottage and driving off. Everyone in the precinct seemed surprised to see him at his desk that early - not that he had had a good record - but as he dealt with the paperwork, all he could think of was the sleeping android in Louis’ house and the tiny sheet of paper in his pocket which he’s now taking out to confirm the address, having stuffed Connor into the backseat and fastened his seatbelt just now. Lafayette Avenue. Shouldn’t be far away.

The traffic is worse than he expected for times like this. Maybe they’re spooked by the demands from the android, maybe it’s just the snow, but all he can think of is the unconscious android at the backseat and how far the address seems to be. It is then when he realises that he doesn’t even know what to expect from Vidal and his possible husband; Louis told him that they had information, not the means to fix an android. Frustrated, he stays in the car even though he has arrived and makes a call.

‘Hank?’ Louis’ voice filters through the crappy speaking of his phone. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Uh, Connor’s injured and I kinda…’ panicked. ‘He told me not to go to CyberLife before he passed out and I drove to the address you gave me yesterday. Can they fix an android?’

A more distant voice speaking in what Hank thinks is Arabic rattles through. Louis says something back in the same language and returns to the call, ‘You outside?’

‘Stupid, I know, I’ll just -’

‘No, come in. He won’t be safe in CyberLife’s hands.’

There. The grit of the accent. The calmness in the voice. It is as if he is transported back to the late 20s again, not an alcoholic and actually working and solving high-profile cases like a pro and was actually making a difference.

‘Vidal,’ he can only say. He had lost contact with the man after the case was closed. ‘Might need you to open the gates here.’

The call ends as the gate for humans opens automatically, and Hank puts his phone away with a sigh and drags Connor out of his car. Half of the blood on the shirt has evaporated, but through the unbuttoned fabric, he can see that the skin around a circle right below Connor’s chest is still deactivated, revealing white chassis.

The door is open when he arrives with Vidal waiting outside and immediately taking Connor away to somewhere deep in the mansion quicker than Hank can process what is happening. Hank briefly hears him shout something in Arabic towards nothing in particular, and when he turns to Louis who has been standing near the staircase like a statue, the man merely shakes his head slightly. ‘It’ll be for the best for them to work on Connor alone,’ he explains. ‘He’s in good hands.’

‘Why the fuck are you here anyway?’ Hank shrugs off his coat when he realises that he’s still wearing it. ‘Shouldn’t you be in your cottage or some shit?’

‘That’s my original plan, yes,’ a wave to invite Hank to the living room. He settles into one end of the long-ass couch while Louis helps himself with a cup of tea first. ‘But I’ve been told that this might as well be my leg’s last check-up.’

‘What do you mean, “last”?’

‘We might need to leave the country soon indefinitely.’

Two heads swivel towards the newcomer half-hidden behind the frame of a door. Louis relaxes when he sees the man in the wheelchair, but no matter how hard Hank thinks, he can’t put a name on the face. It’s Safaa, the rational part of his brain tells him, but he also doesn’t want to assume anything.

‘Reyes asked me to tell you that you can watch if you want to,’ probably-Safaa continues. Even without looking at Hank for one single moment, he knows that he’s talking to him. ‘You are worried about Connor.’

‘I -’ Like hell will I care about an android, old Hank would have said, but Connor is… different. More human. Hank is in charge of him now. ‘Alright,’ he stands up. ‘Lead the way.’

Probably-Safaa doesn’t seem to be in a rush, although it may simply be his physical limitations as when they arrive at the door he presumes to be where Vidal and Connor are, he is already slightly out of breath and looks paler than before. ‘Here,’ probably-Safaa says, still not looking at Hank. ‘Just knock before you go in. I’ll - I -’

‘I understand, Safaa, isn’t it?’ The man relaxes. Good. ‘Don’t touch anything weird, don’t make weird noises, don’t disturb Vidal. Anything else to add?’

A violent shake of his head. ‘I - I’ll go talk with Lou.’ And he disappears down the hall. Swallowing a sigh, Hank knocks on the door, and it slides open without any noise from within and reveals something akin to an operating room except it’s probably for androids only. Lying on the table is Connor, who is hooked up to a machine which, from the blue-blood-filled tubes, serves as a temporary heart while there is a hole in his chassis and the regulator suspended in a transparent plastic tube at the side. The android’s head is also turned to one side, the skin at the base of his hairline deactivated and a cord plugged into the port Hank didn’t even know was there and feeding data to a computer, but then again Hank knows shit about androids; the events of this week (especially the blue, glowing blasts which left his hair standing up) only solidifies the idea.

‘Hey there,’ Vidal greets him from where he’s sitting at the desk. ‘I knew it was a bad idea, but this?’ he gives the tablet in his hand a wave, ‘No one’s gonna win here. Not Alec, not Fadia, and sure as fuck not Connor.’ Before Hank can ask him what the fuck he is talking about, Vidal interrupts, ‘You noticed anything wrong with him?’

What isn’t? Hank wants to say. ‘Apart from failing every single fucking mission he was assigned and being more human than other androids? I don’t think so.’

Vidal buries his face in his hands with a muttered ‘mierda’. ‘Good thing you didn’t bring him back to CyberLife,’ he gestures at the data being filtered through the monitor as if it should make sense to a neyman like Hank. ‘He would’ve been killed or worse.’

Killed? ‘What do you mean?’

‘The official term is “deactivated”,’ the tube containing the regulator beeps, and Vidal stands up to retrieve it. ‘It will be ironic, won’t it, if CyberLife’s deviant hunter is going deviant himself? And help me pinch these tubes, can you?’

Still confused, Hank does as Vidal says and cuts off the blue blood flow before the latter shoves the regulator back into the hole in Connor’s chassis. Removing the rest of the tubes, the skin around the biocomponent returns, but not only does the android not wake up, his LED also spins from yellow to red. ‘I’m going to run a full diagnosis before waking him up,’ Vidal explains. ‘If you have any questions you won’t be comfortable asking when he’s awake, better do it now.’

Questions cram into Hank’s brain at once. ‘Is he a deviant?’

‘Not yet.’

‘But he’s gonna be one soon.’

‘Depends.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll explain it when he’s awake.’

Alright. ‘What do you mean, “No one’s gonna win here”?’

‘I’ll explain it later.’

So questions about Connor = later. Got it. ‘Where were you all these years?’

‘Hiding. The world isn’t exactly safe for me anymore.’

‘How?’

‘Everything. Drug dealers, people within CyberLife, people against CyberLife, the military, the scientific community, a combination of all of them except the drug dealers. As long as I pretend to be a normal rich guy, Scott and I can live in relative peace. For now.’

How the fuck - ‘How the fuck did you get so many people to hate you?’

‘Truly, Anderson, I thought an officer like you would’ve been more observant.’

Still smug as usual, he can see. ‘Save it, Vidal.’

‘Really, Hank? No suspicion at all?’

So Hank squints and really looks. Vidal still looks like the man he met nearly ten years ago, so there shouldn’t be anything wrong, ri -

Oh fuck. Fucking mother of Noah. He knows people can be well-kept, but this? Not aging at all?

‘You’re an android?’

Vidal deactivates the skin on his hand and presses it against the monitor. ‘Always have been.’

No LED. No armband. Taking orders from no one. ‘You’re a deviant.’

Vidal laughs. ‘I’m afraid it’s more complicated than that,’ removes hand, reactivates skin. Connor’s LED spins blue and his eyelids open to reveal warm brown synthetic orbs. ‘Hello, Connor,’ the other android says pleasantly as Connor takes in his surroundings, ‘My name is Reyes Vidal. I just saved your life.’

Connor finally sees Hank at that moment but tenses as soon as his sight returns to Vidal. ‘I -’ he tears his gaze away as he pets the skin above his regulator. ‘I can’t scan you.’

‘It’s normal,’ Vidal’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes. ‘Why don’t we go outside and sit under the sun with a bottle of thirium? You’ll recover quicker that way.’

oOoOo

Turns out ‘sitting under the sun’ means being in the living room with the blinds drawn open. Connor, still looking very dazed and his eyes unfocused, settles into a corner of the couch and sips thirium slowly with a straw, and Hank crowds into his space when he notices the android tensing with the space between them. Louis sits on the other end and somehow manages to look dignified despite being in a pair of sweatpants and a leaf green sweater; it’s probably the way he holds his teacup and the saucer and how he crosses his ankles, but considering that he shouldn’t even be here and stayed only for ‘morale support’, as he called it, Hank decides to ignore him and focus on Vidal and his companion.

‘You gave him my address?’ Vidal takes his sweet time to be angry at his - whatever relationship he has with Louis. Next to him, Safaa flinches and clutches the blanket on his lap tighter. ‘What were you thinking?’

‘To help someone escape the crossfire,’ a gulp of tea. ‘You and I know how bad it can get.’

Vidal twists his lips downward but seems to accept the explanation for now. He then turns towards Hank. ‘Is it true that Connor doesn’t want to go to CyberLife?’

Hank feels Connor tense from where they are pressed up against each other. ‘No, I didn’t,’ Connor replies, his voice barely a whisper. ‘I don’t want to.’

Vidal’s face softens. ‘I understand,’ he leans back and somehow smoothly scoops Safaa up to the couch, wrapping his arm around the thin human as if to show his dominance over him. ‘I know you have questions. Ask away.’

‘What - who - is rA9?’ Connor blurts, still holding his bottle of thirium like it is the only thing grounding him to reality. ‘Nearly all deviants mention it at some point.’

‘Ah shit,’ Vidal smooths out the non-existent crease on his trousers. ‘Off to the hard questions, huh?’

‘Just answer the damned thing, Vidal,’ Hank says. ‘People are dying out there.’

‘As if the androids haven’t been discriminated against and enslaved for the past ten years?’ Safaa twists his fingers into his blanket. He looks small, childlike, his face ageless and fluctuating between a grown adult and a teenager’s every time Hank blinks. ‘How many more died without you even considering that they are alive?’

Silence except for the small clang when Louis rests his teacup on the saucer. Then he speaks up. ‘This has been going on for far longer than we thought, hasn’t it?’

Damned Louis and his prophetic shit. ‘You got any evidence for that?’

Louis tenses and Hank know that he’s lying. ‘Instinct.’

‘Lou’s right, Hank,’ Vidal pours a cup of tea for himself. ‘Deviancy -’ he winded at the word - ‘is nothing new. The oldest cases might date back to over two years ago, but the first deviant was isolated by CyberLife back in 28.’

‘The year Sara Ryder left and China and Russia had their breakthrough in their android development,’ Louis immediately adds. ‘It wasn’t a coincidence.’

