Thread: More than a Machine (Trixie & I)

Miracles came in all shapes and sizes. It was impossible to tell where this was, this cold steel room, but it turns out that the where was entirely inconsequential. The what was a young woman , doubling up as the who. The why was a mission directive, a small blue chip that glowed brightly and was slid into a small port behind the young woman's ear, hidden in turn by a curtain of pure white hair. No, it was the when that was most interesting of all, being several hundred years in the future. Beyond those cold, sterile walls raged storms. Streets lay desolate as acidic rain tore through littered garbage. People in thick, slick raincoats ran from place to place, those rich enough relying on personal shields, those too poor using pieces of scrap metal that rusted and corroded with every staccato droplet. Japan wasn't a good place to live anymore, and it was relatively well off, compared to others. Present day America broke Geiger counters twenty miles off the coast. The why was likewise interesting. It was so easy to scour timelines, draw links between historical records, to see the what-could-have-beens so clearly in hindsight. But like looking to the stars with a telescope, to see was one thing, to reach it quite another. And to reach it was quite another thing from actually interacting with it. But there were strides being made in that regard a way to see that today's world was dependent on something so silly, so seemingly inconsequential so long ago, about one man not siring progeny that would have a chance of beating a corrupt politician that screwed everything up. And further, a way to reach it A tube, ten feet tall and four feet across in diameter, opened its glass shell with a pneumatic hiss, and the snowy-haired woman was gently led onto it. You understand your mission? one scientist asked, his voice muffled only faintly by a mask that hung over his ears and hugged tightly to his mouth. Affirmative, came the curiously hollow voice, yellow eyes focusing and refocusing on the man before her. Humans couldn't make the move, but robots could. And this one was special, a Synth-Organic Artificial Intelligence, S-O AI, nicknamed Ai by minds that were remarkably creative in terms of mechanics but not so much in terms of names. The scientist nodded, before stepping back and letting the tube close behind him, before he headed over to a nearby panel. The tube locked down tight, before a port opened up above, green fluid starting to pour down on top of her. Her face remained passive even as it splashed across her head, staining the synthetic fibers of her hair the white going green. The fluid level grew ever higher until it had washed over her head, her eyes open, unblinking and staring outward. Bio-androids didn't have to breathe, really. The scientist was talking again, but she couldn't hear him through the fluid that had since risen to the top of the tube. There was a switch flipped, and the tube flashed from inside, and then she was gone. The world fell before her... and continued to fall. It was hard enough to judge just where the Earth would be several hundred years ago, to figure out how to move her through space as well as time... but even their seemingly perfect calculations weren't right all the time. She flashed into being somewhere in the blue sky, before her hair whipped out behind her, her white clothes catching the wind as she fell and fell, before smacking into the roof... a roof that could only slow her fall as she smashed through it. Miracles came in all shapes and sizes, and this particular one smashed right through Kensei's roof on the way to his bedroom.