A/N (I seem to be doing a lot of these lately): Tanathir, it's all right... Just being cautious. In the last few years I've been dealing more with the publishing world, and it's taught me careful habits.
This note will be brief, I promise... I've written the chapter from Solace's point of view, but I thought I might continue the trend and write the same chapter from Smith's point of view. Comments?
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For an AI, Smith was acting extraordinarily human.
Solace had had to call him back to get directions to the restaurant and other such important details. Unfortunately he had realized at the same time that he'd missed giving out vital information, so their lines got jammed. Both were apologetic when they finally unsnarled the whole mess, but Smith's conciliatory, concerned tone had left her entirely speechless, so they hadn't talked over each other for nearly as long as she'd expected. And now this apology dinner, which started to seem more and more lavish as she stared around at the building, in the elevator, and over at the maitre d'. What the hell was going on?
She gave her name and the hour of the dinner appointment to the man, was shown immediately to a table (one of the better tables) at which Smith was seated. He stood, as was proper for the approach of a lady, and Solace had the uncanny feeling that she had been thrown back several decades from the apparent time of the Matrix, to the roaring twenties, or the Belle Epoque. Smith's expression was blank-but-worried, his usual face when he was concerned or edgy but trying not to show it. She was worried too, however, and she had no such compunctions about letting that worry show on her face.
The maitre d' left them alone for a few minutes. Normally this was when Solace would have expected a waiter to show up with a menu or a wine list, but she again had the sneaking impression that Smith had planned this out carefully. Hell, she knew he'd planned it out carefully, he was an AI. He could hardly do anything but. And now seemed to be the time he'd planned to make some sort of apology speech... but he couldn't. His hands twisted themselves into knots, fingers interlacing over the napkin, hesitant. A scowl would pass with sudden intensity over his face, probably symptomatic of his own inner logic telling him that such emotion and prevarication were a sure sign of degradation. It hurt just to watch him struggle.
She reached out and laid her hands over his, turning them over and massaging his palms with her thumbs... it worked for humans. AIs were supposed to be wired the same as humans, and seemed to be. He looked over at her with astonishment and she stared right back at him, unafraid and full of compassion.
He looked down. "I didn't think you would come..." he said slowly, jerkily, as though unwilling even to put so many words to whatever thoughts and feelings were ricocheting around in his mind.
"I said I would..." she smiled slightly, but the smile fell as soon as it appeared. "Besides, you look like hell."
"Thank you." The comment was dry, but lacked his usual humor.
"What's wrong?"
He looked down and sighed, an eerily human gesture that betrayed shaken vulnerability. "Everything."
Hell. Maybe Julian was right. "Want to talk about it?"
If he'd been human he would have been crying into his napkin and trying his damndest not to let her notice. As it was, his jaw clenched a little, and he stared down at the table. "I have... never been without the company of my ... co-workers... never been entirely alone before. The change in lifestyle is coming harder than I thought, and the ones I went to for help were, in fact, worse than useless." It seemed to give him a savage sort of glee to be able to refer to them as such. "I find that the change... the abrupt departure from what I had considered the norm... is making me... volatile."
Volatile. That was a good word for it. It was making him downright testy, which was impressive for a collection of data pulses and wires. But stranger still was the fact that he was coming to her, a human, for help. The fact that he trusted her, the fact that he felt he could talk to her when he had been suddenly thrust into... she didn't even know what. She hadn't known Agents could be 'fired' and not deleted before. It suddenly occurred to her that the council might want to call her back once they read that particular report.
... had all of this happened in just a couple of weeks? It was starting to seem very unreal.
She pushed the thoughts aside as inconsequential for the moment and squeezed Smith's hands gently, trying to be reassuring. "You're not alone, you know. You have friends... we can help you, if you want us to. If you let us..." And at least some part of you recognizes that, she thought, because you came to me after whatever disaster happened that rainy day. You came to my apartment... I should have asked you to stay. Damn.
He pulled his hands away. "But that is exactly the problem, you see." His tone was angry, although she wasn't sure if he was angry at her or at himself. "No one has ever said such things to me before. I have never had... what you would call a friend, I have never wanted or needed one."
It was on the verge of her mind to say something like, how lonely, or, how sad... She knew better. She bit her lip, and said nothing.
