tampered | Log://closed.ongoing

Log://closed.ongoing

When; Night, Monday, July 20
Rating; PG-13
Characters; SHODAN (

makes_you_tick )
Summary; After Tony and Sylar try their best to undo the Deities' punishment, SHODAN is at the mercy of corrupt code and her human brain.
Log;

They called her SHODAN, but she barely remembered why. Her memory all but destroyed, even Tony Stark and Gabriel Sylar -- a world-class genius and a superhuman -- couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. In the end, Sylar led her back up to her apartment a quieter mess than she was before, but every so often she still muttered a few random words under her breath when left to her own devices. Usually they were snips of something she said from Citadel Station or the starship Von Braun, but once or twice another voice came from her lips: a human tone, something little and scared.

She stumbled to the sofa in the center of the lush apartment, nearly falling over the electronics stacked in neat piles across the floor, and sat there with her eyes wide and empty and her hands shaking in her lap. Human reaction all of it, but in the end, the only thing going through her mind was...nothing. Like a disk checking the boot sector and finding a mangled heap of bits. No knowledge to start the program, no memory to fuel it, no system to .run it. Her lips moved in a faint, steady cadence now that she wasn't thinking of anything else.

"43893..."

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There wasn't anything to be done. Out of all sorts of frustrations, this was the worst. If he was smarter, if he knew more about computer programming, maybe he'd be able to fix her. Of course, he'd come across this frustration before. It was always the deities, always them changing things at their whim. He could barely stand it.

He sighed as he helped her over to the sofa. He listened to her talk and watched her carefully. "What is 43893? Do you know?"

The eyes snapped up at the number. "43893..." They tracked right and left, as if reading a book, and the mechanically retraced a phrase that she had once said before, to the soldier on the Von Braun. "SHODAN Processing Unit 43893 was performing a grand experiment..."

Then, her expression dropped, shifted, become something frightened. She stared around the apartment as if she had never seen it before.

"...Tommy?" She turned to look at Sylar, scan him up and down. "I...what happened to you?"

This again. He wondered if they'd ever be able to bring her back. "I'm not Tommy. I'm Gabriel Sylar. We're in the City, do you remember any of that?" He doesn't hold out much hope for that.

"On Earth?" What was left of the shattered mind bubbled to the surface, the strongest and most recent memories ground up and sprinkled with oblivion. "They'll want to talk to us. The robots are malfunctioning. We must have turned the ship around."

Well, this was interesting. As much as he worried about 'Rebecca' surfacing before, he was rather intrigued by who she had been. "We're not on Earth. It's a different dimension- and before you ask, yes, I know how crazy that sounds."

He sits down on the couch next to her and sighs a little. "You were pulled here out of your time, and sometimes this place messes with our heads. I'm sorry for that, but I'm going to try to help you as much as I can."

She flung herself to her knees on the floor and paused, her eyes wide and confused. For just a moment, they flickered back to life, and she shuddered once as if in loathing of the position into which she fell. Her breaths quickened, she started to scramble up, and then she was back there with her arms about herself and her head bowed as if before some mythical deity.

"Not him...one of...of hers. Forgive me...sir...honored machine...? Don't hurt me. I know your --your--"

Her voice cut out, hands rising to claw at her throat in vain. Writhing through the remnants of her own mind, SHODAN screamed in defiance, but no one could hear.

...huh. Sylar opened his right hand, and telekinesis pulled her hands from her throat. He was starting to wonder whether he'd need to find something to restrain her while he wasn't around, because that seemed to be his current job.

"You don't know anything right now. I have to hope that this is a temporary problem, because I don't know what I'm going to do if you stay this way." He gave out a deep sigh, stretching his legs out and sliding down the couch a little. "I wonder how this happened to you. All I can think is that the deities invaded your code again."

The green eyes peered up at him again, and she scrambled back up onto the couch. "There were terabytes of data all over the net...I tried to figure it out. Jacked in. Saw it over my eyes..." Instinctively, she grabbed the nearest soft object -- it turned out to be his arm -- and hugged it to herself. "Stories in the net, about it, vid show on the Von Braun too."

He didn't mind her grabbing onto him- although if he'd known she was all right with physical contact for the moment, he'd have put his arm around her. As it was, he leaned in, making it more comfortable for the both of them.

"The Von Braun? What did the vid show you?" he asked quietly, wondering if he could manage a conversation with her.

She leaned over in response, her hands moving from his forearm to his upper arm like a kid clutching a blanket. Her knees drew up; human instincts liked the fetal position.

"Von Braun. I should still be there. Want to see Tommy. Marry him." A weird smile traced across her face, wobbly, until it dropped again. "Nemo. Scary movie. True story. Kid gets brain-hacked at the end, sees this face -- all gray and white. Big...big green eyes." Hers widened, stared into the distance, tracked about, as if she could see it again. "I saw it. I saw it too. It smiles at you."

Marry him? Tommy was the hacker, wasn't he? Oh, SHODAN could be awfully cruel, but Sylar understood that, too. When she described the face, he nodded, and the smile on his face lacked any sort of fear or wobble.

