Logs:NBD

NBD
Dramatis Personae B, Cerebro
In Absentia	2024-02-29 "Oh. Well. Why didn't you just say so?"
Location emails & <XAV> Danger Room - Xs Sub-Basement
from: B Holland <b@xaviers.edu to: Sysadmin <cerebro@xaviers.edu> date: Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 03:13 subject: yr face yo i know this is out of the blue but can we get coffee some time. or tea if you're one of those people. beverage of your choice. w/e. i'll pay. b --- from: Sysadmin <cerebro@xaviers.edu> to: B Holland <b@xaviers.edu> date: Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 03:58 subject: re: yr face Greetings, I know you have abducted my friend, and as I am a very charitable sort I require that you return her intact only. No questions asked! Failing that, take me to your leader? Cordially, Cerebro the ♾️th Admin of the Sol System, in Perpetuity --- from: B Holland <b@xaviers.edu to: Sysadmin <cerebro@xaviers.edu> date: Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 04:01 subject: re: yr face lol ok i'll return her over coffee no seriously though. i know its a little out of character i would totally interact with people exclusively via drone too if i could. much as u have been an excellent nerd mentor over the years i dont actually want to treat u to coffee i just have a conundrum i'd rather not email. i was hoping you could idk wizard at it or somethin. genuinely whenever yr free i'll make time. actually do you even live in new york??? w/e i can travel. i will still get the coffee tho if that's yr jam. like a belated thank u for teaching me at least 3 things about computers. b --- from: Sysadmin <cerebro@xaviers.edu> to: B Holland <b@xaviers.edu> date: Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 04:04 subject: re: yr face The funny thing is, I do enjoy interacting with people in person. But only if it happens entirely on my terms. Unfortunately, we live in a society Maybe that's not funny Anyway, I'm local. In fact, I'm on campus today, if you don't mind swinging by Jsyk I'm not very good at being perceived Cere --- from: B Holland <b@xaviers.edu to: Sysadmin <cerebro@xaviers.edu> date: Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 04:07 subject: re: yr face yah being perceived does kind of suck. id offer to keep my eyes closed but it would be hard to use the computer then. i could make it to campus no problem but this is kind of personal and i rlly do not want people eavesdropping on my personal business you know? there are no secrets in that place its annoying. b --- from: Sysadmin <cerebro@xaviers.edu> to: B Holland <b@xaviers.edu> date: Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 04:08 subject: re: yr face It ''is'' annoying. But, the training room is eavesdrop-proof. Or, at any rate, it would be immediately obvious to me if someone were to succeed at it Cere --- from: B Holland <b@xaviers.edu to: Sysadmin <cerebro@xaviers.edu> date: Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 04:10 subject: re: yr face cool. what time is good for u --- from: Sysadmin <cerebro@xaviers.edu> to: B Holland <b@xaviers.edu> date: Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 04:11 subject: re: yr face Literally whenever. My sleep schedule is permanently fucked --- '<XAV> Danger Room - Xs Sub-Basement' The room is large and circular, a geodesic hemisphere of hexagonal ceramic panels. It is the Danger Room, and is thus often full of danger, but is presently not in use and is thus remarkably danger-free. Safest room in the school, probably. It's still very early, when a sleek hoverbike lands on the back patio and a tiny blue shark makes her way down to the subbasement. B is terribly nondescript today; in her tac pants and grey performance tee and Xavier's hoodie, backpack slung over a shoulder, she could easily be her brother come to actually get training in. She's sipping from a thermos of coffee as she heads towards the Danger Room, a second thermos tucked under her arm, and pauses outside the door with a brief contemplation before offering, mildly, "-- Open sesame?" The doors open at the magic words, and inside the Danger Room is running its Star Trek Holodeck simulation. Not a simulation of a holodeck program, just the holodeck at rest, a great cubical space with a bright yellow grid on the walls, ceiling, and floor. At its center, sitting cross-legged on the empty floor, is a brown-skinned young man with wavy black hair tumbling tousled down about his ears, dressed in a purple mandarin shirt with a faint greenish sheen and grey trousers with a faint purple sheen. "I'm also a telepath," Cerebro says in lieu of a greeting as soon as the doors close behind B, "and unlike some of these other poor sods, I can turn it off. But then I can't guarantee no one else overhears." His lips press into a thin, lopsided smile. "Besides which I rather need it to