Note to previous readers: updated chapter 1 with some additional content - was meant to be separate but think it belongs there really :)
Titch wandered along the hallway, muttering to herself as she pattered back and forth. This wasn't good. This couldn't possibly be good.
Chris and Ivy. The idea made her cringe. Not only that, it made her angry! Only this morning he was still fairly wary of her, yet all it takes is a day of mucking about and suddenly they become the best of friends! Now they teased each other relentlessly, giggling and play-fighting like a pair of lovesick children. When one of those friendly altercations had resulted in Titch being knocked off the sofa by a flying cushion, she'd decided it was time to be alone for a while.
Titch stared at the floor as she walked, watching it pass beneath her tiny feet. Being treated like a person was right up there on her list of priorities, no doubt about it. But this? She wanted this sort of thing, now? The revelation had caught her completely by surprise. Wasn't it only some weeks ago that she decided friendship was her desire? The more she thought about it, though, the more it seemed to be true. It would be... nice... to have that kind of connection with someone.
Oh, but why did it have to be that moron Chris? And since it most definitely did, why did that stupid persocom of his have to materialise just before she figured this out? She groaned quietly, stamping a little harder with each step. The most important - no, the only important person in her existence was now being doted upon by that gorgeous KESS model. Her neurologic processors thrummed as if in complaint and she let them, wallowing in her self-pity.
It seemed entirely pointless. Even without Ivy there to distract him, Chris could never think of her the way she wanted. Of course he couldn't, for all sorts of obvious reasons. Reasons she didn't want to admit were there, and refused to think about. Titch clapped her little hands to her face and the bell in her hair tinkled sadly. Maybe her self-diagnostics were lying to her. Maybe she really was going crazy. What was she thinking, even entertaining the idea in the first place? Is this what emotions did to you? Made you stupid?
Fine, then; she was obviously stupid. So there. Just like Chris. A perfect, imperfect, stupid match.
She sighed miserably. In any case, there was nothing to do about it now. She would simply have to accept it, and that was that. Maybe she should at least mention it to Chris, so he knew. Yes, then he'd be aware of the reason why she would be slowly descending into madness in the foreseeable future! That idea worried her deeply, though; what if he couldn't handle it? What if it weirded him out? He definitely wouldn't know what to do with that information either way. Perhaps it would be less disappointing to keep it a secret. But if she didn't at least say something… Well, she'd have to talk to him in private, assuming she could find some way of prising Ivy off him for a few minutes. Futile as it was, she felt it would at least be interesting to watch his reaction. Maybe it would even be funny, she thought halfheartedly... You know, instead of just tragically pathetic and sad.
Loud laughter erupted from the open lounge doorway and Titch scowled, her mood in perfect contrast to the two in the other room. Yes, she would talk to him, and she hoped he had a pounding bloody headache tomorrow when she did! He'd risen to her accidental "challenge" with great enthusiasm, much to Ivy's delight. It hadn't been long before he was laughing idiotically at his persocom's ridiculous antics. The idea of enjoying a film together had promptly sailed out the window as well, then.
Titch began heading towards the lounge; she might as well see what those two were up to. Ivy was clearly horrendously irresponsible (and Titch thought she herself was bad!) and Chris was incomprehensibly thick even when sober, so it would be up to her to police their stupidity anyway. Titch padded back into the room, finding the two of them kneeling on the carpet together. Ivy had a gentle grip on his arms, apparently positioning them for something. The TV played on in the background, its story long forgotten in the afternoon light.
"OK, so now it's time to do a test. Hold your hand up like this," she held her hand in a grasping gesture, fingers and thumb several centimetres apart. Chris copied her obediently and she nodded in satisfaction, picking up the bottle she'd been feeding to Chris earlier.
"Ready? Now when I drop this bottle, try and grab it as it falls through your fingers."
Chris blinked at her. "Is that empty?" he asked.
"Think quick!" Ivy exclaimed as she dropped it without warning. It hit the ground with a thud, toppling over. The contents - of which about a third remained - sloshed towards the open neck of the bottle, but in an instant Ivy had dextrously swiped it off the floor and not a drop was spilled.
"Oops." Chris chuckled. "Nice save. What does that mean then?"
"It means you sucked at this sober and you suck at it drunk." Ivy laughed, and Chris snatched the bottle from her hand.
