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Introduction to Robotics, Friday

Today was gonna be...

...Today was gonna be interesting. Sure, the Alliance was making it pretty clear they didn't want Kaidan talking about the Reapers, and he was... well, he wasn't happy with that. But right now there was little he could do about it. On the other hand? He was also the only Systems Alliance representative on the island.

And people did need to be told. Maybe even moreso here, when they still had a couple of centuries to prepare, if anything.

"I'm going to show you a movie today," he started. "Next week you'll get to finish and show-off your drones, but this week... we're looking a little deeper into synthetic lifeforms where I'm from. This is a short documentary covering everything we know about the geth and the recent geth war. Afterwards... we're going to talk for a bit."

He'd picked this movie for a reason-- after the initial discussions about the geth and what they were, it was going into the war with Saren, which meant it was going to talk about Sovereign. Which was important.

It also meant Kaidan was forced to listen as the narrator talked about Shepard in the present tense, like he wasn't-- gone. By the end of it, he was rubbing at his arm, feeling like something was missing-- something he hadn't felt this strong, this powerfully, for... at least a couple of weeks now.

He coughed.

"Okay," he said, once it was done. "So, I'm not supposed to be talking to you about this - my superiors would rather I don't, anyway. They just don't happen to be your superiors. But I want to talk about it. You see this ship here?" He rewound the tape until they got to that giant, disturbing image of Sovereign approaching the Citadel. "Sovereign? Yeah, we found out it's not just a ship. It was actually one big synthetic lifeform... and it wasn't too happy about the idea of any of us living past the day."

He sat back. "We've been talking a lot about making these things like it's... like it's something we've invented, like we were the first people to do it. We're not. This thing was living proof that synthetics existed well before humanity did. Not only that, but there might be synthetics out there that can reprogram organic people like ourselves the same way we can reprogram them."

He rubbed at his forehead. "And I don't know if your galaxy is going to wind up anything like my own," he said, "but just take it from me, this is worth looking into. This is worth studying. This is worth discovering. Go out and figure out how things work, and how they used to work, and, hell, how we can make them work in a way that's friendly instead of hostile, because one of these days it might be our lives on the line and we'll be caught with our pants down."

His eyes darted briefly to Victor, but he didn't say anything.

"Okay," he said instead. "That's it. You can stick around and work on your drone or get out of here."

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Like a huge synthetic might want to kill you.

Ahahahaha like (http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/118408436/9821790) that would (http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/117242102/9821790) ever (http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/117626857/9821790) ---

Sigh.

Ace McShane

Victor Mancha

Topher Brink ~~really needs to stop writing faulty imprints~~

Lex Luthor

Anakin Solo ~~Oh, when would that ever happen to -- carry on.~~

William Murdoch

Shane Gooseman

Thomasina Coverly

It's a nice mix between 'here's the history of the geth' and 'have the plot of the original Mass Effect but with plenty of propaganda thrown in' (though there's no mention of Reapers and Sovereign is referred to as a ship Saren used to play into the geth religion about Reapers. Oh, Mass Effect).

Enjoy.

Edited 2012-08-10 13:34 (UTC)

Right, so the problem was that some part of Victor's mind saw that the geth were ... brilliant. Networking them for higher intelligence was a simple idea, not that original, but it hadn't been done as effectively on Earth that he knew of.

Then he considered what they'd done with that power and got a little vertigo-y and had to put his head on his desk.

Resolved: If Ultron ever somehow put himself back together and came to visit, he was not allowed to talk to Kaidan. He'd get too many ideas.

Edited 2012-08-10 15:01 (UTC)

Anakin propped his chin up on both hands as he watched. He spent the first few minutes mildly annoyed about watching a movie instead of doing anything more interesting, but he couldn't help getting interested.

He couldn't help it. It was almost like a photonegative of the situation going on in his galaxy right now.

Which comes after the movie.

If you want to fix anything up for next week.

With the nicely sobering thoughts inspired by the film and lecture running through her head, Ace felt a bit childish regarding her original plans for the day. To whit: tweaking the drone's personality overlay so it would actually flail its sensor-stalks and speed away if it visually detected the presence of women's undergarments.