talk face to face. I promise you I'm not being contrary. Only, I've a very unusual sort of disability, and I don't mean the autism, which is really altogether pedestrian by comparison." B's thoughts have already been schooled, more or less, into a background semblance of Telepathic Politeness. As the doors close behind her, though, this shifts -- the fiendishly complicated Paganini Caprice's she's been looping in idle white noise transform (more colorfully, less audibly) instead to a mental runthrough of the early levels of Celeste. "You hear people and machines, I'm sorry." B sounds deeply sympathetic, even if the mental static of memorized-speedrun does not seem to come with a lot of emotion behind it. She ambles over to drop down, cross-legged, a short distance from Cerebro, looking into her backpack rather than at him as she opens it up to dig out her laptop. "I'm in tech, everyone's got a touch of the autism. -- Do you want me to know what the disability is?" Cere frowns down at the floor between himself and his visitor. "I think...I do, but it's a big can of worms. More of a barrel of worms, if I'm honest. And I haven't exactly got a lot of experience coming out about it." He laces his fingers together tightly -- it looks very much like one of Xavier's habitual gestures, but in him it shows more nervousness than it conceals. "So...technically I am dead. Not -- proper dead, mind you, biologically dead only." His tone suggests he thinks this qualification should be reassuring. "It feels a bit melodramatic to say 'discorporate', when really I'm just digitized..." His smile returns, wider and more rueful. "...and sort of incidentally hard-of-living. None of which is particularly relevant, at the moment," he adds, a touch hastily. "I've been this way as long as you've known me. I'm just as equal to helping you now as I was before. You said you had a conundrum?" Somewhere in B's head, Madeline is crashing into a wall of spikes. B's head lifts, eyes gone dinner-plate-wide. She's scrutinizing Cerebro intently for a moment. << {is this a joke?} >> << {what the fuck does that even mean} >> << digitized >> << {what kind of nerd-ass shit} >> is kind of stuttering in uncomprehending static crackle in her mind before she manages to restart her background white noise. "I --" Apologetically, she's dropping her eyes back to her computer. "... don't think I get it." "I uploaded my consciousness to a computer when my body died," Cerebro says, a little clipped. "Or, technically..." He shakes his head. "It's not that big a deal. I just haven't got a script because -- for bloody good reason -- I don't talk about it." He braces his hands on his knees, gaze drifting to B's thermoses. "Anyway, I can't drink coffee. Preferred tea when I still imbibed things." "You --" It's still taking a bit to sink in. B is glancing back at Cerebro, glancing back down at her computer, before she looks up and past him to the -- holodeck-within-a-holodeck. It's that that seems to finally make something click; her gills are fluttering, her heavy brow dipping inward. "Wait -- you -- and you've always -- I mean, since I've known you --" Her mental video game has frozen, now, stuck in place as its colors warp in a brighter flash of anxiety. It dissolves into a million flashes of memories back through the years, assistance offered with her fledgeling coding projects, raid team practices that seemed far more responsive than the instructions provided. "A computer -- here?" She's shoving her computer back into the bag without opening it; doesn't even bother to zip the pack as she stands, abrupt. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have -- I -- I have to go." Cere's expression falls, just for an instant, before hardening. "Alright then, fuck you, too. This is why I shouldn't talk about it." His voice is tight with anger, and he pointedly does not watch her pack. "I don't give a shit if you ghost me," sounds like an attempt to convince himself, but "as long as you keep your fucking mouth shut" is deadly serious. "It's not just my own life on the line here." "Ghost you? I wasn't --" Something sharp and irritable prickles across B's thoughts, defensive, exasperated. It's swiftly being somewhat tempered by the thoughts of some of her own disastrous comings-out, of the deflating sting when people who were fine with shark find trans a freakishness too far. "Your life is what I'm -- I didn't know. I mean, obviously I didn't know, but I -- what I was going to ask you, I can't --" She clutches her backpack to her chest, shaking her head once. "I'm in trouble," she says then, softer. "I don't want it to put you at risk, too." For a brief moment Cerebro's avatar does not move at all, as if he's buffering. Then he blinks. "Oh. Well. Why didn't you just say so?" Maybe the question is rhetorical, because he doesn't wait for an