"I saw- I think I saw something like that, once. Did it do anything after it smiled?" He knew he shouldn't ask, but last moments were always so intriguing.

Rebecca curled tighter around the arm. "I--I--saw--" Squeezing her eyes shut, she buried her head in the ball of limbs that was her position now, shoulders shaking. The motion transferred to all of her body now, and she trembled as if in the freezing cold, teeth bared, tears pooling at her lids. "Citadel Station. They died. They all died. Von Braun. She'll kill him. She's a god. I'm a bug. Tear your brain apart and it's like running engine cables into your head and turning them on full blast," her voice escalates to a wail as the personality reaches its frail limits, "it hurt so much, changed me, did you know my hair used to be brown, and--and--and my eyes were--were brown, and my cheeks weren't poky, and it's like drowning when there's someone there who won't save you because they're holding your head underwater, fade out, can't breathe, everything stops--"

She screamed into her arms, teeth bared until pink showed around them, nails dragging down her arms as she arched back against the cushions.

Sylar listened and when she started arching her back, he twitched a finger and pulled her arms out to their sides. "It's terrible, I know. But calm down, that won't do you any good. Okay? I'm going to help you." He kept saying that, but he had no way to help, just an unending urge to fix things. And even if he did help, it wouldn't exactly help Rebecca. He was planning to drown her again. But it was the way things had to be. He didn't want to lose SHODAN. It was a matter of survival.

He watched her to see her next move, hoping he didn't have to keep holding her down. "Tell me about the other stories you found in the net?" he tried, hoping to keep up a dialogue with her, whoever she was.

"You don't look like Tommy. But you're nice."

She looked out at her arms, then over to him. Stories. Stories? What stories? They were all true.

"All true." The last words came out in sound. "Diego did it. No one believes it. He told Nemo. Nemo set it free. Then Nemo killed it. They say Nemo came back to the starship, to kill it again."

It felt as if her limbs were being supported by a cushion of air, in a way, something light but strong. As it slowly released, her arms laid against her sides, and her eyes stared through the far wall. Slowly, she turned her head to settle them on Sylar. For a moment, their light returned, the smile flickered to life, and a familiar voice spoke:

"To fail agai--"

And it was gone.

He listened to her, taking it in. It wasn't difficult to put the pieces together when they were giving to him in sequence. It was interesting, but he was glad to see her there, if only for a moment.

"Sounds like it never works," he said, his tone neutral. "They weren't thorough enough, maybe? But you're all right here. You don't have to worry. There's no station and no starship in the City." He wondered how he must sound to someone like her, if Rebecca did indeed stick around.

Edited 2010-07-23 04:04 (UTC)

"The drive. We came out in the wrong place. I did. Even if you're right--"

Without warning, her hands shot out and grabbed his shirt, clamped down, pulled him as hard as she could until their noses nearly touched.

"Where is she?"

He was surprised by the sudden movement, but he didn't flinch or pull away. He just stared at her for a long while, studying her face.

"Who?"

"The one who talks to me. The face I saw. The one that was with me. Where?"

He took a moment to answer that. "As far as I know, she's not here any longer. Have you seen her around?"

She gave him a bewildered look. "Seen her? Can't see her--here," she pointed to her head, "not sure if I'm even here...if she's gone? Go home now?"

"You're here, all right," he said, giving her a light, hopefully comforting touch on her shoulder. "As for going home, I'm afraid I don't have control of that. We're all stuck here, trapped by the deities. Although it really isn't so bad, other than that."

"Aliens took over the ship. They're here?"

"Aliens." He thought about that for a moment, not sure if she meant the deities or someone she'd seen before. "It depends on who exactly you mean. I've seen aliens, demons, and vampires here. Everyone is from a different universe, so technically we're all aliens."

"They turn people into more of them. Dead people. They get back up, and they're covered in worms..." She stared down at the floor, arms wrapping about herself again.

Sylar made a face, frowning at the words. That whole dimension sounded very unpleasant. He ventured putting an arm around her, ready to pull back if it made her uncomfortable. It would help to be close if she started struggling with herself again.

"Nope. We would've noticed by now if something like that started happening. It would've been all over the Network." Like all those weird people digging. Hmmm.

"So...so we're okay." She furrowed her brows and leaned against him. "But...how much time? It feels like I just got here. Like no time went by. But...it can't have been that short. And you sound like you know me. Maybe we were friends, and I can't remember you."

[ooc: this is so cute]

"Exactly," Sylar replied, a small smile on his face. If he played this right, told her the right truths, she'd believe it. And- well, to be fair, he'd never have to technically lie.

"Sometimes this place does weird things to us, and one of those weird things is to mess with our memories. I'm not...entirely sure what happened to yours, but usually it's not permanent. You've been here about six weeks, actually."

A cat crawled out from under the sofa, and Rebecca leaped away before she saw what it was. "Oh. Six weeks...what have I done here for six weeks? How did I get this apartment? What is all this? It isn't communications parts. Most of it looks old." She knelt to pet the cat -- who hissed and snapped at her before dodging away and fleeing back to the safety of its hiding place. Its teeth left little bleeding marks in her hand, but also a faint black burn around the entrance holes.