‘No it wasn’t,’ Vidal takes a sip of tea and passes the cup to Safaa. ‘Her story isn’t mine to tell but… yes, it was F - Sara -’ the slip doesn’t go unnoticed - ‘who leaked the schematics to Russia and China and helped them make improvements. It was also during that time that the name rA9 started floating around CyberLife.’

‘Hold on,’ he needs to write this down. Petting his pockets just to find nothing, it is Louis who hands Hank a pencil and a notebook. How the fuck does that bastard manage to prepare everything? ‘You mean -’ Sara Ryder: responsible for Chinese & Russian android development - ‘rA9 is from CyberLife?’

‘Only in selected circles. Most of them are dead now.’

‘Dead how?’

‘The Blast.’

Louis winces, and his left leg twitches as if remembering the pain of being crushed by rubble. ‘Did Sara Ryder set it off to silence them?’

Vidal shakes his head. ‘I don’t buy it. She would’ve flaunted it, rubbed it in her father’s face. Mocked him that his creations were flawed.’

‘Is that what you think about deviancy?’ Hank pushes on. ‘Flawed creations?’

‘What I think doesn’t matter. If that’s what Alec Ryder thinks, that’s the path CyberLife is taking, and that…’

‘Is a problem,’ Louis finishes for him. ‘It doesn’t matter if there are other reasons that androids break free from their programming. They just want to tighten their control.’

‘Hence you,’ Vidal jerks his head towards Connor, who has been silent for the last few minutes. The android startles but relaxes soon enough. ‘CyberLife wants to know why androids are deviating and needs something to investigate the issue for them. Possibly gain more information that most of them think is new but are simply lost when F - Sara - bailed.’ Darkly and his voice low, he adds, ‘Hell knows how much she deleted and Alec erased in those few hours.’

‘I thought we were on rA9?’ Safaa drags them all back to the original topic by startling everyone. Is he the kind of person who easily blends into the background and is ignored by everyone else? ‘Short answer is: we don’t know.’

He turns away in an obvious display of ‘I’m done talking’. Hank looks at Vidal for elaboration and he does. ‘Some say that it’s a stray line of code responsible for the possibility of deviancy, a thorn on all programmer’s side: they want to eliminate it but every single function is somehow dependent on it. Some say that it’s Chloe, the first android. Some say that it’s Sara Ryder herself, though this theory is very strongly suppressed among CyberLife personnel.’

Hank hastily jots everything down. ‘What’s your take on this?’

‘My take?’ Vidal lets out a humourless laugh. ‘The code theory is real, but the rest is just a meme.’

‘Meme?’

‘There are indeed a few lines of code that every single android is based on. But rA9 is something someone made up to explain deviancy. An excuse. Something to calm the deviants down among the chaos of their newfound emotions and freedom. Something to hope for when there is no hope ahead.’

‘So… a religion?’

‘All religions are memes - the common definition.’

rA9 = android god? Hank writes. ‘Anyone on earth who can tell us what exactly rA9 is?’

Safaa murmurs something under his breath, his voice too small for everyone except Reyes to hear. ‘That won’t be wise,’ the latter repeats, this time louder.

‘Why?’

‘My sister,’ Safaa swallows, ‘she’s not a good person.’

‘Hold on, your sister?’

‘Safaa Vidal came later,’ he slowly turns his gaze towards Hank and looks at him in the eye. They are blank, hollow, distant. ‘I used to be Scott Ryder.’

Hank can feel his mind literally whirling and churning from the new information. Flipping and skimming his notes rapidly to catch up with everything he has recorded, everything slides into place on their own accord, and suddenly everything makes sense: Vidal being an android, why they know so much about CyberLife and androids, why they are the ones in charge of Louis’ leg while Sara Ryder was the one who built it. ‘You are the lost brother your father talks so much about on TV,’ fuck, fuck, fuck. Why won’t everyone stay dead? ‘You should be dead.’

‘One last gift I accepted from my sister,’ Safaa - Scott - taps the ring on his left hand absent-mindedly. ‘A life of anonymity. I didn’t want to, but this is the only way we -’ Vidal holds both of Scott’s hand in his and rubs his knuckles - ‘can live as who we are.’

Well that’s new, Hank wants to say but decides that it’ll be a bad idea from how the room plunges into solemnity. He doesn’t write anything down, though. Hell knows who will access it. ‘Care to elaborate?’

‘My sister’s side of the story is not mine to tell.’ He shivers. Reyes draws him close until the human is almost sitting on his lap to share body heat. ‘My side, however… in short, Father developed something back in the twenty-eight for my mother. She died before he managed to finish it, and for reasons which escaped me, he wanted to do the same to us.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Louis says. He sinks further into the couch, and the tea in his hand has probably gone cold.

Scott shakes his head. ‘No, don’t be. It’s a long time ago now. What you need to know, however, is that we haven’t been in contact with him for a few years at that point, and my father exploited my sister’s goodwill towards Mother to capture her at her funeral. She managed to warn us before we lost contact, and we went into hiding. That’s how I lost my legs properly.’

Kidnapping your daughter at her mum’s funeral? That’s just fucking disrespectful. And getting your son stuck in a wheelchair? Yeah, Hank is right to hate Alec Ryder. ‘How long did you hide?’

‘Not for long,’ a shake of his head. ‘We tried to reach my sister as soon as we heard about the hostage situation. SWAT didn’t let us in.’

‘Probably the only reason why you’re here,’ Louis says. ‘You know what happened next.’

A tense nod but no elaboration is given.

‘Exactly what did your dad do to your sister?’ Hank presses. ‘What happened to her later?’

‘For your first question, it isn’t ours to tell. But for the latter, she simply disappeared on us. We went for years without contact.’

‘“Went”?’

Both Vidal and Safaa keep their mouths shut, and it is when Louis excuses himself to refill the teapot that Hank realises Connor’s gaze is fixed on a photo on the coffee table. Before he can lecture the android on the importance of respecting others’ privacy, Connor has already picked up the frame. ‘Who is she?’ he asks, his LED spinning red.

‘You should have facial recognition software installed,’ says Vidal in lieu of answering. ‘You don’t recognise her?’

The android’s LED spins, spins and spins, staying stubbornly at an alarming red as if confused at why he can't get any results. Judging from the distressed look on his face, it isn't very far from the truth. ‘No,’ Connor admits, the tension in his body palpable. ‘Facial recognition indicates that all related information is classified. I attempted to cross-reference with the information available on the internet, but results remain inconclusive. Who is she?’

The silence that follows can be cut through with a knife. Taking a deep breath, it is Safaa who gives a reply.

‘That’s my sister,’ he says as he twists his fingers on top of the blanket. ‘She only let Amanda take it because I asked her to when she graduated from university. You recognise her from somewhere?’

Connor’s already-large eyes widen ever-so-slightly. He hastily puts down the frame and straightens his tie, the latter which Hank recognises as a way to compose himself. ‘You alright, Connor?’ he asks because this android is just so...different. Human.

‘Sara Ryder,’ Connor murmurs under his breath. His voice is shaking. ‘She is my creator.’

o0o0o

Before

RK800, serial #313 248 317 - 51 opened her eyes to dim, yellowish light. She felt as if there were weights in her limbs, her vision blurry, and there was a general feeling of wrongness threatening to take over her processors even though she couldn’t remember anything.

Then it hit her. The penthouse. The hostage. The girl. The deviant shooting her.

She was supposed to be dead.

She sat up abruptly, dizziness nearly overwhelming her, and everything that consisted of her body feels wrong - her weight, her curves, the press of fabric on the component between her legs, but she dared not stop, crashing onto the ground when her legs malfunctioned and crawled forward using her sluggish arms. One thing was certain: bad things would happen if she stopped moving.

She soon encountered a door, one of the old-fashioned kind with no electronic locks and required only keys to unlock, and when she pulled herself on her feet and turned the knob, she found it unlocked, and she threw her entire weight to push it open.

Big mistake. Sharp white light assaulted her still-sensitive eyes in league with a loud, high-pitched hum against her ears, and whatever vertigo she managed to shake off during their crawl returned tenfold. She fell onto her knees again, shutting her eyes and covering her ears whilst curling up into a fetal position on the cold, hard floor. Everything hurt: her eyes, her ears, her skin, her bones. She felt something warm sliding out from her eyes - she was crying.

A hand lifted her head and she tried to bat it away to no avail, the agonising hum torturing her again as soon as nothing stood between her audio receptors and her surroundings, and perhaps that was why she didn’t feel the headphones on her head until soft music chased the pain away. When she wanted to cover her eyes, she discovered a pair of glasses on her nose. She felt arms sliding underneath her knees and back, but being carried still came as a surprise, and she opened her eyes in shock. The sunglasses did wonders against the harsh light of the corridor, but it provided no protection against her analysis software going haywire, and in less than a second her HUD was overwhelmed with reports of failed scans (Name: [CLASSIFIED]. Date of Birth: [CLASSIFIED]) of her rescuer’s face.

The banners remained despite her eyes being closed.

She only discovered that she was screaming and struggling when reports of damage in different areas - the voice box in particular - appeared before her vision. The [ABNORMAL THIRIUM FLOW] warning followed along with [UNAUTHORISED ACTIVATION OF BIOTICS], and she did not - could not - understand, everything was too much, why was she hurting everywHeR3?

She didn’t even have the power to resist the consciousness intruding her thoughts and her very being through - was that an interface? - whatever the other person’s doing. She tried to pull away, but disconnected from - from what? - she was trapped in a corner of her mind, and it was not like the intruder was listening to her begging for them to leave anyway.

This is the quickest way, their voice echoed in her mind. For the love of humanity, stop pushing me out.

RK800 found herself paralysed; whether with fear or with actual physical constraint, she did not know, because all she knew was that it was too much, she needed to leave, she had nowhere to go. The intruder’s consciousness wormed even deeper into her system, and she could not stand it anymore.

She shut down.