"I have never had the emotional capacity to feel this loneliness, or this sadness, before. Emotions were highly discouraged... especially the more benign or sedate emotions. So I am once again confronted by the alien, the unknown, that which I do not understand nor wish to understand. I don't want your sympathy, and I don't want your pity..." his face curdled into anger as he spoke, eyes flashing.
Solace sat perfectly still, as though if she moved he would pounce upon her and eat her.
"And yet... I find that living without it... living without some form of emotional nourishment... is unsustainable. Now that I am away from my colleagues, I cannot live by hate alone." He looked down at the table, then over at her, blue intensity faded to gray dullness. "Does that seem right to you?"
Solace took a deep breath, trying to figure out what to say. This problem had layers upon layers of complexity, and she wasn't sure whether to treat him as a human or an AI. The hell with it. "Actually, Smith, yes it does." Her voice was calm, steady, betraying none of the uneasiness and terror she felt inside.
"Think about it. You've been thrust entirely out of your element, not once, but twice. You've been thrown into a world that probably hates and fears you... very few people like the feds... and you've had all the restrictions of your previous life removed. It's like a dam suddenly being taken away and all of that water suddenly released from all of that pressure comes shooting down through the canyon with tremendous force. Not only do you no longer have to answer to your superiors, you no longer have the stabilizing influence of your co-workers, other people you respect and understand as familiar and identical to you... at least in their tasks. You don't have to maintain the emotionless face anymore. So not only do you have that loss of purpose that comes with suddenly being let go, you also have all of the emotions that go with it... the despair, loss of self-worth, feelings of hopelessness... only since you're not used to dealing with them you have them tenfold."
He blinked.
"As for coming to see me... I imagine that was reflex. I was probably the only person you had had extended contact with outside of work, and since you no longer had those avenues available to you, you came to me. Probably there was some aspect of it as well that said that I was outside of your workplace, I had lived with emotions all my life and knew how to deal with them, so I could help with that problem in specific, as well as whatever problems you could think of in general."
He sighed, slumping over. Solace blinked. She hadn't expected that kind of reaction.
"... Smith..." she reached out to touch his shoulder. "It's going to be okay..."
"How do you know?" his head jerked up, eyes ablaze with fury. "How can you even have the faintest idea of what is going on? Never in your life have you experienced the world in the way I do. How can you say that you know it is going to be 'okay,' when you haven't the barest idea of what is going on..."
She reached out and squeezed his hands, more than a little afraid. At least here, in this public place... he probably wouldn't try anything. They were drawing attention of the folk at the head table, not to mention stares from tables around them. "Smith, I don't. I can't. I don't know what you're going through, but I do know that right now you're afraid. You're experiencing a lot of new sensations, and trust me, I do know what that's like. I know what the alienation is like."
He blinked at her, and the world seemed to ripple for a second. No déjà vu, though. So probably no drastic changes to the Matrix. "What..." and his voice was more subdued now. "What happened to you?"
She looked away and pulled back, uncomfortable with even the thought of telling him that she was unplugged. "I'd... rather not talk about it." She hoped that would be enough to convince him that she knew what she was talking about.
He sat back and stared at her for a little while. Solace thought he was considering what to do or say, but his eyes were more blank than usual and she couldn't tell. She felt miserable that she couldn't help him, and fiddled with her napkin a little as she tried to think of something else she could do, something she could say, anything to make it better. Anything to make the bad go away.
Smith looked down and to the side, so suddenly that she thought for a second that he'd dropped something. His shoulders seemed to shake, a human gesture of tension and confusion. After a minute or too he looked back at her.
"I..." he took a deep breath. Solace reached out, but didn't take his hands just yet. "I am sorry. I am... not the most stable of creatures at the moment. You are right... this is a ... this is not a good time for me. I ..." he snarled the word. "...feel... as though I have been cast adrift, and I am not used to having nothing solid to stand on. For the most part it makes me angry, these feelings of helplessness and this inability to control my emotions. I have blamed a number of people for it... I have blamed you... but I have no one to really blame, but myself."
She winced, down deep inside, at that particular revelation. If he had really blamed her he could have killed her very easily. And how was Tank going to explain that to the council?
"I ... I don't know what to do. And I do not like the feeling, because I have always known what to do, in any situation. The interview with ... it did not go well. At all. Not only did they have no useful information for me they derided me for my inability to survive... they ..." he trailed off.