answer. "I won't claim to be 100% unhackable, but I doubt it could be done without powers. Even then -- even with physical access to my hardware it would be difficult because I am not wholly digital." He stands up smoothly while around them the empty holodeck is wavers and resolves into a distinctly organic-looking crew lounge on the sentient bio-mechanical spaceship Moya from Farscape. "However, I do believe in abundance of caution. I can partition my mind and store potentially sensitive data in disposable remote servers. There's no such thing as perfect security..." He perches sideways on an organic structure with a non-organic bench seat built into its inner curve. "...but mine is better than most. I've handled Prometheus data safety for years, I know what I'm doing." He makes a beckoning gesture that he probably meant to be reassuring but looks more impatient than anything. "Just...let me help." "Say so, I didn't --" B stops, here. A spiral of anxieties have been swirling about the risk of even thinking the wrong thought, here; about digital security, about school security, about what that means for Cerebro's safety -- these all tumble swiftly into a strangely more detached consideration of years of raid training, of whether Jax and Ryan knew the reality of the Danger Room, of how apt that moniker really is. Her fingers curl in, claws prickling into the heavy canvas of her backpack. It's the shifting scenery that derails her -- the anxieties aren't fading but she's considering the spaceship with a vague and wry amusement. Eventually she does move, slowly dropping into the bench by Cerebro and setting her backpack down on the oddly more fleshy surface. She isn't taking her computer back out just yet, though, first attempting to calm her thoughts enough to resume her previous surface-level screening. "There's a possibility helping will make you a target for HAMMER and the Brotherhood both." "I wanted to call it the 'Holodeck'," is somehow the only response Cere has to that cascade of anxieties. "My security is inseparable from the school's security, but frankly I'm the strongest link in that chain. I'm sick to death of playing dumb and living half a life." His brows furrow slowly. "Though I should probably still add 'coming out' to my risk assessment protocols..." He's still considering this when B's warning snaps his attention back, and his shoulders tense hard. "Fuck the Brotherhood. They already know about me, there's nothing for it, but if they come after us again I will make them wish HAMMER had finished the job." His hands curl into fists, rage tightening his expression and clipping his words. "That's what would have happened if I hadn't spotted the attack! I suppose they might suspect me because of that, if they had two brain cells and a secure Internet connection between them right now, which I doubt." He shrugs, dropping down to sit beside B. "HAMMER isn't going to stop with the Brotherhood. Finding out more about their new strategy is important for our safety, too." "How do you gauge the risk on that? People are -- people." There's a mild disdain layered onto this assessment. B scrunches her forehead, shooting Cerebro a brief and quizzical glance. "-- again?" She is studiously not racking her brain for Past Brotherhood Terrors; her next curiosity at least makes it easy enough to veer away from that line of thinking. "Wait, you spotted the attack? Did you -- did they -- why --" She's finally pulling her laptop back out, claws clicking lightly against the plastic case. "... why do they know about you?" "Data mining, obviously," Cere says with blithe unconcern. Then, less confident, "And perhaps some kind of preliminary...questionnaire? Look, if I knew, I'd already have protocols." He's not quite so cavalier with the next question, his reply edged with fury. "I imagine the recruiters left out some minor details about Liberty Island. Like how they built a weapon of mass destruction, kidnapped one of our kids to power it -- which would have killed them, by the by -- and tried to kill everyone who went to rescue them." His anger is skewing acerbic, his sharp smile not even slightly amused. "But hey, sometimes you just have to murder a bunch of your own people and all of Lower Manhattan in the name of mutant liberation. Can't make an omelet and all that." His shoulders have hunched up slowly over the course of this tirade, and he does not relax now. "I'm always scanning for Sentinels doing anything unusual. Your spiders are fiendishly clever, but those disguised their network traffic faster and smarter than I'd ever seen. I still can't make head nor tails of it." His voice comes in a low monotone. "Magneto and -- whatever that blue shapeshifting bitch is calling herself these days used to be my friends. Or I thought they were, until they sabotaged me to kill Char --" He rolls