Alternity: The Elements of Eternity - Recovery Interval: First

[SalmonMax]

With Kittani having her own problems, Shiro wound up doing the repairs to Isis, under her advisement. The work was a lot more...fiddly than repairing a full scale war machine. Isis' parts were much smaller and much more delicate. The worst part though was that she still looked human where the plasma hadn't scorched her. It was hard to concentrate on replacing a microservo when a very lifelike, very attractive woman's body was separated from him only by a thin medical gown. It only got worse when he had to dress the injuries to her 'skin,' and she shucked the gown as well to make sure he could get all of the 'dead' spots cut away and extracted. Of course, that had been a lot less sexy than he'd thought it would be, since the damage to her exo-skin had been fairly extensive. No burn victim, however shapely, was really sexy. And it was eerie and grotesque to slice and cut the cauterized edges of the wounds with a scalpel, and watch the newly maimed 'flesh' bleed and tear like real skin. Only the presence of the endoskeleton made it tolerable. That and the way Isis would just watch him, with her one good eye, evincing no pain, no anger, no gratitude. Just watching him.

Finally the job was done. Damage to the endoskeleton repaired, gelpacks covering the dressed wounds, Isis back in her gown and God sitting on His throne. It was with some relief that Shiro finally left to get a stiff drink.

Isis was silent for a long time, staring at the ceiling. Then, unexpectedly, she spoke.

"Kittani, what is your opinion of the man and woman we rescued? Kittani, are you awake?"

[Gavin Qel-Droma]

"Hmm?" the lovely woman beside her asked. Her bones were knit for the most part but Adrian had asked she remain bedridden until the knit had time to set to prevent accidental tearing or undoing the knit. "Oh, um, I dunno."

She carefully sat up and crossed her legs 'indian style' pulling the sheet up around her waist to prevent any surprise visitors from inspecting her backside. "Milena seems really...um, wow, you know? She so beatiful and confident. I envy her a bit, like I do you. I wish was beautiful and confident and like a machine, not having to answer to anyone or having emotions or regrets. To just be able to be."

"Sebastian's cute." She blushed and Isis's sensors detected a raise in her heart rate and slight increase in body temperature. "Okay, I take that back, he's freaking gorgeous, like 'hi, I want a tongue bathe you' gorgeous. Which means he's either one, gay, or two, married or with a beautiful girlfriend. I overheard him and Adrian talking, we're dropping him off at the Lighthouse, he's some business to take care of or something. I dunno what we're doing with Goldie Girl."

[SalmonMax]

Isis absorbed Kittani's words and sifted through them for the important parts. Learning to do that hadn't been easy, and her mistakes along the way had led to a great many spurious shipboard rules from Erebus.

"Is it your opinion that Mileena made an error in moving towards the tank?" Isis asked, completing the reason she'd brought up the first question.

She had discovered that human beings had a tendency to expect subjects to be broached in two phases...an introduction that turned the conversation onto the relevant topic, followed by the actual question of interest. Simply asking the real question immediately often elicited confused or uncertain responses.

But there was another, serendipitous benefit to addressing questions in two phases that Isis had discovered. Often times the responses to the "warmup" were interesting in unexpected ways.

"Also...you envy me?"

[Gavin Qel-Droma]

"Hmm, see, that I can't say." She fiddled about with her sheet in her lap nervously. Although she seemed calm enough Kitty really didn't know what to do with idle hands. "We couldn't communicate with her. She did what she felt she had to do to survive the situation since we were acting independently. Since she acted to preserve her own life, and she succeeded by the very merit that she's still breathing, then I suppose no error was made. Successes of her action based her initial intention proves that." She smiled a bit. "God, I'm starting to talk robot..."