Solace blinked. AIs, it seemed, were as vicious and cruel as young teenagers. Now she did pull his hands back into her grip and squeeze them gently, reassuring, stroking the backs of his wrists with her fingertips. "People are cruel..." she said softly, thinking out loud, hoping some of it would help. "And people are prone to be scared. When they see someone has failed, especially in a situation where they have failed as well or where they think they might fail in the same way, they lash out. Because it reminds them of their own inability to succeed, inability to recover... or because they are afraid that the proximity of the failure... like an aura, or a bad smell, they fear it might taint them. It's hard, it's mean, and it's not pretty... but it's true."
Smith scowled. "Not for us. It is not true for us... we are not subject to those frailties."
"Everyone is subject to those frailties. Every human being..." she trailed off. It hurt, almost physically, how much she wanted to explain it to him in words he could understand, or at least comprehend. But she couldn't risk revealing her knowledge or her status to him.
"I..." he struggled with words, and she knew what he was trying not to say.
"You are built like a human being," she settled on, "No matter how much you may be trained, raised, or taught not to react like one. You may have learned emotionlessness, but your body is still wired for emotions. They are still there, no matter how deeply buried they might be. The equipment is still there... the chemical reactions, endorphines, everything."
His fingers dug into her hands, almost to the point of being painful. "Then why, if it is my own body, can I not control it?"
She sighed. That was always the question. "I don't know. Maybe it's not meant to be controlled. Probably part of it is because you're not used to having to use fine control. Suppression is a lot easier than management, but it also requires a lot less finesse."
He scowled. "I don't ..." sighed. "I don't want to control it. I want it to go away."
She didn't have anything she could say to that, except to hold his hands and try to be reassuring without words. They sat, hunched over, heads almost touching for a little while; it seemed as though he was trying to touch her every way he could and trying not to be near her for a little while. Finally the tension eased, and they both inched back to sit more straight, more normally. Smith looked at a point over her shoulder, and she was about to turn around before she realized he was signaling the waiter. Solace felt herself relax slowly, breathing out a long and shuddering sigh.
"Oh..." Smith said, thinking of something suddenly. She looked over at him, startled. "I would recommend against trying the cake, here. It is quite good... but can have some unexpected after-effects. The tiramisu, on the other hand, is quite exquisite..."
This note will be brief, I promise... I've written the chapter from Solace's point of view, but I thought I might continue the trend and write the same chapter from Smith's point of view. Comments?
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For an AI, Smith was acting extraordinarily human.
Solace had had to call him back to get directions to the restaurant and other such important details. Unfortunately he had realized at the same time that he'd missed giving out vital information, so their lines got jammed. Both were apologetic when they finally unsnarled the whole mess, but Smith's conciliatory, concerned tone had left her entirely speechless, so they hadn't talked over each other for nearly as long as she'd expected. And now this apology dinner, which started to seem more and more lavish as she stared around at the building, in the elevator, and over at the maitre d'. What the hell was going on?
She gave her name and the hour of the dinner appointment to the man, was shown immediately to a table (one of the better tables) at which Smith was seated. He stood, as was proper for the approach of a lady, and Solace had the uncanny feeling that she had been thrown back several decades from the apparent time of the Matrix, to the roaring twenties, or the Belle Epoque. Smith's expression was blank-but-worried, his usual face when he was concerned or edgy but trying not to show it. She was worried too, however, and she had no such compunctions about letting that worry show on her face.
The maitre d' left them alone for a few minutes. Normally this was when Solace would have expected a waiter to show up with a menu or a wine list, but she again had the sneaking impression that Smith had planned this out carefully. Hell, she knew he'd planned it out carefully, he was an AI. He could hardly do anything but. And now seemed to be the time he'd planned to make some sort of apology speech... but he couldn't. His hands twisted themselves into knots, fingers interlacing over the napkin, hesitant. A scowl would pass with sudden intensity over his face, probably symptomatic of his own inner logic telling him that such emotion and prevarication were a sure sign of degradation. It hurt just to watch him struggle.
She reached out and laid her hands over his, turning them over and massaging his palms with her thumbs... it worked for humans. AIs were supposed to be wired the same as humans, and seemed to be. He looked over at her with astonishment and she stared right back at him, unafraid and full of compassion.
He looked down. "I didn't think you would come..." he said slowly, jerkily, as though unwilling even to put so many words to whatever thoughts and feelings were ricocheting around in his mind.