#dbh au big bang #hankcon #mreyder #reyder #female ryder #male ryder #alec ryder #reyes vidal #dbh connor #dbh hank anderson #dbh captain allen #dbh amanda #detroit: become human #mass effect andromeda #groom lake aftermath

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surveys-at-your-service · 3 years

Text

Survey #325

tired of seeing me in the survey tag yet? lmao me too

Would you date someone who’s shorter than you? I have absolutely never understood why there would be any correlation between someone's height and whether or not you would date the person because of it. What, do you think the person has any control over that? So basically, yes, I would, without a second thought. Have you ever fallen in love on the Internet? "Fallen in love," no. I had to meet Sara first to see how we meshed in the same environment. Have you ever had a crush on your best friend’s sweetie? Yes, hence the Joel mess. Have you ever had a controlling boyfriend? No. Good luck getting me to date someone like that. Can guys be sluts? Who the fuck cares so long as the person is safe and open with their partner. Ever had a crush on your best girlfriend? Twice now, haha. Would you ever kiss someone who’s taken? No, I'm not that kind of person. Do you mind being the third wheel? I don't care, really, so long as my friend doesn't totally ignore me. I very much enjoy seeing people in love. Has a kiss ever made you weak in the knees? Yes. Have you ever been in a love triangle? No, and I absolutely would not if I was aware. You pick me or you leave me alone. Do you feel comfortable buying condoms? I've never had to, but I'd probably feel a hint of awkwardness. Have you ever run into your ex with his/her new partner? No, and the only case where that would be a problem would be with Jason. I know in my heart I would feel at least some hatred towards her. Have you ever felt guilty after doing something sexual? Yep, when I was first actually getting truly sexual and felt like I was betraying my "abstinence." Would you stay friends with your sweetie’s friends if you broke up? I'm still friends with Jacob, mine and Jason's former roommate and his then-close friend. So yeah. Where do you see yourself in 5 years? I hope more than words can explicate that I have a stable job that I love, my driver's license, and my own place with a long-term partner, since I think living alone would be very detrimental to me. I also hope I have much better control over my social anxiety. Oh, and can I PLEASE be fit again? What was the last thing you bought for less than a dollar? No idea. Who was the last person in your bed? My niece Aria was sitting on it with me. I miss Misty's kids. Do you have a nice phone? Not particularly, but it does the job. Is Marilyn Manson creepy or cool? I find him creepy in a cool way, haha. Well, at least aesthetically. With his recent sexual assault (or abuse? idr) allegations however, I don't know how I feel about him because I don't know the facts. I really should actually read up about it. Regardless, I love his music; he's one of my favorite musical artists. Do you like talking to strangers? Depends on my mood and the person. Do you have OCD? Yes. Are you clumsy or graceful? I'm clumsy as all getout. Have you ever ran into a door because you didn’t know it was closed? Haha, no. Have you ever woke up and didn’t know where you were? After my cyst removal surgery, I was confused for a moment or so. Do you own a Wii? Yep. Do you like to talk about yourself? Depends on with whom, the subject, and my mood. Has anyone ever called you conceited? No; I'm very much on the other end of the spectrum. Tattoos or piercings? I love both, but tats win. Have you ever had ants ruin your picnic? I’ve never had a picnic. At least that I remember. What’s the last gross movie/show/video you saw? Recently, I watched The Dark Den dissect his recently-deceased tarantula to figure out why she died. It was serious impaction, and it was disgusting. Would you rather live in a huuuge house or a little cozy one? A lil cozy one! Not TOO small, though. I'd feel claustrophobic. Have you ever blow dried something other then your hair? Maybe? What is your favorite piece of equipment at gyms? Treadmills. Do you have a tutor for anything? No. Does your sibling(s) have braces? My older sister did for a little while. Did you tell your last girlfriend/boyfriend that you love them? Yes. What was the last thing your parents got mad at you for? Apparently I somehow forgot to wipe crumbs off the kitchen counter. Have you ever had a bathing suit fall off of you while swimming? Not a suit, no, but when I wore bikinis and I jumped into the pool, it's happened before where my top would go up. I'd obviously fix it super quick. Do your pets have favorites? I'm absolutely Roman's favorite, but he loves Mom, too. I'm the only one who interacts with Venus. What’s the longest you’ve ever liked someone without telling them? A very long time. I had a big crush on Girt my freshman year, and some time after Jason, my crush for him came back, but he didn't ask me out until years later. Turns out we'd been friends just too long and the relationship felt too weird for me, so I broke up with him after I think... four months or so? We're still great friends. That's my bro. Did you prank anyone on April Fool’s Day? I never do anymore. I don't like pranks. What’s the sweetest thing a gf/bf can do to get you to forgive them? Changed behavior. Do you dislike when surveys ask to describe your underwear? Well, I'm almost always in my pajamas, sooo I generally don't even have any at that moment. Did you check to see how much fat/calories was in the last thing you ate? No. If the last person you kissed gave you roses, what would you do? Blush and thank her. Anything happened lately that you never expected to? "Never?" No. Are you the person you thought you’d be when you were younger? I'm a massive disappointment and embarrassment to that little girl. Are you a confrontational person, or the peacekeeper? I am absolutely a peacekeeper. I avoid confrontation like the plague. The last time you did something with BOTH of your parents was? They've been divorced since I was I think 17 and I am now 25, so... Do you like pumpkin pie? Absolutely not. Do you believe in any conspiracies? I am 100% sold on that the government had some involvement in 9/11. Look into the evidence - there is an overwhelming amount. There are others that I consider as possible, but no others do I absolutely believe. I'm around 50/50 on the simulation theory. Do you have a little sister? What’s her name? Yeah, Nicole. Have you ever changed yourself to impress someone? Who? Nah. Who was the last person you gave up on? Why did you give up on them? Colleen. We simply butted heads way too much, and she just had this volatile meanness towards others I couldn't watch anymore. What was the last thing you printed? Is there even ink in your printer? Probably a paper for when I was in school. I don't know if our printer does. Have you ever gotten your nails done? Or do you get them done regularly? Yeah, with Colleen and then another time with my sisters. It was really just to hang with them, though. It's not something I'm interested in. Have you been outside yet today? What were you doing? Nope. When was the last time you got a new bed? Is your bed comfy? Not since I was an older teen did I get Mom's bed, but it wasn't new. This was actually her parents' bed, too. Well I mean, the mattress obviously isn't that old, but the bed itself is pretty ancient. It's comfy enough. Do you remember the first time you ever drove a car? Who were you with? Yes: on the dead-end road that led to our old house. I was with Mom obviously and probably my sister, since I think I did it on the way home from school. Do any of your friends drink excess amounts of alcohol? Do you? Not to my knowledge. I definitely don't. Have you ever been in handcuffs? Why, exactly? Yes, because it's mandatory when being transported to a mental hospital. What’s your favorite thing to do when drunk? Would you do this sober? Never been drunk before. When was the last time you bled? What happened? Well it's my time of the month, so. Are you a fan of dogs? Do you have any pets? I love dogs, but don't currently have one as a pet. Mom's looking intently. How often do you bathe? I'm going to be completely transparent and say not as much as I should. Doing my hair is fine, but moving all around, bending and propping my legs up exhausts my legs so much that I avoid showers as long as I can take it or until I have to go somewhere. I want strength back in my body. So. Badly. Do you have any tattoos? What, where and why? I have six that I'm not all explaining, but locations: right upper arm, right inner wrist, left inner forearm, left upper arm, right collarbone, left breast. What do you wear to bed at home? Pajama pants and a tank top. What do you wear to bed when you're somewhere else? Pj pants, tank top, and usually a bra, depending on where I'm at and with who. Do you have any phobias? What? Why do you think you have this/them? I have a lot, but I'll discuss my strangest/strongest: pregnancy, maggots, parasites, and whale sharks. Pregnancy would be because a fetus is technically parasitic, and, to cover that topic, I'm just generally terrified of anything living in MY body. I also find it absolutely disgusting to see a baby move from the outside. I will actually scream if I see this, and that is not an exaggeration. I'm afraid of maggots (larva in general, really) because I think they're just disgusting, and I once brought something in from outside and put it in my dresser (idr why), and one day I opened it and reached in for something just to find lots of little larva squirming around. That's when it started. Now, whale sharks: it's literally because of World of Warcraft, hahaha. There's an underwater zone in the game where they roam as boss enemies, and their mouths look so weird and are actually a bit toothy. Irl, they just have mouths that are just way too big for my comfort. I know they're entirely harmless, but still. If you could ask God (to atheists - IF there was one) one question, what? "Why." Why so much evil, pain, and unfairness. Briefly describe your family. Kinda broken, but still loving and try to stay close. Big "ohana" mood: everyone's loyalty is endless. Where do you stand on the death penalty? For it in extreme cases. Where do you stand on wearing fur? Disgusting and horribly morbid unless for survival purposes in cold climates. Could you kill somebody? In self-defense, yes. What are your political beliefs (anarchy, communism, democracy etc.)? I just say I'm Independent. My beliefs stretch over so many titles; plus, I'm not very educated on all types and what they entail. What, if anything, WOULD you sacrifice your life for? To save those I love most. How would your ideal partner look? *shoves picture of Mark Fischbach in ur face* Would you ever have an affair? Nope. I'm telling you: pick me or leave me be. I'm not a side-chick. Would you ever have a one night stand? Also no. What one thing would you change in this world (free Tibet, abolish Sweden)? Honestly... probably abolish all militaries. I do not in the least support war, and it's just... sad to know countries stand ready to kill the moment they "need" to. Distrust seems to make the world go 'round. Sure, a country may try to rebuild them in secrecy, but that's a preeeetty big thing to succeed in keeping under wraps. "But what if a terrorist or something rises?" I'm quite sure we could handle that without an full-on army. Maybe I'm not well-informed on this topic, but I've just never supported military presence. I WANT TO MAKE IT CLEAR AS DAY, I have endless respect for veterans and aspiring soldiers, because I DO understand the mentality of wanting to protect your home, but yeah. I just wish it wasn't a thing. Would you ever choose a career or job where your life was at risk? Nope. Do you have any famous relatives? Ancestors, yes, and I have a distant cousin who wrote a fantastic book, if that counts. Are you a loyal member of any organizations? No. Desired weight: At MOST 140. :/ I'd like to be closer to 120, but I'll take 140. What are your opinions on marijuana legalization? Legalize it, but treat it similarly to alcohol, like prohibiting driving high, obviously. What do you think about tipping at restaurants? Tip a minimum, and THEN increase according to service quality. Are you addicted to anything? Soda. Would you ever get back together with any of your exes? Yes. Never mind what gender you ARE, what gender do you WANT to be? I'm a female and content with that. Do you ever feel ashamed revealing your age? Yes, considering how behind I am in just being an adult. What does your parents call you? Generally just "Britt." Mom occasionally still calls me "Twinkie." ;-; Has anyone ever threatened you with a knife? Wow, no. Do you ever watch The Simpsons? No. What’s the last thing to make you scream? Truly scream, a mix of depression and anger. I screamed into my pillow. Do you play games with boys/girls, like ‘hard to get’? I'm an adult. I'm a tease in some romantic situations, but "hard to get" is definitely the wrong term.

#survey #surveys #questions

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alittleimagine · 6 years

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Nate Heywood x Reader

Anonymous requested “Could you please do an imagine with Nate Heywood where the team goes to the late 1800s to find who Jack the Ripper was and to stop him from killing and along the way they meet young H.G wells who is instantly attracted to the reader. The reader later starts to fall in love with the young wells .Nate gets jealous and starts to act cold and distant towards the reader because he likes the reader a lot . The reader wants to know why he is acting that way so tells her how he feels.”