She brushed her short hair back past her ear, tucking a few blue strands away that kept falling in her eyes. Her voice fell into a slight whisper, like her mind trailed elsewhere. "Yeah, I do in a way. Envy you, I mean." She paused for a moment searching for the right words. "You don't feel anything. I was so scared down there, it hurt, I thought I wouldn't make it, as a human I know that if something happens to me, that's it, it's done, and it scares the hell out of me.

"That's why I envy you, and other machines. If something happens I can just bring em' back." She perked up a bit and shrugged. "Even rebuild them in a way that takes into consideration the weak points that brought them down in the first place, be it rust, weapons, programming errors. You name it."

Kittani smiled, but it was empty and those same blue strands found their way back behind her again after having fallen down again as she spoke. "It was dumb of me not to listen to you down there, but I had to do something. Granted 'getting shot' wasn't what I had in mind, but I guess I've got a lot to learn."

[SalmonMax]

Isis considered that idea and compared it to her own thoughts on the subject. Like most of her thoughts on things like this, they were best expressed as questions.

"Does the fact that I can be repaired after taking fatal damage, even transferred into another body if need be, make my 'death' meaningless?" she asked.

"I think, for example, if you were to die, that event would be of great importance. There would be a funeral proceeding, and a remembering of your life in the most positive possible terms. Your absence would be anticipated with sadness and remorse. It would impact all of us in ways I cannot predict."

"If I were to 'die' though, my memory core would be transferred to another chassis while repairs or reconstruction took place. I would not be lost, as you might be, but neither would the event of my death be considered important... And even if my primary processor were destroyed, and I therefore experienced as close to death as I can, I could still be restored from a backup, or reprogrammed from a record of my code."

"So I am curious. Does the fact that there would be so few consequences to my demise make my life less valuable?"

[Gavin Qel-Droma]

"Isis," She tried to sound as compassionate as possible, but wasn't sure it come out the way she intended. The fact that you can 'keep coming back' makes you effectively immortal. Your death isn't meaningless because you can't die."

Grabbing her pillow she tucked it in front of her and buried her chin into it. "Besides, you're not even alive. Emotions and sensations are unique to each person. Even through programs that would allow you to experience such things, still they are just codes programed by someone else based on their interpretation of what that emotion or feeling may be. It would never really be yours."

"Now having said that I'd like to point out that I like having you around." She grinned at the machine in front of her. "We're friends and I happen to think that your existence is no less valuable than anyone else aboard this ship. So don't go getting all 'robot with a soul' on me, explaining metaphysics to a combat model makes the brain hurt..."

"...but yeah, dying is a pretty hard thing to accept, I guess."

[SalmonMax]

"And yet," Isis went on, "You yourself pointed out that my existence isn't really my own. Another person is responsible for everything about me. I have observed that human beings are usually very defensive about their identity, and sanctity of their free will. The notion of free will is something I have only a limited ability to participate in."

She lets her head turn sideways to regard Kittani with blank curiosity.

"In your opinion, is the ease with which my existence can be preserved adequate to balance the limitations of my existence, as compared to a human being? Do you envy all of me, or just my 'immortality?'"

[Gavin Qel-Droma]

"No," Kittani shook her head. Isis didn't understand her, but then again she didn't expect her to, she functioned on robot logic, not human thought. "You're not really getting it, Isis. I don't envy all of you, or even your 'immortality'. I envy that you don't have to worry about guilt, or remorse, or fear. As humans, we carry those things with us forever. You're lucky, at least in my opinion, because you won't ever have to deal with things like that."

She breathed in, sucking her teeth as she moved a bit the wrong way and a pain shot through her side along her mending ribs. "No pain is a plus too." She tried to smile and seem even-spirited.

[SalmonMax]

Isis considered that. The 'no pain' thing she understood. Pain seemed strange to her, considering all the remarkable qualities that biological bodies had. They were masterpieces of 'design,' forged by eons of ruthless, savage competition into highly efficient, highly specialized configurations...but pain seemed counterproductive. Certainly the organism needed feedback to know when and where it was damaged and how badly...but pain so often incapacitated at the moment when action was needed most. And it was so easily subverted and used as a weapon.