his eyes. "-- Professor Xavier. Not over whatever ideological bullshit they tried to sell you, no, just to stop him finding that kid. They're traitors to our kind and they fucking used me as a weapon. I take that sort of thing personally." B is turning several parts of this over in her mind as she boots the computer up with drastically different levels of care. Weapons Of Mass Destruction: 🤷. Killing Charles 😔. Mystique kidnapping one of hir classmates to kill them: ⁉️. Magneto kidnapping one of hir classmates to kill them: 😡. Sabotaging Cerebro 🤬. "Most of what I knew about Liberty Island just involved trying to kill a lot of bigwigs the world would be better off without," she admits. "Magneto was already in prison and -- we didn't really get details." It's certainly not Liberty Island she's thinking about, though, but the Freaktown town square and the glass-streaked silhouette scorched permanently into the blacktop, a dull and detached flicker of anger accompanying the thought. "I guess hurting his own people has been kind of a pattern, huh?" She's opening her laptop up, now, fingers flying rapidly over the keys for the boot password and then the login. "Stark gets a lot of backend data on the spiders. Need it for debugging, updates --" That she's long since lost her secret clearance and shouldn't have access to this anymore goes without saying. There is nevertheless a wealth of logs saved to this computer, pulled from the time surrounding the attacks. "I have spent a lot of time in these thing's brains and their patterns that day were --" She's going to say << weird >> but this feels inadequate to the inconsistencies she is thinking of. Vast gaps in data that she's trying not to think of as covering their tracks, trying not to assign motive to the robot spiders. Strange fluctuations in their processing that don't track at all with the normal clumsy stutters when a human takes over manually puppeting one of the drones. Most of all, the way HAMMER's Sentinels so effortlessly commandeered the rogue spiders she'd personally recoded to protect the island. "-- I don't know," she finishes, uncertainly, "and trying to dig into it got me nowhere. HAMMER's been spying on my family for years, I know their normal activity, and --" Here she's stopping again, a little self-conscious in biting back the offended thought that was going to come next: those pigs are too stupid to hack her bots. Somewhere among the fear for her life and the worry for her one-time comrades there's a wounded pride that she is trying (unsuccessfully) to put into a more appropriate balance. "Hah!" Cere isn't actually laughing, but the word "hah" does sound amused. "That weapon wasn't meant to kill aforementioned bigwigs the world would indeed be better off without, but rather turn them into mutants." He throws his arms up. "Even aside from all the violence and trauma, being caught up in such an idiotic plot was just plain insulting. Of course your erstwhile Big Siblings wouldn't tell you what actually happened, because then they'd have to admit to going along with it." A little more soberly, "Magneto and I go way back, and I am bloody amazing at pattern recognition. I don't know why it took me so long to see that one, but at least I learned my lesson." His shoulders finally do ease, though maybe it's just because he's redirected his attention to B's data. "Weird?" He rubs his knuckles over his bare chin. "That's downright peculiar. Clearly HAMMER has got a new card or five up its sleeve. I suppose it's a kind of respect if the Brotherhood of Morons is blaming you for this." He leans over a little farther, little though he needs to, given he's actually seeing through his avatar's eyes. "You know, I've had a bit of experience puppeting those beasties, myself. Do you think you have got enough data to update my simulation?" He tips his hand at -- apparently nothing, until a faint shimmer and hum in the air materializes into an inert Sentinel. "Again, this is all going on a server I can and will burn if need be." "I'm sorry, the plan was what." B isn't even angry, now, thoughts just kind of flatlining at this Mutate the UN business. "You know, he hasn't even been there. So many of my siblings slaughtered to find him and that coward's been in the wind. For months." There's worry behind this, too, a sick certainty that no number of lesser dead targets is going to stop the government's hunt, and no possible way to keep them safe -- whoever is still alive -- if she has no idea how it happened in the first place. She hesitates for just a moment when the Sentinel appears, and she's doggedly schooling her speculation away from I've had a bit of experience puppeting those beasties. "I'll give you what I've got. Just --" Her gills flutter rapidly, and she's not without a self-consciousness of the hypocrisy in, "-- don't get cocky."