thisavrou_log | You can never say that I didn't try

Entry tags:

You can never say that I didn't try

Who: Rinzler and OPEN
When: April 14th through the 24th
Where: the Hold
What: Rinzler killed some people and copes poorly. Set after this log.
Warnings: references to character death and mindscrew, glowy injuries, unfortunate assumptions. (See also: Rinzler.)

The first place Rinzler woke up in this system was a cell. He'd been locked in after a fight with his duplicate—with Tron. Not that the enforcer had been capable then of even hearing the older version's name. Rinzler had attacked because he had to, because the overrides built in his mind detected conflict and demanded he delete the source. Since then, he's shattered that if/then chain. Chipped away at the filters on his memories, even managed, once or twice, to speak.

But he's back where he started, and he knows better than to expect things to end the same way.

For the most part, visitors will find Rinzler seated on the low bench back against the wall. Circuits burn dimly in the shadows, almost outshone by the dull glint of fractured code that covers a full half of the enforcer's core. He's turned slightly to conceal the injured side, but the spiderwebbing cracks through code and armor are obvious to see, and he doesn't have the power to refresh his shell and cover up the damage.

The low rattle of corrupted code echoes through the cell and down the corridor, though it does nothing to compete with the invectives from the user locked in one door down. Rinzler approaches shutdown just once, curled up against the wall, and if the flickering lights and twitch of limbs is any sign, it's anything but restful. The program won't notice anyone approaching then, but he probably wouldn't mind being woken.

Once or twice, Rinzler rises, pacing, frustration and the need to move boiling up through the despair. There's nowhere to go, though, nothing to do, and even that much risks opening his damage further. Maybe he should. Fracture, break, rip himself apart and leave them voxels on the floor to claim and punish. Rinzler wonders if he ever tried before. If he does, he can't remember. He wonders what they'll make him into. Alan-one had told him what would happen, told him he'd correct the fault if Rinzler fought again. Now two users are dead, and if there's any hope at all, it's that they'll decide he's too worthless to salvage.

[[ooc: ~~the duration during which Rinzler can be visited depends largely on the results of his trial, so there may be some time-wobbling. In particular, if he ends up with solitary confinement...~~ no longer applicable; Rinzler will be visitable for both the trial period and his sentence. ETA 2: As of the 20th, temperature conditions will be improved thanks to Vision + co.

Prose and spam both welcome!]]

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Whether Rinzler noticed her or not, it's after Tali's tap that the black helmet twitches her way. Her own mask takes a moment to match up. The voice is familiar, though, despite the communicator's distortions. He's met this user. She'd been afraid of him before. If the faltering language and faint twitches are much sign, that hasn't changed. He waits through the rambling tangent. The amusement at his kills. He even manages not to bristle when she brings up Tron in contrast.

That question, though? Is a surprise. Rinzler's mask tips a little, startled to open incredulity. Does he... really? He's heard of the concept, yes, but never with any reason to expect it might apply. Which is itself an answer, probably.

The enforcer shakes his head.

"That's probably a really stupid question to you, right?" It's only about then that she remembers Rinzler hasn't seen her masked. She's thinking vaguely back to their first meeting, when she had wished her mask was there, as she pulls off the visor with a hiss of escaping air. She has to squint at him a moment in the brighter light, in the warmer, more humid air.

"I was terrified of you the first time I realised what you were. I'm still scared. Right now, with a barrier up. I don't trust you. I don't know if I ever will."

It's somehow very easy to say this to someone who presents as a silent, masked entity. Maybe that's how aliens back home so readily hate her people. That's a sobering thought.

"But why should I be scared of you just because you've killed people? I've killed people. I've killed...a lot." She doesn't know what she was going to say, but 'a lot' works. Those are vaguer words than 'a whole planet of them and more'.

"We probably call it different things. But I think you have a soul. If you were just a mindless robot going around killing people, it'd be easy to just reprogram it out of you."

