Disclaimer: I don't own anything from Supernatural or Dollhouse. I'm not making any monetary profit from this story.
Impossible Dream
When Topher first arrived at MIT, he really didn't expect to get along with his roommate, let alone make it past the first night before the other guy petitioned for a single. So when he walked into his room (his room, because there was no way he was going to be the one kicked out), he did so with his back straightened, strutting as much as his 5' 6" skinny ass frame as he could manage, not even knocking before walking in.
Suffice to say, he was rather taken aback when the guy hunched over a laptop connected to—was that three servers?—sitting in the curtain shrouded darkness didn't even look up from the screen. Topher took in the sight of half unpacked boxes already strewn with rumpled shirts and papers and bits of computers—was that another server peeking out from under a pair of boxers?—and loudly cleared his throat. When that didn't garner a response either, he shrugged and dumped his box on the thankfully untouched bed on the other side of the room and left to gather his other boxes.
His second entrance to the room didn't produce any recognition from the shaggy, brown haired guy either, even when Topher didn't quite manage to turn the loaded cart with all his stuff at quite the right angle to make it past the door frame and the plastic slide against the metal with a loud squealing sound that make his teeth clench together. The technophile just kept his fingers flying across the keyboard, occasionally muttering numbers under his breath.
Topher decided that if that's the way it was going to be, it was better than them yelling at each other or having a show down display of masculinity (which he so would have won). Or maybe the guy was just really into his project, which Topher could completely understand. He had been known to miss a day or two of school finishing a program that would, when grafted into a target server, proceed to collect data, like bank information, and, without input from Topher, hack said account and drain it without anyone even noticing anything was wrong. Or, like his favorite project from high school, a program that spread virus-like to every teacher's computer and automatically returned the google results for porn sites, no matter how innocent a term they searched.
Hey, he never claimed to use his powers for good.
So that's why he shrugged off the roommate's behavior and proceeded to unpack all his things and set up his two servers and laptop (he was starting to think adding another server sounded like a good idea, and it had nothing to do with competition with Mr. Roommate). He was so engrossed in organizing himself that he jumped when the sound of joints popping broke the silence, and the other guy exclaimed, "Dude, when did you get here?"
They got to talking, and Topher finds that despite his misgiving, he and this Ash guy have much more in common than he thought they would. Perhaps he'd get used to having a roommate after all.
It's only after a couple of months of school that they broach the subject of projects. After all, MIT is a highly competitive place and nobody wants to let the wrong person into their confidence only to find out later that their ideas have been stolen. But Ash and Topher, they mesh together, acting as each other's sound boards.
"What if you reprogram the input to something more quantifiable? I mean, right now, you have the computer identifying the statistics and then quantifying it, but if the stats are already quantified, that would save a chunk of processing," Topher suggested one day, as Ash was chugging his third beer in an hour.
"No, that's part of the ingenuity of it, quantifying the abstract. I mean, what's the point of inputting more stats if that's what everybody is doing? I want to make the computer understand things from the human point of view." Ash exclaimed agitatedly. He paced the short width of the room, tugging his fingers through the mullet he was slowly cultivating.
Topher was silent for a minute, mulling. He seemed to come to a decision, nodding before turning to his own computer and booting it up.
"I want to show you my project. Maybe this will help, but you can't tell anyone about it, understand? This is my baby." He said seriously.
Ash stopped and stared at him. "Is this that project you blew off four days of classes for because you thought you had a break through?"
Topher winced at the reminder. He had not been a nice person to be around after those four days and hitting a road block after sensing victory so near. Ever since then, he'd been stalled on his project. And it all had to do with the same thing Ash was trying to incorporate into his project.
"Yeah," he admitted quietly. "You understand how important this is to me?"
"Dude," Ash responded in his 'duh' voice, "Is beer foamy?"
He laughed at that, and swung the computer screen around so Ash could read through the program. It took him thirty minutes of silent concentration. Topher could even see several points where Ash's eyes squinted a bit together as he had to reread several lines to understand what he was doing. It made Topher feel a sense of pride that even Ash, who was brilliant in his own right, had to really follow what he was doing.