That didn't stop her from doing it, mind. She just felt compelled to add a set of commands she hoped worked out to Please don't try to take over the galaxy. You wouldn't like it. The galaxy is full of knickers.

"Is it just me or does he keep looking at me during class?" Victor asked Ace in a low voice, by way of greeting-slash-complaint.

He was taking out what personality he'd given his drone. It hadn't been anything much -- had been pretty much a straight rip-off of the bot from ~~meta~~ Short Circuit, in fact -- but he didn't especially want Kaidan to know he could program that well.

Edited 2012-08-10 15:06 (UTC)

"You reckon?" Ace wasn't being sarcastic; she had to think about it for a second, since OMG ROBOTS tended to be her overidding thought when listening to the lectures in this class. "I s'pose he does, yeah. Guess you make him nervous?"

"I guess," Victor said, and twisted a piece of drone wiring a bit harder than he absolutely had to as a reaction to the unfairness of it all. "I should. I'm terrifying," he continued, with heavy sarcasm.

Possibly because some part of him knew it actually was kind of a reasonable reaction, but he hated admitting that.

"Bnnnnnnngh..." Ace replied with her best game-show buzzer sound while peering at her own specifications. "Wicked cool, check. Scary, not so much." The tone of his voice made her look up, though. "...Unless you want to be terrifying? I could pretend?" Badly.

Okay, so everybody in the world wasn't against him. That did Victor's paranoia a world of good.

"I'm okay with you not," he decided. "It's just ... weird? I mean, nobody who doesn't know thinks I'm scary at all. Moms like me."

Ace snorted. "See, if my mum liked you, that would be creepy. She has horrible taste."

"Okay, normal moms like me," Victor recalibrated. "What flavor of horrible taste does your mom have?"

"The 'Really, Mum? Can't you see the tan line where his ring usually is?' sort, with a side of 'Didn't you graduate with his mum?'" Or both, frequently. "When she likes one of my bloke friends, I'm always afraid that means either he's secretly a wanker, or she's gonna ask him out for drinks."

Admittedly, she'd liked Julian, who was both wank-free and into chromosomes neither member of the McShane household possessed, but he was the exception to just about every rule besides Ace also has terrible taste in men.

"So really, secretly a robot? Not that scary."

Edited 2012-08-10 17:07 (UTC)

"I'm just gonna be glad my chances of meeting your mom are probably about the same as my chances of getting a nice big hug from Alenko at the end of class," Victor decided. "Either she'd like me and you'd wonder if that meant I was a jerk, or she wouldn't and then my whole theory about moms would be shot."

"Also," he added, tweaking another bit of wire, "the idea of being asked out by someone's mom is kind of gross."

"You're telling me." Though Ace was exaggerating; Audrey had never dipped quite that far down the age ladder. Just far enough to give Ace the eye-rolling creeps a few times. "Alenko's not so bad for a teacher, though. He just needs to get over the bit where AI's are gonna eat him if he sleeps, or something."

"That's the problem," Victor agreed. "If he was just a moron or racist, I wouldn't care if he was looking at me."

His eyes flickered to Ace. "And now I'm going to wonder if anybody's programmed man-eating robots. Thanks."

Anakin was more than a little perfectionistic about his robotics, you could definitely say that -- and it would be an understatement.

He was completely intent on his work, hair falling into his eyes as he bent over the drone's circuitry.

William's drone didn't have much of a personality for him to worry about, here, seeing as how it was a steam-powered mechanical.

Still, he was tweaking one of the wheels a little, as it was having trouble with uneven terrain.

Once he's pinged in.

Oh yes, the TA was here. And it was possible that the documentary had set him just a little bit on edge. Just a little.

He was just going to be sublimating through drone-work, thank you.

Edited 2012-08-10 14:59 (UTC)

Who'll be in the corner, thinking about whether he took the right action here or not. And trying not to brood too visibly about Shepard.

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Introduction to Robotics, Friday

Sign In

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Watch the Documentary

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Listen to the Lecture

Work on Your Drone

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Talk to the TA

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Talk to Kaidan

OOC