"I said I would..." she smiled slightly, but the smile fell as soon as it appeared. "Besides, you look like hell."
"Thank you." The comment was dry, but lacked his usual humor.
"What's wrong?"
He looked down and sighed, an eerily human gesture that betrayed shaken vulnerability. "Everything."
Hell. Maybe Julian was right. "Want to talk about it?"
If he'd been human he would have been crying into his napkin and trying his damndest not to let her notice. As it was, his jaw clenched a little, and he stared down at the table. "I have... never been without the company of my ... co-workers... never been entirely alone before. The change in lifestyle is coming harder than I thought, and the ones I went to for help were, in fact, worse than useless." It seemed to give him a savage sort of glee to be able to refer to them as such. "I find that the change... the abrupt departure from what I had considered the norm... is making me... volatile."
Volatile. That was a good word for it. It was making him downright testy, which was impressive for a collection of data pulses and wires. But stranger still was the fact that he was coming to her, a human, for help. The fact that he trusted her, the fact that he felt he could talk to her when he had been suddenly thrust into... she didn't even know what. She hadn't known Agents could be 'fired' and not deleted before. It suddenly occurred to her that the council might want to call her back once they read that particular report.
... had all of this happened in just a couple of weeks? It was starting to seem very unreal.
She pushed the thoughts aside as inconsequential for the moment and squeezed Smith's hands gently, trying to be reassuring. "You're not alone, you know. You have friends... we can help you, if you want us to. If you let us..." And at least some part of you recognizes that, she thought, because you came to me after whatever disaster happened that rainy day. You came to my apartment... I should have asked you to stay. Damn.
He pulled his hands away. "But that is exactly the problem, you see." His tone was angry, although she wasn't sure if he was angry at her or at himself. "No one has ever said such things to me before. I have never had... what you would call a friend, I have never wanted or needed one."
It was on the verge of her mind to say something like, how lonely, or, how sad... She knew better. She bit her lip, and said nothing.
"I have never had the emotional capacity to feel this loneliness, or this sadness, before. Emotions were highly discouraged... especially the more benign or sedate emotions. So I am once again confronted by the alien, the unknown, that which I do not understand nor wish to understand. I don't want your sympathy, and I don't want your pity..." his face curdled into anger as he spoke, eyes flashing.
Solace sat perfectly still, as though if she moved he would pounce upon her and eat her.
"And yet... I find that living without it... living without some form of emotional nourishment... is unsustainable. Now that I am away from my colleagues, I cannot live by hate alone." He looked down at the table, then over at her, blue intensity faded to gray dullness. "Does that seem right to you?"
Solace took a deep breath, trying to figure out what to say. This problem had layers upon layers of complexity, and she wasn't sure whether to treat him as a human or an AI. The hell with it. "Actually, Smith, yes it does." Her voice was calm, steady, betraying none of the uneasiness and terror she felt inside.
"Think about it. You've been thrust entirely out of your element, not once, but twice. You've been thrown into a world that probably hates and fears you... very few people like the feds... and you've had all the restrictions of your previous life removed. It's like a dam suddenly being taken away and all of that water suddenly released from all of that pressure comes shooting down through the canyon with tremendous force. Not only do you no longer have to answer to your superiors, you no longer have the stabilizing influence of your co-workers, other people you respect and understand as familiar and identical to you... at least in their tasks. You don't have to maintain the emotionless face anymore. So not only do you have that loss of purpose that comes with suddenly being let go, you also have all of the emotions that go with it... the despair, loss of self-worth, feelings of hopelessness... only since you're not used to dealing with them you have them tenfold."
He blinked.
"As for coming to see me... I imagine that was reflex. I was probably the only person you had had extended contact with outside of work, and since you no longer had those avenues available to you, you came to me. Probably there was some aspect of it as well that said that I was outside of your workplace, I had lived with emotions all my life and knew how to deal with them, so I could help with that problem in specific, as well as whatever problems you could think of in general."
He sighed, slumping over. Solace blinked. She hadn't expected that kind of reaction.
"... Smith..." she reached out to touch his shoulder. "It's going to be okay..."
"How do you know?" his head jerked up, eyes ablaze with fury. "How can you even have the faintest idea of what is going on? Never in your life have you experienced the world in the way I do. How can you say that you know it is going to be 'okay,' when you haven't the barest idea of what is going on..."