"It...shocked me." She stared down at her hand as if she had never seen it before, turned it over, looked at the cybernetics. Angling herself so that she could stare at her reflection in a window, she turned to look at the side of her neck, lifted her hair, took shorter breaths.

She rushed about the room, fumbling through the sea of parts, and came upon a table in the far back of the living room. Its surface was smooth and polished, but when she placed her hands on it, a hologram screen rose up from the back.

Manual Access Detected

A series of arms and actuators emerged from their hiding places under carpet, behind bookshelves, in drawers, and extended out into the open like obedient servants waiting for a command. One of them scanned up and down, right and left, and another message appeared:

Gabriel Sylar, Level 10
SHODAN, Level 0

She turned around, furrowed her brows, and stared at the hologram.

Sylar shrugged a bit when she talked about the time difference. "A man named Tony was nice enough to give it to you. Most of the City is way behind your time technologically. I think the most common time period people come here from is about 2010. I'm from 2008, myself."

He walked over to her when the cat bites her, frowning thoughtfully at the burned bite. He may have helped work on that, but he can feign innocence. The Zane persona wasn't that far in the back of his mind. "I'm actually not sure what a lot of this is. You were working on somethi-"

He does a good job of looking entirely confused at the actuators and the hologram. "What does that mean? Level Ten of what?"

"And why isn't it under my name?" She put her hand through the hologram. "2008...I can't remember what year I'm from. I can't remember what I was working on. But that name -- I remember that name. You don't really say that name. But maybe I can..."

She tapped at the table, trying to find its buttons, but instead found nothing. The screen asked a question:

Manual Access Attempt
Access Name?

Must be voice activated. She raised her tone and spoke clearly to the machine. "...SHODAN."

Name Not Found
Voiceprint Recognized
User Has Been Compromised

"Wait, what?" She held out her hands. "But--but..."

Name Not Found
Voiceprint Recognized
User Has Been Compromised

The actuators rose up like a mob of angry claws, one of them snapping out to grab her arm. "I can't remember, I can't--"

Name Not Found
Voiceprint Recognized
User Has Been Compromised

One of them whipped out a -- a something -- a steel cord, and wrapped it around her neck tightly enough to hold her there but not enough to throttle her.

Sylar continued to watch as if perplexed, even jumping a little when the actuators grabbed her. It was an interesting defense mechanism to be sure. The user has been compromised? Some of the confusion on his face was actually real.

He reached forward, his fingers shaking a little as he put them on the table. "Gabriel Sylar. Can I access this?" He gave a small nervous smile to Rebecca. "Don't worry, I'll get you out of there one way or another," he said quietly.

Gabriel Sylar
Voiceprint Recognized

The little scanner node on the wall aimed at him now, traveled up and down its track, and then the monitor replied,

Level 10 Access Granted

The actuators froze, still holding Rebecca in midair, but made no further move to detain her than they had already done.

Intruder Restrained
DNA: Rebecca Siddons
User Compromised: Incorrect Name

Now the hologram packed that message into a corner, the rest of its screen space taken up by a set of options that Gabriel could choose, in little icon form:

Program Creation
Network Interface
Network Tools
Server Storage
CAD Tools
Miscellaneous

All right. No more than restrained is fine. Sylar smiled at Rebecca a little. "Okay, so....now I just have to figure out how to get it to let you go, right? And then we can figure out how it all got that way."

He looked over the options and hesitantly picked Miscellaneous. "Tell me if you know what I should try next, okay?"

Miscellaneous spun to the center of the display, then expanded:

Actuator Map and Guidance
Monitors
Video Records
Music
Temperature
Light

Rebecca slowly relaxed in the arms' grasp, her eyes rolling back, lips falling open with gravity. For all appearances, she seemed to be asleep, even in her awkward position, like a puppet with the strings cut.

He stared at Rebecca for a short amount of time, a little surprised that this was what put her out. Maybe it had something to do with the computer being manually interfaced.

Well, he wouldn't let up the act just yet, just in case. Besides, he was fairly curious about some of this. He chose the "Actuator Map and Guidance" icon and waited to see what that would tell him.

A detailed map of the room appeared, showing the position, angle, and range of motion of all the machines active in the area, along with a brief status report minimized near each one. Each was marked with a little circle; pull it, and it would move. There were a few macros down in the corner: all retreat, search for a specific object, etc.

He allowed himself a little bit of time to play with the machines. The little gestures required to move them were reminiscent of using his telekinesis to manipulate objects. He made a couple of things 'dance' a bit, but then he went for the macro 'all retreat'. He was curious whether it would actually let go of Rebecca or not- he stood poised to catch her if so.

They obeyed, zipping back into their holding positions with calm haste, sliding behind objects and under tables and into the wall and ceiling. The room looked almost normal -- and Rebecca fell into his catch as the actuators ignored her altogether. She seemed completely unconscious, breathing slowly, eyes closed. Whatever was wrong with her, it had switched her off.

In the back of that mind, for just a moment, the old AI had stirred, opened her heavy eyes, reached out, and pulled the plug. This was too much.

She would...deal with that...later.

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Log://closed.ongoing

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