"Liar! I caught it the first time!"
"Hah! Barely! You were so bad the first time I was almost wondering if booze would actually make you better!"
They laughed again before Ivy spotted Titch watching them dispassionately.
"Oh, there you are! Where've you been? The human experiment is going badly, we're never going to get any useful data because our test subject is crap at everything in general."
"Oi!" Chris mumbled around another mouthful of liquid, and Ivy leant across the carpet to get closer to Titch.
"He is fun, see?" she whispered, a clear rejection of Titch's earlier comment. "Hey, wanna watch him try and stand on his head?"
Titch raised an eyebrow. Seriously? But he was still hurting from the other day! He'd probably fall and hurt himself even more.
It was almost tempting.
"No, thanks." She replied, glancing at Chris. The idiot of a man grinned hazily back at her. The bottle in his hands had a label on its side, and Titch tweaked her optics, focusing on the number in the corner. It was nearly 30% alcohol by volume. He was hammered. The resulting relaxed, happy, ignorant demeanour was incredibly aggravating. Titch found herself wishing there were some way she could feel like that... right now it certainly looked like bliss.
Maybe she could. What would make a good analogue for the kind of stupor and impeded thought processes humans experienced while under the influence of alcohol? Titch made a quick connection to her WiODA endpoint, firing off a few search terms about the effects of alcohol on the brain and skimming the results.
It gave her a flash of inspiration. She turned her attention to her neurologic processors, picking one out of the swarm of others and probing the registers it exposed. It felt odd to examine her own hardware in this level of detail, but she found she could sample the data flowing into and out of the processor as it hummed away at its numerous tasks.
A quick web search again... and there: the set of registers she wanted, discussed in a datasheet about NEIS neurologic architecture. It was from a much older series of Minito class persocoms, apparently swiped from inside the company in the past and disseminated via various enthusiast messageboards, but she could see no reason why the instruction set would change between generations.
This was a bad idea, but her curiosity was piqued. She carefully piped the necessary values into the processor's registers, and felt it drop to a sleeping state, its flow of activity ebbing away.
Titch smiled, slowly disabling a few more. This was not unlike the way alcohol inhibited excitatory neurotransmitters in the brain. If this worked as she suspected, she'd start to feel its effects as her systems failed to compensate for the lack in processing power. At first she felt no different at all, so she disabled a thousand.
Nothing. How about ten thousand?
That might have done something… it was hard to tell. A hundred thousand, then.
Titch blinked, experiencing a lurch in her logic loop that made her stagger to one side. Yet still, she recovered and felt pretty normal. Perhaps it felt like she needed to concentrate a little harder now, but clearly her processors were just about coping. She disabled another hundred and fifty thousand processors, and this time she giggled loudly in surprise. Now that felt very different! Oh, that was interesting.
An idiotic grin spread across her face. "Well waddya know." she slurred, slowly and gently easing herself down onto the carpet. "Oh, synthesis is a bit off. Oops."
Chris frowned, confused, and Ivy gasped. "Titch, are you ok? You don't look so good."
Titch waved happily from her seat, blinking slowly. "Eh, just trying a thing. I turned off some processors. Mmm."
The others fell silent. Ivy looked between Titch and Chris, noting that they shared the same glazed expression. "No way... Titch, are you... drunk?"
Titch didn't know. "Maybe? It's a bit fuzzy, but… Chris, is this what drunkenness feels like?"
"Is it harder to move?" Chris asked.
"Oho, yep! My IMU is starved for data," Titch said as she flopped to one side, catching herself with an outstretched hand at the last second. "Oh, look at that."
"How about your thought processes? Can you perform complex maths right now?" Ivy asked.
Titch concentrated for a moment, then laughed. "Haha! Nooooope! There's no spare… thingies."
"Processor time?" Ivy prompted, incredulous.
"That's the stuff." Titch chuckled, and Chris did too.
"I'd say that's… that's a pretty good analogue, Titch. Amazing, I had no idea you could do that!" Chris grinned. Titch beamed in return. No wonder alcoholics did this all the time! With her neuro...neuro... with her stuff being so limited, there was hardly room to spare for difficult thoughts.
She turned her head slowly, noticing Ivy frowning as she looked into the middle distance, concentrating. "I can't seem to do it. I have no software control over my neurologic processors." the other persocom said, looking extremely disappointed.