Did she mean to be that blunt? Did she think Rinzler would much care if she sugarcoated it? No.

Rinzler watches without comment as she puts aside her mask. The honesty is more surprising, even if logic seems to fail halfway through. Rinzler might be hated for what he's done, but fear is for potentialities. What he's capable of. What he might do.

Both of which are, of course, entirely subject to his coding. Fingers curl into fists, the scraping grind of code rising a little. A "soul" is something that can't be reprogrammed, then? Or is that just what it takes to qualify as having one's own mind? Neither conclusion is surprising, but bitterness still seethes up to the surface, thick and vicious and entirely enough to override his own caution.

Rinzler's helmet jerks to the side, a sharp and silent interrogative. Really, user? What makes her think it's hard?

A flicker of anxiety passes over her face without her even realising it as Rinzler's head jerks sharply, as she notices the clenched fists and the rising pitch of those noises he makes, and though she doesn't know specifically what he's asking, she can guess. And she always knew he wasn't going to happy with a damn thing she said in here, because there are times when she's not happy with it.

Ideas she's lived with her whole life aren't standing up so well when she has to apply them to real life.

"You have your own mind. You think for yourself. You change and adapt, and you don't need any organic help to do it. You don't need organics for anything. Maybe all we've done since you've got here is tolerate you, or threaten you and..." She gestures vaguely. "Attack you.

"Part of me can't even blame you for what you did. You told me the first time we met, didn't you? You deal with threats."

...Pause, and she bursts out, frustrated, "I don't know why I'm in here, I don't know why I'm saying any of this!"

They don't need users. Clu had certainly thought so. Clu had also taken Rinzler's mind and made it his, locked down every line of independent thought and adaptation. The user isn't wrong about programs in general, but Rinzler's not sure in the least her claims apply to him.

At least most of them. There's a wary nod of confirmation partway through: he deletes threats. That's what he's for. It's all the purpose he has left right now.

Her outburst, he only watches. Rinzler doesn't know what she expected from him either.

She stops fairly quickly, the anger flash-frying itself into nothingness and finding itself replaced by a deep, skin-crawling frustration, a feeling that Tali's round peg of a world view isn't fitting into a hole that's suddenly square.

A deep breath. Another one. For a moment, all she does is pace. This trial is ridiculous and this case is ridiculous and the mere fact of Rinzler sitting in the hold again - damaged - while no one does anything new to try to fix the problem? That's the most ridiculous thing of the lot.

"Do you have to kill them?" He's a thinking being. He has a soul, like all those damned geth did so long ago, and now, wherever they may be. "If someone threatens your safety...do your directives specifically mean the person should be got rid of, or could you stop them being a threat and that would be enough?"

Maybe her total lack of understanding is sending her way off base. But if she's so scared of an AI thinking its way around its programming and destroying its creators, why the hell can't it work the other way around - thinking around its programming and not destroying anything?

The helmet doesn't move, but his stare does, tracking the user's motions with a flicker of jealousy. When she speaks, he gives a slightly lopsided shrug. It depends. On the kind of threat, on the situation. On what was at stake. Very little of the directives Rinzler knows reinforce any need for self-protection.

Of course, they generally didn't have to. The enforcer's not glitched enough to want derezz, or weak enough to sit there and take whatever treatment the users down the hall provide. And how else is he supposed to stop a threat? If this user thinks he can talk his way out of his problems, clearly she doesn't know him in the least. Rinzler reaches, finally, for his MID, glowing letters appearing in the air above him as he types.

Won't stop.

Edited 2016-04-22 14:14 (UTC)

She sees the message, and... Keelah, she feels her gut wrench. Her face twists with the sudden emotion - but it's not fear of Rinzler. At least, it's no more than it might have otherwise been. It's the sudden empathy of knowing that in every fight she's ever been in too, it's kill or be killed. Of knowing what being between a rock and a hard place is like, and appreciating that if anybody is on one right now, it's the synthetic in front of her.