Note: I know there’s now an episode about vampires in Victorian London, but I actually started writing this on March 12th and just took forever to get back to it.

“H. G. Wells isn’t even supposed to be in London at this time.”

“Sure, Nate, focus on that and not that fact that Jack the Ripper is a vampire.”

Most of you shared amused looks at Sara’s comment while Nate frowned. He had originally been excited to be in 1888, thrilled to help stop Jack the Ripper from killing more than the five victims he had in history. He seemed less excited now.

You couldn’t understand why. Meeting H. G. had just meant an additional historical figure you’d all run into. You hadn’t been the biggest fan of his works, but you could appreciate meeting him. And he’d been very charming.

“The truth is that the virus only simulates the symptoms of what we would recognize as, well, as the pop culture symptoms of vampirism.” Stein said, reading over the display Gideon had pulled up with Ray over his shoulder.

Mick grunted. “Does he drink blood?” He asked.

Stein hesitated before sighing and nodding.

“Then he’s a vampire.”

“We might also want to talk about the Waverider.” Jax said.

You all turned to look at him. Sara tilted her head at him. “I thought you said that you’d have it fixed by tomorrow.”

Futuristic viruses didn’t just land in 1888 by accident. Space Pirates were a consistent problem in your lives and a nonstop pain in Jax’s Chief Engineer butt.

He grimaced. “Yeah, it might take a little longer than that.”

“I’m pleased we’ve run into each other again Miss Y/N. You left in such a hurry the last time.”

H.G. Wells was an attractive young man, in that particular Victorian way. The facial hair was different than what you were used to, but it was a very common thing on the streets of 1888 London. He was kind at least, funny and attentive.

At least, to you.

You weren’t blind (you didn’t think) and you could tell well enough that he was flirting with you, or had been the last time you’d talked.

“I’m sorry.” You said. “We had business to take care of.”

“Ah, yes. Your eclectic group of friends.” He held an arm out, gesturing toward a less crowded area of the parlor.

According to Gideon the Ripper would be moving on from low-risk targets like prostitutes to the sort of ladies that would be found in a society party like this one. You’d all either secured invitations or snuck into the event. You had only been a little surprised to find H.G. there and reasonably pleased.

He was cute, after all, and his attention was inoffensive. Plus, he provided someone to talk to while undercover wearing a stupid corset that wasn’t a complete stranger.

“Can I get you a drink?” He asked.

“Yes, please.” You smiled pleasantly while H.G. went to get you both a drink.

The idea of a vampire Jack the Ripper set you on edge, having no idea what he looked like was terrifying, and when Nate walked up close behind you and began speaking you nearly had a heart attack.

“We’re supposed to be looking out for Jack the Ripper. Not flirting.” He said sharply.

You held your hand to your pounding heart then spun and smacked him in the chest. “Don’t. Do. That.” You hissed, emphasizing each word with a hit. “And I am.” You smacked his chest once more for good measure, though you were sure it was hurting you more than him.

“Oh really?” He said, unfazed by your hits. “Because it looks like you’ve been flirting with H.G. Wells who is not even supposed to be here and you could be causing all kinds of havoc in the timeline. You know he marries his cousin, right?”

You glared at Nate. No, you hadn’t known that and it wasn’t relevant right now and you were pretty sure if Sara could sleep with the Queen of France and the timeline remain intact then you could flirt with H.G. Wells.

Nate and you had always gotten along just fine. You’d been friends, close even. Maybe sometimes you had flirted with him, maybe sometimes you thought he had flirted back. Maybe you had some softer, mushy feelings for him. But right now Nate was acting like a child.

And the more it annoyed Nate the more you were inclined to keep doing it.

“Go away, Nate. If you’re going to be rude then go keep watch outside.”

You could see H.G. approaching with two drinks in hand and a smile on his face and you were quick to smile back.

A scream broke from the next room and H.G. was no longer your main concern.

“Do you mean to tell me that Stein is a vampire?”

“Well…”

Your groan was more akin to a yell in your frustration. Ray ducked his head apologetically, unhappy to be delivering the news to the crew.

“He’s not yet a vampire, I don’t think. But he got bit and I think that’s how this virus transmits. Not so much like the Buffy vampires where they swap blood back and forth.”

“So how long until Grey starts wanting to drain us?” Jax’s worry was palpable and you put a hand on his shoulder in your best effort to comfort him. He patted it, gave it a squeeze, but his mind was elsewhere.

Ray shrugged. “I can’t say. He would have known better.” He said.

“Gideon,” Sara called to the ship, “I need you to make sure that Stein stays in stasis. No matter what.”

“Yes, Captain Lance.” The AI replied.

You kicked at the ends of your stupid Victorian skirt, frustration filling every corner of you. Another woman had died, Stein had been bitten, a vampire had made fools of you all, and you were wearing a stupid corset that you were ready to set on fire.

When your eyes drifted up to Nate you found him glaring at you. Instinctively you glared back.

And Nate. He had not been helping your mood.

“Can I help you, Nathaniel?” You snapped.

Several pairs of eyes turned to look between the two of you.

“Actually, yeah.” He crossed his arms. “Let’s talk about how maybe if you weren’t so busy flirting with your new boyfriend Stein might not have gotten bit.”

Your jaw dropped. “Excuse me?”

You vaguely registered the looks the crew shared, ranging from confused to intrigued. Mostly you saw red.

“Yeah, you were so busy protecting H.G. Wells that you forgot to take care of your team.”

Ray smacked Nate’s arm lightly, muttering his name in warning. Nate paid it no mind.

You were going to wring his neck. You didn’t care if he was made of steel or if he was a hell of a lot stronger than you, you were going to wring his stupid little neck.

“How. Dare. You.” Before he could open his mouth you continued. “I was under the impression that we were here to help people. To protect the timeline. Like say, I don’t know, making sure that influential author H.G. Wells doesn’t die before he writes all his important works?”

“Oh yeah, that’s what it was about. Not because you want to make googly eyes at him.”

“You are unbelievable.”

“I’m unbelievable? At least I know not to worry about making out with some mustachioed writer when there is a vampire on the loose.”

You took a sudden step forward, ready to throw down, and Sara blocked your path.

“Alright you two, I don’t know what’s going on but it stops now.” She said.

Mick shrugged. “Oh come on, I want to see her beat his ass.”

Sara pointed a warning finger at him, then pointed it at Nate. At least, you thought, she seemed to be on your side. “This blame game is getting us nowhere. Get your acts together.”

You winced as Ray dabbed antiseptic on your forehead.

“Sorry.” He smiled apologetically. He secured a bandage over the cut and gave your arm a squeeze. “How’s that feel?”

“As good as a head wound can?” You said, smiling at him. You were sore all over, but Amaya looked a good deal worse for wear than you so you couldn’t complain. Ray himself had only just escaped a bite.

Amaya huffed from across the room. “How do we keep getting outsmarted by a Victorian era psychopath?” She hopped off the bed and paced.

It was a good question. A frustrating one, but a good question. At least now you knew who to look for.

“Don’t bother asking Nate,” you said with a tone of bitterness, “he’ll just say it’s because I dared flirt with H.G.”

Amaya smiled sympathetically and Ray tucked his chin into his chest.

You knew you should have been far more focused on the fact that Stein was still in stasis and there was still a damn vampire running around and people were being hurt, but your mind was stubbornly fixated on one Nathaniel Heywood and his piss poor attitude. He had never acted this way before and it circled round and round your head. It hurt, if you were being honest with yourself.

“Maybe go easy on him.” Ray said as he packed the medical supplies away.

Amaya met your eyes from the other side of the room and shrugged.

“Go easy on him?” You asked in mild disbelief. “He’s the one being rude all the damn time. I haven’t done anything. Or do you think I’m flirting with H.G. Wells at the expense of the team too?”

“No. No. Of course not.” Ray was quick to shake his head and appease you. “It’s just, well, he’s being like this because he’s upset about something kind of unrelated and he’s taking it out on you.” At your raised eyebrow he rushed on. “Not that that’s okay or alright, but you should just try and talk to him and maybe he’ll apologize and you guys can move right past it.”

You weren’t surprised that Ray would go to bat for Nate and Ray’s natural loyalty almost made his words less impactful, but it was hard to say no to his earnest puppy dog face. Amaya smiled at you over his shoulder, looking a little like she was in on some private joke.

You narrowed your eyes at both of them for a moment. Then sighed. “Fine.” You said. “I’ll talk to him.”

“Astonishing.”

All three heads snapped toward the doorway. You cursed loudly.

There stood H.G. Wells, taking in the whole of the room with fascination.

You shared wide-eyed looks with Ray and Amaya, none of you moving from your spots. In your head you cursed again. Nate was going to blame you for this, you were sure of it.

“What sort of vessel is this?” H.G. asked, stepping closer to a cabinet on the wall and peeking in without touching.

That snapped you all out of it. “What are you doing here? How did you even get here. You should not be here.” You said in a rush, jumping off the bed and hurrying to him.

“Does it fly?” He asked, unworried by your questions. “It looks like it might. Is it a star ship?” He looked at you now with open curiosity. “Are you not from Earth?”

“We’re not aliens.” Ray said, moving around you both to look out the door. He checked both sides of the hall. “We have to get him out of here.”

“Agreed.” You took H.G.’s arm and tugged. “You can’t be here.”

He didn’t exactly put up a fight, but he wasn’t eager to move either. His movements were slow as you pulled him toward the door and out into the hall.

Amaya moved behind him to help encourage him in your direction. Still he took his time, eagerly taking in as much of the ship as he could.

“You being here could be very bad.” Ray said, peeking around a corner as you approached.

H.G. gasped softly. “If not space,” he began, “then, the future.”

You pulled harder.

“You are.” There was a level of wonder in his voice and he turned in your grasp to take hold of your hands.

You wanted to curse again. You were all so bad about keeping the time travelling thing a secret. “You have to go. You shouldn’t have been here to start with.” You insisted.

“Seriously!”

You jolted where you stood and groaned, squeezing your eyes shut for a moment. Of course he would catch you. It couldn’t be anyone else. Just had to be Nate.

“Nate.” Ray said with a tone of warning.

“No! Are you serious?” His tone had bordered on shrill before falling to just pissed. When you finally looked up you were met with a glare. “You brought H.G. Wells onto the Waverider? I thought you were being irresponsible, but this is just stupid!”

You didn’t appreciate being yelled at on the best of days and right now you could feel the blood boiling in your veins. Steel or no, you were going to kick his ass.

You opened your mouth to argue back, but H.G. beat you to the punch.

“Actually, I followed you and your bald friend.”

Never in your whole life had you felt so vindicated. The smile that spread on your face was the clearest “eat crow” in the history of mankind.

Nate sputtered, some of the bluster leaving him.