"Woah, man," he said, collapsing into his desk chair. "Is that what I think it is?"
"What do you think it is?"
"You're trying to write up a personality. A human personality, not just a technical personality like the iPhone's Siri. You've even got that bit in there about physical quirks, limitations on specific body organs. Why would you give a cyber personality asthma? Damn, man. You trying to play God?" There was a hint of awe in his voice, but it was mostly overshadowed by curiosity.
"Yes," Topher answered, wondering how Ash would react to that.
"Damn," he repeated. He reached for another beer.
"But do you see it?" he asked, grabbing a beer for himself.
"Yeah," Ash said, sucking the can dry from the bottom. "You're putting the abstract into quantifiable terms. Defining it so that the computer can understand it and deal with it. Breaking it down into baby steps, but a whole hella lot of baby steps. How long'd that take you?"
Topher spun around on the chair. "I've been working on it for years. And the way I see it, this isn't even going to be the final version. To really complete this, I'd need to base it off of composites of actual human people. Get access to their brainwaves, their MRI scans, psych evaluations, the whole nine yards."
"You'd need serious backing to do that. Like government backing. Don't tell me you plan to work for the man?"
"Do I look like white collar kind of guy to you?" Topher asked, gesturing to his fleece pj bottoms, white tee, and flannel overshirt.
"Well…" Ash tilted his head, squinting one eye. "I may just be drunk, but if you put a collar on that tee, it could pass."
Topher chucked his empty can at Ash's head.
"Hey, Topher?" Ash asked him one night, after they'd both shut down the computer screens and were under the covers, waiting for Morpheus to claim them.
"Yeah?" he responded groggily.
"Do you believe in monsters?"
He wasn't quite sure what to make of the question, and with his half asleep mind, couldn't even begin to fathom what Ash was really asking. He grunted.
Ask continued on like he responded properly. "Cause they exist you know. You might think I'm crazy, a lot of people do until they see them for themselves. But they're out there. My adoptive family, they hunt them. And the thing is, they know I'm good with computers, so they always ask me to find the hunts for them, but I can only do so much, you know? I can only track the patterns after a thing's been through a town and eaten all the children or whatever. But my project? The one I was trying to put together when you showed me your baby? I'm trying to quantify behaviors of the monsters, by types. See if I can figure out where they're gonna show before they show."
There was silence for a while. Topher was suddenly wide awake, unsure if Ash had been smoking or drinking or both, but seriously creeped out either way.
When Ash spoke again, Topher jerked a little at the unexpected noise. "It's mostly the big baddies I wanna track—demons. Nasty pieces of shit. They possess people you know? I'll get you an amulet to keep it from happening to you. But the higher ranked ones, they're supposed to be preceeded by omens, and they don't just possess people. They torture and kill, not just one person but a whole bunch. If I can just figure out the omens, I think I could do it. You're right though. If a human personality can be digitalized, so can the traits of a demon. Baby steps, dude…. Guess I'm just… I'm just saying thank you… inspiring me… won't steal though, that's lame."
His voice trailed off into snores soon after that, but it wasn't the noise that kept Topher awake long into the night.
They never talked about monsters again, but Topher noticed when Ash made breakthroughs on his project, and when he found a small, silver amulet sitting on his keyboard one day, he quietly wore it against his chest, it's cool weight a comforting weapon against an unfathomable enemy.
It was nearly a year later, in their junior year, that Ash finally asked Topher the big question, the one he'd been waiting for ever since he'd shown off his pride and joy. They were, for once, sitting in the common room of their floor, eating and relaxing before the stress of the academics really kicked in.
"What would your platform be for an artificial human personality? Cause, I mean, there's no point in programming in physical ticks for a computer and you haven't shown any interest in bionics…" Ash trailed off, taking a huge bite out of his pepperoni and anchovies pizza slice.
Topher idly licked his salt and vinegar potato chips, savoring the flavor while considering whether or not he actually wanted to answer that question. In the end, it was Ash asking and that meant he was really the only person he'd trust to know the depth of his ambition.
"Ideally, I'd be putting a personality into an actual person. That's really the only application for what I want to do, that would actually test how well I can create a personality."