Another breath. She's still fidgeting, even as she stills her pacing. Rocking on her feet, hands twining about one another, tangling a stray stand of hair in her fingers - none of it calms her jitters.

"Organics tend to stop pretty quickly if you have a stungun," she says finally, and there's a dry hint to her tone. "We don't like electricity much. What if you were armed with a stungun?"

The last sentence rattles out a bit. Unsure, barely believing she's about to try advocating giving Rinzler another weapon.

The fidgeting is hardly a surprise. The words, on the other hand? Well, Tali's finally gotten past that apathy. There's an audible catch of noise, and if the heat-glitched lag doesn't clear so easily, the slight twitch of the mask suggests the program's finally staring her in the face.

She's... serious.

The helmet twitches a little, back and forth, but it's not clear if the response is denial or disbelief. Both, perhaps. Of all the new technologies available in this system, Rinzler had encountered that weapon his first night: repeatedly, and at close range. It's undeniably effective, enough to make it baffling that any user, much less this one, would want to arm him with the tool. There's even a flicker of far too vivid curiosity—could the user down the hall could outrun this kind of charge?

Still, for the most part, Rinzler's problem isn't weaponry. He is a weapon, and perfectly capable of bringing in his prey alive.

Delay.

Not stop. Even if it worked, they'd just retry.

Deletion: permanent solution.

That...gets his attention? She thinks. She's good at picking up body language - it's hard not to get good at it when your whole race lives in masks all the time - but his is alien and it's synthetic and it's subtle at the best of times. It's all twitches and quirks of the head, and sometimes as tiny as whether he acknowledges anything she says here at all.

"People come back here," she says simply in reply. "They might not. But usually they do, and when they do they'll come back angrier with you than they were before. And then the whole ship gets angrier because even if all you were doing was defending yourself, you're the threat because you won."

Something about those words twinge inside her, and she's suddenly thinking of the geth. She stomps down on that thought as soon as she has it, grimacing in distaste.

"You're just making a feedback loop. It's going to get worse the more people you hurt."

It's Rinzler's turn to fidget. Seethe, really, frame drawing inwards in tiny shifts that read more braced and frustrated than any metric of regret. She isn't wrong. Users have priority, and if he fights them, he's a threat. If he doesn't, he's as useless as the pet the glitch down the hall had decided to term him—or a pile of voxels, if it had its way. There's no answer, no way out, and Rinzler doesn't belong.

He doesn't have a place here.

He doesn't have a place, and it won't matter because he's already crossed the line. He won't have a choice about any of it soon.

Rinzler shakes his head. It's not disagreement. Just sick, empty return. Null value. No solution exists.

He seems to curl in on himself in increments, and she's silent for a moment, until he shakes his head, and she's good enough with body language - and he's human-like enough - that she gets it. Part of it. She's probably never going to get all of it.

"That's why I think you should try a non-lethal approach," she says finally, and her tone is almost...businesslike, the tone of somebody who's seeing a problem and trying to figure out a solution on the fly. "If you're not killing anyone who attacks you, other people on board stop thinking you're the bad guy - they won't be threats because they don't feel threatened. And if anyone does threaten you, they start to look like the threat to everybody else. Hopefully that means they'll stop, right?

"You need to..." She was fidgeting, hands coiling around one another, but now she gestures for the right words. "Be more creative about threats now." Pause. "I don't know if I'm making sense."

Be more creative. If Rinzler had the energy to care, he might actually be offended. As it is, the tension only resettles, hunched shoulders twitching inwards in a lagged shrug.

Won't matter.

It wouldn't. Even if he did have time.

"You have to try something," she said into the rattling silence. "We're all stuck on this ship together and we're going to be here a while. Maybe it doesn't matter, maybe...it's just going to be like this the whole rest of the time we're here. But--we can try."

She'd been about to say 'you can try'. But at this point, it seemed she was determined to muscle in.

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You can never say that I didn't try

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i have no idea what I'm doing

amazing things, that's what

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