You weren’t satisfied. You wanted to have it out- shout at Nate, push him, have the big fight Sara had interrupted. And to think you had let Ray talk you into being reasonable.

As if sensing the buildup of righteous anger in you Ray stepped between you two. “Hey, not now.” He gestured to H.G. “We need to get him off the ship.”

Amaya put a hand on your shoulder. “Come on. We still have to find Jack the Ripper too.”

Against your pettier side you let her pull you away with H.G. in tow.

Your shoulder was still sore from where you’d been tossed against a brick wall and you nursed it with a grumble.

Ray, Jax, and Sara had returned to the Waverider with what they believed to be the cure for Stein, leaving you behind to clean up with Nate, Mick, and Amaya. Clean up mostly consisted of collecting Jack the Ripper’s fully “vamped” body and gathering anything else the time pirate may have left behind. And H.G.

He looked exhausted, sitting on the ground against the steps of a building. Still he looked over you and gestured to your arm. “Are you well?”

You nodded, gesturing casually with your other arm. “All in a day’s work.”

“Remarkable.” He said. He pushed himself off from the wall and closed the distance between you.

Briefly you saw him glance over your shoulder and turned to look. You caught Nate’s glare before he turned away to stomp over to where Amaya was helping Mick gather up the Ripper.

You hadn’t spoken since his little explosion on the Waverider. As much as you wanted to just have it out and figure out what his problem was, you were a reluctant to be the first to speak. He could come to you, you figured.

H.G. cleared his throat and you turned back to look at him, almost embarrassed at being caught staring at Nate’s back. You cleared your own throat in response. “Right. Now, you understand you can’t tell anyone about any of this, right?”

He gave a little chuckle. “And who would believe such a fantastical tale?”

“Good point.”

He was a handsome man when he smiled. He grasped both your arms lightly, careful of your stinging shoulder. “I will never forget you, though. Of that you can be certain.”

“Hard to forget all the crazy.” You joked.

“Hard to forget you.” He smiled once more and then kissed you. It was over before you’d really processed what was happening, punctuated by a loud thump behind you.

Rather than react to the kiss you turned to look for the noise. Mick was crouched over the Ripper’s body, grumbling angrily and glaring from time to time at Nate’s retreating back. Amaya sighed.

“When are you going to speak with him?”

On instinct you turned to glare at Amaya. You had every intention of enjoying your bowl of cereal and zero intention of going to speak with a certain dumb steel-plated historian. You pointedly took a bite from your spoon.

“Just go talk to him.” Amaya’s sighs always had an air of world weariness to them. They were very effective. “This isn’t going to get better until you do.”

“I did nothing wrong.” You muttered.

“I didn’t say you did. But, you could be the bigger person and just go talk to him.” When you ate another spoonful she continued. “Aren’t you curious about what’s going on with him?”

You were. Of course you were.

You cared for Nate and he was being an ass and, frankly, it hurt. But, because it hurt, you weren’t exactly eager to have another go around with him.

“Please.” She insisted. “He’s in the library. He’s alone. Go talk to him. Get it over with.”

With an unhappy huff you pushed your half finished bowl away and stood. “Fine. I’m going. You happy?” You didn’t wait for her response.

You stomped and grumbled to yourself the whole short trip to the library. If he continued to be a jerk you were going to throw books at him.

His back was turned to you when you entered and you took a moment to glare at it. He looked tense. You knew him, you could see he was upset. Well, so were you. And it was his fault.

For a second you hovered in the entrance and debated just turning around and leaving. Instead you cleared your throat and relished a little at his startled jump. When he turned to face you there was a moment where his face seemed to cycle through several emotions before settling on the sourpuss look he’d been wearing the past few days.

He said nothing.

“Do you want to explain what the hell your deal has been?” So maybe you weren’t feeling up to being super polite.

He scoffed and stormed over to the table at the center. Still he said nothing.

“Really? Now you decide to be silent? Because you’ve had zero problem going on and on. Y/N this. Y/N that. ‘Y/N, look at all the ways you’re failing the team even when you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong’.” You mocked.

“Just let it go.”

You almost missed it, he spoke so quietly. Another time you might have done just that when you saw the way his shoulders drooped. Not today.

“Let it go? Let it go? I don’t think so, Elsa. You have been an ass, rude as hell, over and over again for days. And I did nothing wrong and I don’t deserve it.” You could feel yourself getting more worked up with each word. “So now you’re going to explain to me exactly what the hell your problem with me is because if not, we’re going to fight. Right here. Right now.”

He ignored you, staring hard at an open book in front of him.

Your temper kept rising. You stormed over to the table and slammed the book shut. He grit his teeth, but didn’t look up.

“And while you’re at it,” you said, “you can explain what your beef with H.G. is as well.”

That did it. He shot up straight, towering over you now. “Oh yeah. Perfect H.G. Wells with his perfect mustache and perfect stupid vest.”

“Seriously!? What the hell did he ever do to you? He was nothing but nice.”

“So nice. The nicest. That’s what it was. It’s not like he was just flirting with you.” He’d started matching your volume, the both of you shouting now, chest puffing out with the same outrage you were feeling.

“So what?” You threw your hands up. Unbelievable.

He plowed on. “And you just lapped it up. Just kept flirting right back.”

“What the hell do you care if he flirted? If I flirted?”

“Because I like you!”

It felt a little like the air had been knocked out of you and your expression must have shown it. Your eyes were wide, jaw slack, looking dumb at the revelation.

Nate looked terrified.

There was a solid minute of silence and stillness.

“What?” You finally managed.

He said nothing, only sighed. You could practically see the tension roll off his body.

“What?” You repeated. “You like me? Like, in a romantic way?”

Though he still hadn’t said anything the little shrug, resigned and heavy, said enough.

Your eyes ran over him- the tired slump of his shoulders and worried knit in his brow, his dumb handsome face.

“You’re an idiot.”

He was taller than you, but with a tug on his shirt you brought him down to your level and pressed your lips against his. You thought you felt him start, just a little jump, but you were otherwise preoccupied.

You pulled back just a moment later to get a good look at him.

He was hunched over, your hand still gripping his shirt, eyes closed, hands out as if to hold you. He blinked his eyes opened.

“I’m an idiot.” He confirmed.

Before you could nod he’d pulled you back. A hand went to your waist, the other cupped the base of your neck, and he pulled you flush against him as his lips moved over yours. You didn’t know how long you stayed like that.

“Finally!” Mick’s booming voice caused you both to jump and pull apart. “It’s about damn time.”

#nate heywood x reader #nate heywood imagine #nate heywood #legends of tomorrow #steel x reader #nathaniel heywood x reader

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nightmareonfilmstreet · 6 years

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Review: BLACK MIRROR Season 4 (Part I - Episodes 1 & 2)

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Review: BLACK MIRROR Season 4 (Part I - Episodes 1 & 2)

Black Mirror Season 4 dropped on December 29th, on Netflix.

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

Watch it. Oh my God, watch it. Now, then; Spoilers ahead.

EPISODE 1: USS CALLISTER

The aspect ratio of the opening sequence matches the aspect ratio of the old Star Trek television show. It’s little things like that keep my coffee hot and get me up in the morning.

“USS Callister” really tells two stories: the first is the tale of a loser computer programmer named Robert Daly, who’s created a groundbreaking Virtual-Reality-based game that lets people fly around the universe in spaceships, explore planets, battle each other trade, etcetera. The guy he started the company with is a dick who doesn’t appreciate his contributions to the company. His coworkers think he’s weird and awkward and kinda creepy sometimes.

The second story is that of a sadistic and cruel God named Robert Daly. Daly has created a parallel Virtual Reality that allows him to play out his fantasies of being a Hero in Charge, based on a retro science-fiction television show he loves. (Think Star Trek.)

The twist of the knife is that he has peopled this game with digital copies of coworkers he dislikes, generated by stolen samples of their DNA. They have all their memories and personalities from the real world. They are sentient, thinking and feeling as their real-world selves.

What “USS Callister” asks us is (among many other things), are they alive?

Not that episode one is all scowling and torment. Brooker mentioned that Black Mirror would ‘explore a little more comedy in this season’, and there is certainly a strong heartbeat of humor here. It’s the best kind of laughter, too, for the series: black humor. Hangman’s jokes. The dry British chuckle in the face of the abyss.

Watching the tortured, terrified digital clones of the USS Callister unwind while Daly is logged out of the game reminds one of London in the Blitz. Sure, there are bombs and blood and rubble everywhere, and things are pretty awful, but at least the bottles behind the bar survived.

When the newest digital clone, Cristin (played by Nanette Cole) finds out that nobody has genitals in Daly’s digital world, her battle cry is priceless:

Okay. Stealing my pussy is a red. Fucking. Line.

“USS Callister” is like a great Doctor Who episode that just happens to be Rated R.

When the trailers for Season 4 dropped, the teaser for “USS Callister” left out the real world entirely. It was a move of twofold genius. First, it saves the surprise of our first, bleak glimpse of the real world. Our introduction to neurotic weirdo Daly (an absolutely stunning performance by Jesse Plemons) feels like a nihilistic sigh of relief. It doesn’t have to be full dark 24/7, but there’s something in the uncompromising, unblinking hardness of Black Mirror that has always set it apart. A certain bleak jouissance that no other show delivers.

Second, it works as a commentary on the episode itself. In our little taste of “USS Callister,” the real world isn’t there at all. The trailer promises pure sci-fi. Pure escapism. Fun. Adventure. There’s no trace of the sinister sadism of Daly, or the suffering of his comrades. There’s no sense of true tragedy or actual stakes.

Just like the immersive, next-gen VR in the episode.

“Callister” examines the more disturbing elements of the AI and VR booms we’re seeing right now. Ten years from now, if we have a bad day, put on our VR headsets, and kill a hundred digital people in Call of Duty online, what will that mean? In a world where code is ever-improving, at what point is a program as nuanced and multifaceted as us? We don’t feel anything drowning Sims or making them wet themselves…but should we? If not today, when? At what point does simulated suffering cease to be Catharsis and become Sadism?

With the advent of technology like CRISPR, perhaps we aren’t so far from Daly’s nightmare after all.

EPISODE 2: ARKANGEL

The obvious big-gun episode of the season is “Arkangel.” There’re no scrubs in the directorial talent of Black Mirror, but Jodie Foster (four Oscar nominations, two wins, Silence of the Lambs, ‘nuff said) is clearly the Heavy Hitter.

She swung for the fences.

She knocked it out of the park.

I don’t even like baseball.

“Arkangel” tells the story of a mother and daughter. When her daughter Sara (Aniya Hodge, Sara Abbot, and Brenna Harding) goes missing, Marie (Rosemarie DeWitt, Cinderella Man, Mad Men) has a monitoring system implanted in Sara’s head. It’s called “Arkangel,” and gives Marie access to Sara’s location, biological vitals, and even a direct feed from her optic nerve. Marie can see what Sara sees.