She reached out and squeezed his hands, more than a little afraid. At least here, in this public place... he probably wouldn't try anything. They were drawing attention of the folk at the head table, not to mention stares from tables around them. "Smith, I don't. I can't. I don't know what you're going through, but I do know that right now you're afraid. You're experiencing a lot of new sensations, and trust me, I do know what that's like. I know what the alienation is like."
He blinked at her, and the world seemed to ripple for a second. No déjà vu, though. So probably no drastic changes to the Matrix. "What..." and his voice was more subdued now. "What happened to you?"
She looked away and pulled back, uncomfortable with even the thought of telling him that she was unplugged. "I'd... rather not talk about it." She hoped that would be enough to convince him that she knew what she was talking about.
He sat back and stared at her for a little while. Solace thought he was considering what to do or say, but his eyes were more blank than usual and she couldn't tell. She felt miserable that she couldn't help him, and fiddled with her napkin a little as she tried to think of something else she could do, something she could say, anything to make it better. Anything to make the bad go away.
Smith looked down and to the side, so suddenly that she thought for a second that he'd dropped something. His shoulders seemed to shake, a human gesture of tension and confusion. After a minute or too he looked back at her.
"I..." he took a deep breath. Solace reached out, but didn't take his hands just yet. "I am sorry. I am... not the most stable of creatures at the moment. You are right... this is a ... this is not a good time for me. I ..." he snarled the word. "...feel... as though I have been cast adrift, and I am not used to having nothing solid to stand on. For the most part it makes me angry, these feelings of helplessness and this inability to control my emotions. I have blamed a number of people for it... I have blamed you... but I have no one to really blame, but myself."
She winced, down deep inside, at that particular revelation. If he had really blamed her he could have killed her very easily. And how was Tank going to explain that to the council?
"I ... I don't know what to do. And I do not like the feeling, because I have always known what to do, in any situation. The interview with ... it did not go well. At all. Not only did they have no useful information for me they derided me for my inability to survive... they ..." he trailed off.
Solace blinked. AIs, it seemed, were as vicious and cruel as young teenagers. Now she did pull his hands back into her grip and squeeze them gently, reassuring, stroking the backs of his wrists with her fingertips. "People are cruel..." she said softly, thinking out loud, hoping some of it would help. "And people are prone to be scared. When they see someone has failed, especially in a situation where they have failed as well or where they think they might fail in the same way, they lash out. Because it reminds them of their own inability to succeed, inability to recover... or because they are afraid that the proximity of the failure... like an aura, or a bad smell, they fear it might taint them. It's hard, it's mean, and it's not pretty... but it's true."
Smith scowled. "Not for us. It is not true for us... we are not subject to those frailties."
"Everyone is subject to those frailties. Every human being..." she trailed off. It hurt, almost physically, how much she wanted to explain it to him in words he could understand, or at least comprehend. But she couldn't risk revealing her knowledge or her status to him.
"I..." he struggled with words, and she knew what he was trying not to say.
"You are built like a human being," she settled on, "No matter how much you may be trained, raised, or taught not to react like one. You may have learned emotionlessness, but your body is still wired for emotions. They are still there, no matter how deeply buried they might be. The equipment is still there... the chemical reactions, endorphines, everything."
His fingers dug into her hands, almost to the point of being painful. "Then why, if it is my own body, can I not control it?"
She sighed. That was always the question. "I don't know. Maybe it's not meant to be controlled. Probably part of it is because you're not used to having to use fine control. Suppression is a lot easier than management, but it also requires a lot less finesse."
He scowled. "I don't ..." sighed. "I don't want to control it. I want it to go away."
She didn't have anything she could say to that, except to hold his hands and try to be reassuring without words. They sat, hunched over, heads almost touching for a little while; it seemed as though he was trying to touch her every way he could and trying not to be near her for a little while. Finally the tension eased, and they both inched back to sit more straight, more normally. Smith looked at a point over her shoulder, and she was about to turn around before she realized he was signaling the waiter. Solace felt herself relax slowly, breathing out a long and shuddering sigh.
"Oh..." Smith said, thinking of something suddenly. She looked over at him, startled. "I would recommend against trying the cake, here. It is quite good... but can have some unexpected after-effects. The tiramisu, on the other hand, is quite exquisite..."