She concluded Kittani did not need to be reminded of that though. Instead she focused on the other item of interest.

"Guilt and remorse serve useful social functions though, do they not?" Isis asked. "They help regulate individual deviations, and assist you in functioning in teams. If you never felt guilt or remorse wouldn't it mean others would have difficulty in trusting or relating to you?"

[Gavin Qel-Droma]

"I kinda mean more the whole 'regret' thing than anything else Isis." She trained her vision off to the holodisplays of medical equipment. Despite talking to a machine she could bear to look Isis in the eyes as she spoke. "You've never let people down, and even if you did, you wouldn't care. You can't care. I wish I could do that, y'know? Look back on things I've screwed up and just 'not care'. It beats the alternative."

She pinched Isis's arm gently wiggling the synthetic flesh a bit. "You got it good, that's for sure. I so wish Capt. Erebus would let me work on you... I could upgrade the snot outta you."

[SalmonMax]

Isis looked down at the pinched spot on her arm, which was turning realistically a little pink as synthetic microcapillaries broke open and let artificial blood suffase that area. She was aware of the contact; the texture and temperature of Kittani's fingers, and the precise amount of force they applied to the specific area of her skin...but it wasn't 'pain,' and she wondered again what the experiential difference between the two was.

"Your envy may be misplaced then," the android mused. "When my performance is judged subpar, by myself or by another, I review the incident in detail to determine alternative actions I could have taken that would have been better. For example, I have been doing that with the encounter with the armored combat vehicle. The results of that encounter were satisfactory at the end, but my performance did not contribute acceptably towards that. I therefore conclude that I did not 'pull my weight,' and have been analyzing my record of the events to find areas to improve in."

She paused, giving Kittani's mind a chance to absorb that, then got back to the point. "In that sense, I 'care' very much when I let people down, or 'screw up.'"

[Gavin Qel-Droma]

"I guess it the fact that you were build, not born Isis." The woman's reflective eyes looked into Isis's rather blank emotionless ones. "The Thuldans wiped everyone I cared about. Friends, family, everything... and I wasn't there to stop it."

Memories of her colony being burned and scorched flooded her thoughts. The images of all the people she grew up with, whether she knew them or not, being little more the scorched husks scattered about their homes and land. "If I were a robot, like you, it wouldn't hurt so much to remember everything I lost. I wasn't supposed to be a mercenary, I was supposed to be an engineer. I was dating a guy, we were going out to places, my dads birthday party was coming up soon... and then this." She waved her hands about the room to emphasize her environs.

"You might care when you screw up Isis," Her expression was pure sadness. "But how often do you cry yourself to sleep when you zigged instead of zagged?"

[SalmonMax]

"I neither cry, nor sleep," Isis admits without rancor. "And I don't experience emotions in the same way you do, which includes emotional pain."

The android considered for a moment, then said, "An analogy would be an individual born with a nervous system dysfunction, causing them to lack a sense of touch. They would be impervious to torture or unpleasant physical sensation, but would also be unable to experience pleasant ones, and would be oblivious to potentially dangerous situations that pain might warn them of. The analogy is not wholly apt...it assumes a malfunction, wheras I am functioning as designed. I am not missing a sense I was meant to have...I am simply different than human. Nevertheless, the capacity to experience emotion must have positive value, or it would be subject to the pressures of natural selection."

There was another pause, as Isis regarded Kittani. Abruptly she realized that she'd missed the point. She'd mistaken an attempt by Kittani to 'open up' about her past and establish a bond of trust for a request for information and analysis.

Somewhat awkwardly, as she was now emulating behavior she didn't fully understand, Isis said, "I am sorry that you have suffered so much, and that your sleep is disturbed as a result. I would greatly regret it if the crew of the Rue were taken or killed...you are all the closest analogue of a 'family' to me."