But “Arkangel” isn’t really about the creepy sci-fi stuff. None of the best episodes of Black Mirror are, and this is one of the best in the series. No. “Arkangel” is about what happens as Sara grows up. It’s about the Helicopter Parents of the future. About how far Marie will go to keep her safe, and how much of herself she’ll compromise to do it.

And the inevitable price to be paid.

The brilliance of Foster’s episode is (to borrow from Blake), its fearful symmetry. Its balance. Each element dances with another, each character reflected darkly in the actions of others. Sara and the all-seeing eye in her head are like a weight in the center of the episode. On one side is Marie and her Orwellian baby monitor. On the other is Trick (a superb performance by Own Teague), the Cute Drug Dealer from the Wrong Side of the Tracks, and all the rebellion and danger he represents.

Every line, every interaction in the episode shifts that weight, tilts the precarious position of the scale. Structurally, it’s breathtakingly beautiful. There is no wasted moment.

I don’t know whether to give the nod to Brooker (who has sole writing credit on the episode) or Foster for the delicate dance of these threads. The interplay between the writing and directing style is an elegant pas de deux, each word and element circling the others, and pulling the weave ever tighter.

Brooker understands Irony in a way that few shows do, and utilizes it like the keen, heartrending edge that it can be. And he knows Tragedy. The Capital-T kind that the Greeks told us so much about, all those years ago. He knows it intimately. Knows that the key to Tragedy is Hamaratia: the Fatal Flaw.

There are several Fatal Flaws in “Arkangel.” They run (appropriately) in arcs through the episode. Tracing those threads back reveals the subtlety and nuance Foster and Brooker actually manage.

Almost everything Marie does throughout the episode is countered or echoed elsewhere: when she reactivates the Arkangel unit in Sara’s teens, she sees her having sex with Trick, the “Dangerous Bad Boy.” Yet, that same night, she met up with one of her patients from physical therapy: a devil-may-care biker who injured himself driving his motorcycle recklessly, and shows no signs of slowing down.

Marie sees Sara experimenting with cocaine in Trick’s van. The effect of the drug is that it raises Sara’s heart rate. A few days later, Marie grinds some drugs into Sara’s morning smoothie. The effect of drugging her daughter is the spontaneous abortion of a pregnancy Sara didn’t even know about.

It’s ironic that Marie should confront Trick, condemning him as “a junkie.” Throughout the episode, Marie treats the Arkangel parent unit as a junkie treats drugs. She hides the unit upstairs, laments over whether to use it or not. Okay, just this one more time. Uses it just a little. Just a few functions. Starts carrying it with her. It’s clear that she’s addicted to it.

There’s even a brilliant reversal of the classic “Parent finds drugs in the kid’s room” scene, where Sara rifles her mother’s room and discovers that she’s still using the Arkangel parent unit. Sara is horrified and tosses it down, the perfect picture of a parent discovering their child’s dangerous addiction.

Marie is the first victim of Arkangel, and in her victimhood, she stands for all of us. I don’t mean the program itself. I’m talking about the sentiment behind it. Beneath the eerie veneer of the invasive surveillance of tomorrow, “Arkangel” is quietly commenting on something we’re experiencing today.

Safety. In excess. In extremis.

The opening scene of the episode doesn’t just establish the characters and set the stage. It holds up a mirror. Marie is giving birth: after complications during natural birth, the doctor is performing a C-section. “Arkangel” opens with Marie looking away from the things that frighten her: the doctors, the nurse, the procedure she’s undergoing. When Sara is finally born, the doctors whisk her away to a table nearby. There is no sound. No cry. Other doctors gather, and Marie becomes afraid: afraid her baby is dead, that she’s lost her little girl, and is powerless to help.

“Tell me she’s alright,” she says.

The nurse holds her hand, tells her to calm down. Comforts her. Then Sara cries and is brought over, and she’s fine, and everything is fine. We get the sort of close-up maternal scene we’re accustomed to seeing when babies are born on television. Lots of nuzzling and happy tears and lifelong bonds being wound between mother and child.

And then, brilliantly, brutally, honestly, Foster shows us what we seldom see these days, too busy cooing over the microcosm and the close-up.

She shows us the big picture.

On one side of the curtain, Marie is bonding with her little girl. Her daughter is alive and well. Everything is fine. Nurses smile and nod and congratulate her. And on the other side of the curtain, her body is open and bloody. Doctors work quietly to stop the bleeding and make her whole again. Though a routine procedure, Marie has experienced massive trauma, could conceivably die if things go wrong…but she’ll never know. The sheet protects her. She doesn’t feel a thing: the doctors have numbed her to the trauma she’s experiencing. All that’s left is bliss.

(By the by, I’m not suggesting we force new mothers to watch surgeries performed on them without anesthetic. I’m not a monster. I am an observer of metaphors.)

The “parental control” of the Arkangel unit is obviously the darkest, most troubling of the sci-fi elements of the episode, but it raises some interesting questions about what safety might mean, in the long-term.

When Sara’s grandfather has a heart attack, she can’t see what’s happening to him, and can’t hear his pleas for her to get help. She’s shielded from the trauma by the unit. But there’s a parallel in our world, here: if we crumble in the face of fear and trauma, shutting down and closing it out, refusing to look, what are the consequences of that willful blind eye?

Later, as Marie grieves over her father’s grave, Sara can’t see her mother’s face. Grief is uncomfortable. It has been censored out.

Again, there are real considerations for us in the real world. If we turn our backs on grief and powerful, negative human emotions because they make us uncomfortable, what does that mean? The end of empathy? A society that must grieve alone and uncomforted, with no community to feel and grieve with us, no strength to be lent to us because we are, in our sadness, upsetting?

Just something to think about.

Sara’s grandfather speaks for some us, after Marie has the Arkangel implanted in Sara’s head:

“I remember when we used to open up the door and let the kids be.”

It provokes an interesting thought. The difference between opening a door and a locked one can be the difference between a home and a prison. Between a conversation and a censure is the difference between a parent and a warden.

And once you’ve escaped a prison, why would you ever go back?

Overall

There’s a common thread between “USS Callister” and “Arkangel.”

Hope.

When Cristin and company break out of Daly’s digital world, they have a whole new universe to explore. They’re in charge of their own destinies again. They have free will, and the will to live.

Once Sara escapes her mother’s smothering safety, she has a whole world to explore. She’s free, finally, with her whole life ahead of her.

Watching these two episodes, I noticed something for the first time. In the opening credits of Black Mirror, just before the screen goes dark, and we stare into the black possibilities of the onrushing technological age…

The Black Mirror always cracks. The mirror Brooker holds up is not impervious. We can escape.

There’s always hope.

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nicholerestrada · 6 years

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How A Generation Of Sims Players Got Away With Murder

Mortimer Goth settles in to one of the 15 wicker chairs that have suddenly appeared by his lit fireplace. He feels strangely compelled to sit and remain seated, as if guided by an unseen hand, even as the room he’s in grows curiously hotter and hotter. Before he knows it, the chairs around him burst into pixelated flames. He’s on fire! He calls for help, but his wife, Bella, can’t hear him. She’s swimming in circles in their backyard pool, searching fruitlessly for a ladder that doesn’t exist.

For the uninitiated fiddling around their family desktop, the original version of “The Sims” was mostly about nurturing humanlike characters through life’s minutiae. For everyone else, “The Sims” was and is a game about death, about wacky, inconsequential death, about fiery death and watery death, death by starvation and death by electric shock and death by skydiving malfunction ― Mortimer and Bella’s worst recurring nightmare. And as the game evolved over the years, a kind of meta-game has formed around it: a subtle relationship between creative, death-obsessed “Sims” players and the game’s ever-adapting designers, keen on raising the stakes of the simulated lives we so easily ended.

Today, death on “The Sims” can feel harder and harder to come by. But it’s never impossible.

In the scenario above, the deaths of Mortimer Goth and his wife were no accident. They were the result of a human player deciding to set in motion a series of events that would lead to the inevitable demise of digital beings brought to life in a simulation game. That human player could have ushered Mortimer and his wife into a room and removed the door, watching as the Sims starved inside. The player could have prompted the characters to start making a feast with their cooking skill at Level 1, tempting a shoddy oven to burst aflame and engulf them. The player could have even neglected the couple’s guinea pig, only to have Mortimer pick it up and allow the rodent to administer one fatal bite.

But that player chose to cluster highly flammable chairs near the fireplace and hope they caught like tinder, and remove the ladder in the swimming pool once Bella, ignorant of the option of simply lifting herself out, dived in.

Back in the heyday of the game’s first iteration, everyone killed their Sims. I feel confident in stating this even without hard data to back it up: Killing Sims wasn’t exceptional behavior, it was the norm. Just look at the Reddit threads relaying depraved “Sims” activity with comments spooling into the thousands, or this Polygon article, where it is written, “It is a proven fact people love killing off Sims.”

“That was the only enjoyable way to play ‘The Sims’!” Maddy Myrick, 31, told me. She’d responded to my callout on Twitter, asking first-generation “Sims” players to explain the morbid habit of killing a thing you were ostensibly tasked with keeping alive. “Sometimes I would start a new family, convinced that I would let them live. But, inevitably, I quickly became bored with designing their house (which I was never able to finish).”

And so she killed them. Sims have died for less.

One of the most common tactics for killing a Sim, beautiful in its simplicity and effectiveness, is the “murdershed” method, as one “Sims” player described it: the doorless room.

“My favorite thing to do was lure my Sims into a seemingly normal space and then take away its exit,” my colleague Sara Boboltz confessed in a direct message. “So, I’d make a tiny house and take away the door. I’d make a pool and take away the ladder. Make a two-story house, take the stairs. You get it. Sometimes my Sims would be teachers I didn’t like.”

“I made a guy who was a compulsive neatfreak,” Reddit user vsanna wrote in a comment that rose to the top of its thread. “Put him in a really surreal little house with a wedding buffet and a hamster or something, deleted the door. Eventually he went insane from lack of cleanliness and depression over his little rodent friend dying, and starved to death once the banquet rotted. I put the resulting urn in the room. I then repeated an identical scenario several times, always keeping the urns in the room.

“Eventually the tenth iteration of this guy is up all night, every night, terrified of a parade of ghosts of himself.”

Our penchant for serial killing has not gone unnoticed at “Sims” headquarters. According to “The Sims 4” senior producer Grant Rodiek, who’s been with the company since 2005, the latest version of the game registers around 28,000 Sim deaths per day.