Ash had frozen half way through taking another bite of pizza, his mouth gaping open. Topher plunged ahead.
"I mean, think about it. If you can program a person with another personality, then people would pay literally millions to have themselves altered. They do it all the time with their bodies, why not mental traits as well? And, well, there could be a task force like group of people who could police even better than, well the police. They could download a set of skills particular to any given case and that would make them baller at bringing down the bad guys. Think like the matrix but this is real. It's possible, I know it is, I just need to compile profiles to start actually building personalities."
Ash had carefully set down his pizza slice while he'd been talking and was studying Topher with an intense look that he couldn't quite read.
"But you're talking about whole personalities being transplanted into people—not just a few traits tweeked, Topher. What would you do with the original person? You can't fit two people into one body, that's not how it works." Ash looked the most serious Topher had ever seen him. Grave and solemn and intense, all focused on him. He could feel his throat going dry.
"Well, that is a tiny kink, b-but, I figure that if I just take a scan of the original personality, then I can save it and then just wipe the person clean so that they can be fully programmed with a completely new profile. Only volunteers, though. I think it could be tricky if they didn't volunteer, they might wind up subconsciously fighting against the programming if they don't want it."
"You think?" Ash's voice was sarcastic, not unusual for him, but it set off alarm bells in Topher's head.
Ask kicked back from the table, sending the chair scattering across the floor. Topher stood as well, unsure what was going through the other man's mind. He followed as Ash stalked out of the room and down the hall back to their room.
"Ash?" he asked. He thought that, of anyone, Ask would understand.
Ash just kept moving faster, ducking into their room and immediately grabbing a baseball bat from the corner.
"What are you-HEY!" Topher cried, rushing forward as Ash hefted the bat and swung it down on Topher's servers. Pieces of plastic and metal bent and broke, even as he brought the bat down three, four, five more times. Topher threw himself at Ash, trying to tug the bat from his hands, hoping against hope to save some of his work.
"What the FUCK?" he yelled. "What the FUCK?"
Ash grunted, his face set in a hard, entirely un-Ash like scowl. "Where I come from, what you're trying to create, we have a word for. Possession. As in, a demon riding your meat sack anywhere it wants and screwing up everything it can. For fun. I may not be a hunter, but I know how to recognize evil when I see it."
Topher was seeing red at these words. He tugged the bat from the other man's grasp and held it tightly in his hands. "I don't give a fuck what you call it. It's the future and I'm going to create it. You can go piss off a bridge, you and your fucking monsters."
He hefted the bat up high and brought it down towards Ash's head. He ducked under the bat, stepping in close to avoid giving Topher the room he needed to swing again. Topher yelled incoherently at Ash, shoving him back.
Behind him, footsteps pounded into the room, hands wrapping around both their shoulders, pulling them apart. Ash got a swing in to Topher's nose, before his hand was restrained. Topher struggled and pulled away, trying to make Ash pay for destroying his baby.
"You know what you know," Ash spat. "But dude, don't you dare think for a moment think you're anything but human. And I know how to take down monsters- I can take down humans who are monsters in training."
In the end, both of them were expelled from MIT. Ash returned to the middle of nowhere and Topher moved out to LA, taking odd jobs, sometimes shady cyber hacks, just to make rent. He kept the pieces of hardware Ash had destroyed, spending months trying to pull any data or recovered files off the pieces that he could. When that failed, he started to painstakingly recreate it. It was immeasurably slow and he grew discouraged, knowing that even if he did manage to reconceive everything he had, he needed much more resources then what he had access to at the moment.
So when he was arrested for being a contact to another hacker, and a Ms. Adele DeWitt approached him with an offer he couldn't refuse… well, he simply couldn't refuse.
That's how he found himself standing in the middle of the dollhouse, underground. At his back, a fifteen server supercomputer hummed quietly. A chair was in the middle of being built, wires hanging from all around it, disappearing into computers and the floor. This was his domain.
"I know what I know," he whispered in the splendor of his office overlooking the spa décor of the building. He watched the empty space below, seeing his creations filling the space. He was so close now. Just a few more technicalities to work out. Then he could start compiling scans. And then… and then, he would begin to create.
Fin.