02: friends
If data had been able to feel, you would have imagined that today it would be shivering as it moved along the muddy plains of a field which was dark and gloomy with rain.
If people believed that a vagrant AI was anything more than junk data they might have thought it was lonely…
Said AI of course was not quite sure what "lonely" was, but the dictionary implemented in its programming weeks or even months before gave it the idea that it had something to do with not having any friends. Or companions. Or whatever the word "friends" meant.
It – or rather she, for it wore the appearance of a lost human girl in a ragged white dress and scruffy auburn hair – found herself flicking through the records of the previous days she had spent in the World that was her home. Corrupted asa it was, there was one - "memory"? Was that the word? – that stood out – sitting on a pile of crates in some Mac Anu alleyway until a female PC had wandered up to her. The conversation was fragmented like the rest of her data, but there were some sentences that she did remember…
"I
know! We can be friends!"
"Friends?"
"Yeah!
So then you don't have to wander around by yourself, right?"
The AI
wondered what had happened to the Player Character from two weeks
ago. Perhaps she was not around because she was...busy? Yes, that was
the human word for it. Having defined things in zeros and ones her
entire life, the AI was unfamiliar with the concept of "words".
Some
internal matrix told her that the PC she had just remembered had
logged in, so she took a look around at the field. What was there to
gain by visiting her?
As she prepared to warp to Mac Anu, she found herself viewing a fragment of that day again, the picture fuzzy but the words clearer than the Water City's blue sky.
"I'm
just a piece of scrap data… maybe my only purpose is a nobody born
to get lost again…"
"Aw,
don't talk like that. Even a nobody can be somebody if they want
to, so all you've got to do is decide where you want to go…"
A
nobody…but maybe one day she'd be somebody again, right?
One last look at the rain-soaked field before she smiled slightly and Gated Out, leaving nothing more than a scrap of fabric and a half-remembered whisper.
"We're friends…right?"
Suddenly existence as a scrap piece of data wasn't so bad any more
Author's Note:
I decided to get off my backside and write something, so here you are. Instead of making a separate oneshot, I'm going to write out a collection of drabbles instead.
I can't make it work unless it just pops into my head, so apologies for the long wait. It is kinda short...I'll have to try and make it a bit longer next time, won't I?
Oh, and I am aware that not all of my writing is canon, but now it's so hard to figure out what actually is canon and what isn't that it might be a bit off. Sorry for the confusingness.