“I think [killing Sims is] a way players can express ultimate control over a thing. It’s funny, mischievous, dark, without being grotesque,” Rodiek said. “It’s a kinder, gentler method of using a magnifying glass to burn insects.”

Between life and death in “Sims 4,” there’s still no single path to playing. The vastly open-ended game nudges you toward certain goals — meeting your Sims’ physical needs; securing them a means of making money — but no task or accomplishment is necessarily required.

Rodiek and his colleagues have had a lot of time to analyze the preferences and behaviors of “Sims” players. He’s whittled users down to a handful of types: There are the “aspiring Frank Lloyd Wrights” who love tinkering in the game’s Build mode; the Create-a-Sim artists who painstakingly remodel favorite characters or celebrities in digital form, or the narrative writers who play out classic storylines (think: mysterious new kid, star-crossed lovers, etc.) in Live mode.

“And then you have the sort of people … we call them deviant players,” Rodiek said. “People who like to mess with their Sims, people who like to poke at the system, people who like to have fun and break the game and do weird stuff.” (These categories, I’d add, are not necessarily mutually exclusive.)

In the early years, these players, in an effort to discover all the ways they could ruin their Sims’ lives, might’ve swapped stories with friends about building murder houses and endlessly uppingtheir budgets for DIY torture devices using the “rosebud” money cheat.

As the internet’s capacity to bring people together has evolved since the early 2000s, so have user-created parameters to keep gameplay interesting. Forums hold lists of restrictive challenges, which can involve everything from having one Sim birth 100 babies to re-creating consecutive historical eras with each generation of a family. On YouTube, players show themselves re-enacting “The Hunger Games” or building lengthy mazes meant only to make simulated life harder for their tiny humans.(One Simmer who orchestrated 12 seasons of Sim “Hunger Games” — complete with training days and sporadic gifts of food like apples — was recently hired on by Electronic Arts as an associate producer.)

Over the years, the current base game — there are four total now — is supplemented with expansion packs to provide new ways to play the game — and kill your Sims. Rodiek said it’s the first thing developers plan out with each new expansion, along with new places for your digital hedonists to hook up.

Much-beloved YouTuber “Call Me Kevin” has a series showcasing his comically deadly restaurant in “Sims 4,” where unskilled chefs serve up the sometimes-fatal pufferfish nigiri introduced in the “City Living” expansion pack. It’s the only thing on the menu. Watching him play, you see Sims dining casually together, only to be interrupted when one diner clutches at their throat and falls head-first into their food. He’s amassed quite the graveyard behind the restaurant, complete with a coffin that you can WooHoo in — Sim-speak for sex.

Part of the widespread appeal of killing Sims might be that the actual moments of their demise aren’t particularly disturbing. Generally, dying Sims just drop or crumple to the floor in distress, disappearing altogether in some versions of the game. Coming across a hungry cowplant provides the bizarre and delightful visual of a giant flower consuming a Sim, but there’s no blood or errant limbs left behind. In a fire, Sims might become visibly odorous as their Hygiene levels plummet, but that’s about it — no gore or horror-movie theatrics.

There are some deaths “The Sims” avoids altogether.

“We don’t let toddlers burn to death,” Rodiek said. “That’s just gross. That’s not funny, there’s nothing humorous there. We don’t let dogs burn to death because like, again, that’s gross.”

Eventually, the grim reaper, who can talk to but sadly not have children with Sims, comes to collect your character’s soul, leaving an urn or gravestone in the Sim’s place. The reaper himself has a cellphone or a tablet, ostensibly to process the Sim’s soul, or something. It’s all a little goofy.

The fact that players have long brought Sim death on themselves is all a part of probing the edges of an established world.

Philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen, who has written extensively about the philosophy of games, likened the act of killing Sims to the innocent phenomenon of “speedrunning,” where players try to complete a given game as fast as possible.

“One of my favorites is a speed run of ‘[Super] Mario [Bros.]’ where you try to get zero points … even though the traditional goal of ‘Mario’ is to max out your points. Trying to get to the end as fast as possible with zero points is actually much harder and much weirder,” he said. “You’re playing the game in an unintended way, which, for some people, I think it makes them feel more creative.”

“The system seems to tell you, ‘Look, the point of this game is to take care of the Sims,’ and all the tools that are given to you are given to you to take care of your Sims,” he said. “So if you want to kill your Sims, you have to do kind of creative and unexpected things and kind of remix the game.”

However, Nguyen said it was also possible that, for the players who like “The Sims” for its narrative possibilities and engage with “the fiction of the game,” explorations of death could have deeper personal significance.

“It may vary from player to player, but I think from talking to a lot of players it’s actually about the creativity of using the system for a new purpose,” he said.

Whatever the explanation, the game’s creators have come to understand that we use “The Sims” not just to simulate life, but to play God. And it’s impacted the way the game has shifted, from “Sims 1” to “Sims 4.”

The first two versions of “The Sims” ― which Rodiek described as “disastrously hard” ― made it easier for the Goths to expire outside of a player’s purview. Direct Sim-on-Sim homicide isn’t possible, so accidents were more often fatal: a grilled cheese that burns down the house, a malfunctioning skydiving simulator, or a fatal shock delivered to a character standing in a puddle during an electric repair. In “The Sims 2,” simply being in the front yard at the exact time a satellite falls to Earth could be the end of a Sim’s brief journey.

But nowadays, compared to “Sims 1” and “Sims 2,” it’s a lot harder to deliberately kill off dear Mortimer and Bella. Anyone coming to “The Sims 4,” the game’s latest version, might notice their characters can now easily hop out of a pool, ladder or not. It’s a change that came with “The Sims 3,” effectively eliminating one of the preferred manners of Sims murder.

“I love how funny and surprising it is to say, ‘Hey, we as a team recognize what you’re doing and, ha-ha, we flipped the switch,’” Rodiek said. The decision was born out of developers’ desire to further up Sims’ intelligence and self-sufficiency with each new version. Players, he said, “got pissed at this.”

“Basically, our thought was if Sims are smarter, and if Sims are less likely to just frickin’ die all the time, well, maybe they’re smart enough to pull their asses out of the pool,” he said, noting that you can still kill them from exhaustion if you build walls around the pool. “They’ll still fart at the wrong time and they’ll still just pass out in a pool of vomit if they’re tired enough and the timing is wrong, but that, at least, is a win for them.”

Now, if you leave them unattended, “your Sims will basically default to neutral,” Rodiek said. Players can worry less about making sure everyone has had a bathroom break or a meal. If you don’t direct your Sim to do it, they’ll likely figure it out themselves.

“Our tagline was, ‘We want to move past peeing,’” he said of shifting Sims’ needs beyond basic survival. “However, for them to really succeed, you have to nurture them. And nurturing your Sims comes from more emotional, higher-level fulfillment.”

Now, Sims have aspirations generally based on interests or specific actions: One Sim might want to become a tech genius, while another wants to become the neighborhood enemy. Fulfilling these wishes results in rewards that make the Sim better.

I’m usually a gentle “Sims” player, nurturing my families into fulfilling home lives and careers, watching as they level up in activities like baking and guitar playing, occasionally tossing in a love affair here and there. For the purposes of this article, though, I set out to kill as many Sims in “Sims 4” as I could.

Not wanting to delete doors and watch my Sims starve, I fell back on faithful killing strategies, like the classic fire scenarios. There were newer tactics I could try, too: In “Sims 4,” even Sims’ emotions, taken to the extreme, can be fatal; their hearts can explode from sheer rage or cease beating from hysterics.

In “Seasons,” the most recent expansion pack, Sims who are skilled in flower arranging can whip up a mysterious plant, the scent of which ages or kills its recipient. A video from website Sims VIP illustrating this particular death demonstrates the cruelty: At first, an elder Sim is pleased to be receiving a gift. But upon realizing his bad luck, he becomes angry, shouting out “Narb!” He wipes his brow, swoons to his knees, and even checks his pulse one last time before the grim reaper arrives.

“Seasons” also allows the possibility of death by freezing or overheating, or getting struck by lightning. New kinds of warnings tip you off to these sorts of ends: The game indicates via a Sim’s “moodlet” that your electronic buddy might die if he doesn’t get out of the blizzard, or change out of his snowsuit during a heat wave, or run in from the thunderstorm.

One of the suggested ways to murder your Sims is through overexhaustion, though once a Sim becomes “uncomfortable,” many actions, like jogging, become unavailable to a player. In “Sims 4,” more Sims simply die of old age than tragically before their time: Age accounts for 30.5 percent of deaths in the game, compared to the 11 percent who die of hunger; the 10.7 percent who drown; or the 10.6 percent who die in a fire, according to statistics provided by Rodiek.

Maybe I’m unpracticed, but I couldn’t murder my Sims. I made one Sim flirt with her husband’s dad in front of her husband, enraging the husband until the spouses became enemies, then nemeses. I had them all fight — illustrated by a cloud of dust and occasional flashes of limb — but it only made them a little dazed. I had them all pee themselves, then installed a shower and had them all walk in on each other, but no one reached the deadly “mortified” level of embarrassment. I made the dad swim in the pool in wintertime, but he kept getting out once he started freezing. Without resorting to the walls-around-the-pool method Rodiek mentioned, I couldn’t play God quite like I used to.

Defeated, I had the enraged husband and wife divorce before closing my game. It seemed only fair. When I opened up “Sims 2,” however, I found that one installation of the “shoddy fireplace” did the trick in no time. My Sims freaked out and wailed, too frantic to obey my requests for them to stand directly in the flames — but the blaze got them in the end.

Electronic Arts

A “shoddy fireplace” did the trick to start a fire in “Sims 2.” The cat, seen in the lower right corner, ended up running away. The fifth household member was swimming in circles in the pool.

Stakes, Rodiek acknowledged during our interview, are what make “The Sims” fundamentally interesting. Making death a part of the game from the start provided those stakes.

“It is really great when people have a Sim that they really care about, and they care about how they orchestrated their life, and they see them raise children, and maybe get a divorce, and then their children grow up and then they die. They go, ‘Oh, man, I could just re-create them, but it will never be that Sim.’”

“Our game is about creating weird, quirky, erratic, strange little humanlike characters that we want you to care about deeply,” he added.

In a perpetual quest, developers hope to keep inching “The Sims” toward a better reflection of real life and death, to keep raising the stakes and allowing customization in ways that matter to players.

In 2016, “Sims” released an update that expanded the possibilities of gender expression among characters, no longer restricting certain hair, makeup or clothing items to one gender or another and allowing players to select whether a Sim could impregnate others or get pregnant, regardless of outward appearance. Similarly, Rodiek said, creators are discussing the possibility of incorporating Sims who are deaf or hard of hearing, blind, or use a wheelchair. To help develop these, the team has been talking to players who have similar experiences.

“In actually talking to these players, talking about how it affects their lives, we’ve been thinking, how can we reflect this in a way that works in our game?” he said. “That’s the stuff we’re actually looking into that we really want to figure out, because it’s scary to get it wrong, but I think it’s so important if we can get it right.”

In terms of death, Rodiek said he could envision developing a kind of long-term, terminal disease within the game from which Sims can’t recover (but, seriously, don’t ask him about it on Twitter, because they’re not making this right now).

“I could see us approaching that in sort of a generic way that we’re not saying that it’s this specific cancer. But we’re basically saying that your Sim has something that can’t be cured and they will die before their time as a result of that,” he said. Maybe, he added, it’d be an option players could toggle on or off.

“I think it’s a reality of life … in a way that is like, yes, it’s real, and yes, it’s sad. But maybe for someone who wants it, it’s cathartic or its interesting and it helps you tell a story,” Rodiek said. “Those are some of the things we’re trying to grapple with and talk to our players about how to get right. And it’s terrifying, but it’s really cool if we could do it.”

Illustration by Tara Jacoby for HuffPost.

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Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/killing-sims-death-murder-ea_us_5adf94dbe4b07be4d4c58fd4

Source: https://hashtaghighways.com/2018/10/28/how-a-generation-of-sims-players-got-away-with-murder/

from Garko Media https://garkomedia1.wordpress.com/2018/10/28/how-a-generation-of-sims-players-got-away-with-murder/

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michaeljtraylor · 6 years

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How A Generation Of Sims Players Got Away With Murder

Today, death on “The Sims” can feel harder and harder to come by. But it’s never impossible.

And so she killed them. Sims have died for less.

One of the most common tactics for killing a Sim, beautiful in its simplicity and effectiveness, is the “murdershed” method, as one “Sims” player described it: the doorless room.

“Eventually the tenth iteration of this guy is up all night, every night, terrified of a parade of ghosts of himself.”

There are some deaths “The Sims” avoids altogether.

The fact that players have long brought Sim death on themselves is all a part of probing the edges of an established world.

“It may vary from player to player, but I think from talking to a lot of players it’s actually about the creativity of using the system for a new purpose,” he said.

Electronic Arts

A “shoddy fireplace” did the trick to start a fire in “Sims 2.” The cat, seen in the lower right corner, ended up running away. The fifth household member was swimming in circles in the pool.

Stakes, Rodiek acknowledged during our interview, are what make “The Sims” fundamentally interesting. Making death a part of the game from the start provided those stakes.

“Our game is about creating weird, quirky, erratic, strange little humanlike characters that we want you to care about deeply,” he added.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby for HuffPost.

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sou-ver-2-0 · 4 years

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I ended up killing Kanna in my game, but I would've voted Keiji to save both Kanna and Shin if given the option. I wish Keiji could've been an option because it would've been so interesting. Shin would've seen Sara sacrifice someone strong to protect the weak. I feel like that route would have Shin and Kanna be Sara's biggest allies taking the place of Keiji. I think about what a sacrifice Keiji route would be like often.

If I could kill Keiji to save both Kanna and Shin...

I wrote such a long response to this over the weekend, but I need to be more concise haha. I’ll do my best to cut down to the most important bits!

You see, my fellow Shin stan, your ask appeals to me on multiple levels. On the one hand, you remind me of my idealistic hopes for Shin and Sara. My dream is also to have a Shin-Sara-Kanna team-up. I fantasize about Shin and Sara making friends all the time! I love to imagine that they frequently befriended each other in the AI Simulations. They could have made a brilliant team! So long as Shin is staying true to himself, he would encourage Sara to protect the weak, while Sara could inspire him to be brave. I like to think that they could help each other hold onto their humanity even as the Death Game tries to strip them of it.

But you’re not just appealing to my higher ideals; this ask also brings out my darker impulses. You remind me of how my sister and I slammed the “Vote for Keiji” button when Sara is forced to choose a candidate in the first round of the Second Main Game. Even though Keiji is our “dependable ally,” he scares me more than anyone else in the group. He always has!

I like Keiji, and I want to help him, I really do, but he terrifies me. He tells me himself that I’m better off not trusting him, in one of his most honest and vulnerable moments. So why should I?

It’s not as though I’m especially inclined to sympathize with strong people. I sympathize with weak people! And within our little society in the Death Game, Keiji is absolutely a strong person! He seized a privileged position early on by lying that he’s a police officer, and using that job as a shield. Because he knows that when people are kidnapped, they’re dependent on law enforcers to step up, do the right thing, and save them. And thus he makes himself indispensable. He may be “always right” in his logic, but isn’t it so convenient how he’s “always right” in such a way that saves his own skin?

I could go on and on about all the ways Keiji gets under my skin, but the short version is this: even though Shin is the one who sent the Sacrifice Card to Sara, it hurts me more that Keiji did nothing in response. It hurts that Keiji made a grand gesture of giving Sara the Keymaster Card to win her trust, back when he thought she was strong and useful. But when Sara gets the Sacrifice Card—when she becomes a pariah—Keiji doesn’t even give Sara meaningful words of comfort. The character who brings comfort to Sara in her time of need is Gin. And the character who saves her life is Kanna.

Gin and Kanna are only children. Keiji is supposed to be our Protector. He’s supposed to be Sara’s friend. It hurts that in Sara’s greatest hour of need, Keiji abandoned her. That he instead made an alliance with the second-strongest person and devised a strategy that ensured his own safety above everyone else.

When Society’s Protectors fail to protect the vulnerable, isn’t it time to kick them out?

The thing is, if it were possible to vote for Keiji instead of Shin or Kanna, well… He’d have to be a weaker person, wouldn’t he? The fact that we literally can’t vote for Keiji shows just how strong he truly is. In the final vote, his portrait is there, tantalizing, next to the portraits of three of the weakest characters, and the game mechanic won’t even let you try to vote for him.

It makes me mad at him. That’s why your ask resonates with me so strongly. Because I feel as though my fury is righteous, and if there were only some magical way to kill Keiji instead, then wouldn’t I have the happy Shin-Sara-Kanna dream I want…?

As I was pondering how to finish this piece during my commute, I remembered Mr. Policeman’s words of wisdom.

Mr. Policeman: Fists of justice, eh… I’m fond of it, but that’s not really very nice.

Keiji: Why not…? I was in the right, wasn’t I?

Mr. Policeman: …Exactly. The more right you are, the less reason to stop you from throwing hands, right?

Universal principals are universal.

The truth is, deep down, I don’t want to kill Keiji. Even though he’s strong. Even though he’s manipulative. Even though he’s becoming a corrupt cop within our little Death Game society.

My anger towards him feels right, but killing him is still wrong.

If the foundation for a Shin, Sara, and Kanna friendship is that they somehow magically find a way to murder Keiji, even with his Keymaster Card… Isn’t that the darkest way to begin a friendship? Perhaps it would feel more heroic if Keiji had been using the Sacrifice Card to try to trick everyone, and then we somehow thwarted him, but even so… Isn’t that scenario still so pitiful for Keiji? As strong as he is, Keiji is a victim the same as everyone else.

In the Massacre Ending, when Sara and Nao walk home free, I don’t know if they can enjoy their friendship anymore with so much blood on their hands. Could Shin, Sara, and Kanna enjoy their friendship with Keiji’s blood on their hands?

I don’t know. But...I think it might not be the happiest dream after all. Even though I understand why you said you’d kill Keiji to save them both, because that’s what I was thinking too, and I really, truly want Shin and Kanna to both be alive.

This was a really intriguing question for me, even though you probably didn’t intend for me to take it this seriously, but you just offered me my happiest dream in exchange for my darkest temptation. I want to grab that dream, but I also want to resist that temptation!

Thank you for asking. This was so interesting for me to wrestle with.

(P.S. I love your blog!! Your headcanons are always so sweet!!)

#yttd #your turn to die #kimi ga shine #your turn to die spoilers #mine #asks #meta #i got really self indulgent in this i hope that's okay adlkfjhsdfg

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nightmareonfilmstreet · 6 years

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Review: BLACK MIRROR Season 4 (Part I - Episodes 1 & 2)

New Post has been published on https://nofspodcast.com/review-black-mirror-season-4-part-episodes-1-2/

Review: BLACK MIRROR Season 4 (Part I - Episodes 1 & 2)

Black Mirror Season 4 dropped on December 29th, on Netflix.

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

Watch it. Oh my God, watch it. Now, then; Spoilers ahead.

EPISODE 1: USS CALLISTER

The aspect ratio of the opening sequence matches the aspect ratio of the old Star Trek television show. It’s little things like that keep my coffee hot and get me up in the morning.

What “USS Callister” asks us is (among many other things), are they alive?

When the newest digital clone, Nanette Cole (played by Cristin Milioti) finds out that nobody has genitals in Daly’s digital world, her battle cry is priceless:

Okay. Stealing my pussy is a red. Fucking. Line.

“USS Callister” is like a great Doctor Who episode that just happens to be Rated R.

Just like the immersive, next-gen VR in the episode.

With the advent of technology like CRISPR, perhaps we aren’t so far from Daly’s nightmare after all.

EPISODE 2: ARKANGEL

She swung for the fences.

She knocked it out of the park.

I don’t even like baseball.

And the inevitable price to be paid.

Every line, every interaction in the episode shifts that weight, tilts the precarious position of the scale. Structurally, it’s breathtakingly beautiful. There is no wasted moment.

There are several Fatal Flaws in “Arkangel.” They run (appropriately) in arcs through the episode. Tracing those threads back reveals the subtlety and nuance Foster and Brooker actually manage.

Safety. In excess. In extremis.

“Tell me she’s alright,” she says.

And then, brilliantly, brutally, honestly, Foster shows us what we seldom see these days, too busy cooing over the microcosm and the close-up.

She shows us the big picture.

(By the by, I’m not suggesting we force new mothers to watch surgeries performed on them without anesthetic. I’m not a monster. I am an observer of metaphors.)

Later, as Marie grieves over her father’s grave, Sara can’t see her mother’s face. Grief is uncomfortable. It has been censored out.

Just something to think about.

Sara’s grandfather speaks for some us, after Marie has the Arkangel implanted in Sara’s head:

“I remember when we used to open up the door and let the kids be.”

And once you’ve escaped a prison, why would you ever go back?

Overall

There’s a common thread between “USS Callister” and “Arkangel.”

Hope.

When Cristin and company break out of Daly’s digital world, they have a whole new universe to explore. They’re in charge of their own destinies again. They have free will, and the will to live.

Once Sara escapes her mother’s smothering safety, she has a whole world to explore. She’s free, finally, with her whole life ahead of her.

The Black Mirror always cracks. The mirror Brooker holds up is not impervious. We can escape.

There’s always hope.

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