"That's normal, that's how it should be. You're not supposed to - you aren't supposed to turn them off!" Chris mumbled. This didn't cheer Ivy up one bit. "For Titch… it could be different. Maybe it's the virus, screwing with Titch's shit."
"My shit… huh?" Titch squeaked. Oh, her processors. Hmm. Ivy did look sad, now. She managed to resist an impulsive desire to giggle. It was sort of satisfying Ivy couldn't do this. Actually it was very satisfying. Finally an experience only she and Chris could share!
"If only it were possible… Sorry Ivy," Titch said to the bigger persocom, unable to stop grinning. "That's such a shame."
"I know! It looks so much fun!" Ivy sighed. "Look at you two. Oh, this sucks!"
But she glanced once more at Titch, an unsettlingly mischievous smile appearing on her face. "Then again… it seems the scope of my experiments just doubled."
Titch groaned, trying and failing for the third time to walk along the metre-long ruler Ivy had laid out on the floor for her. She crumpled to the floor, rolling over to see Chris trying to balance a disc case on the edge of his finger. It would fall off almost immediately, but he'd just swear, grin and pick it up again each time, apparently determined to succeed at this latest challenge.
This wasn't fun at all! Titch sighed groggily. Ivy was a bloody menace, forcing them into pointless tasks like this! The larger persocom stood in the middle of the room, watching them both with great enthusiasm and apparently enjoying herself thoroughly. What data could she possibly be getting from this? Or was it just funny to make them look like fools?
"Again!" Ivy laughed, shooing Titch back to the end of the ruler and ignoring her incoherent protests. "Come on, you're doing really well."
"Can't I try that one?" Chris asked cheekily, pointing at the ruler. He'd be able to walk its length in a single step, Titch thought hazily.
"Hah. If I can make it twenty times as long, sure." Ivy replied, handing him the bottle from before. It was now empty. "Here, try balancing this now, it's heavier."
This time Titch made it a few more steps along the ruler before she missed her footing, collapsing again with a tinkling of her little bell. This was no good, maybe she should enable more of her processors. She reinstated fifty thousand of them - enough to let her think a little more clearly. Oh, that was better! She thought she would enjoy her analogue to human drunkenness, but no… it had been satisfying for all of about ten minutes! After that Ivy had cheered up and gone straight back to playing with her drunken human, except now Titch wasn't spared the drama either. There had to be some way to put a stop to her stupid experiments. Titch already knew the word "no" didn't work - it was a tactic she had tried on every single task so far... each of which she'd then found herself performing mere moments later.
But what could stop Ivy's incessant need to explore this matter? Maybe if she was inebriated herself. Then she could do her own stupid experiments and leave them out of it! Alas, it wasn't possible… Titch considered the problem for a moment, as Ivy moved to herd her back to the end of the ruler once again.
"Wait! I have an idea!" she turned to Ivy, firing up her remaining processors and appearing to sober up instantly. Everything became a hundred times more irritating as her capacity to think fully returned, but she forced herself to remain on track. "Eugh... Phew…. need my wits for this. Let me check that properly… Yes. OK, listen." she paced back and forth lucidly. "You really want to know what that feels like, right?" she pointed to Chris, who was groggily absorbed in balancing the bottle and didn't notice.
"Yeah, but I can't control my processors like that. Don't worry, you will do nicely as a surrogate." Ivy grinned and reached for her, but Titch scurried out of the way.
"God you're creepy. Listen to me, what if you give your processors pointless work to do? What if you tied up some of them with menial chores? Better yet, assign them tasks with almost real-time priority. That'll partition them off on those tasks, in a fashion. They'll be useless to you; it'll be like they're turned off, right? Won't that have the same effect?"
"Oh… huh. That's an interesting suggestion." Ivy said, sitting in front of Titch on the floor. She frowned, concentrating for a few moments. To say it seemed like she was thinking hard would probably be an understatement, considering what she was trying to do. A dull plunk sounded from across the room as the bottle fell to the floor, and Titch saw Chris blinking hazily in their direction, trying to understand the exchange that was taking place.
A moment later Ivy gasped, her focus returning to the room. "Oh! Oooh, this feels… strange." she said breathlessly, looking at Titch with excitement.
"You feel stupid, don't you?" Titch giggled, watching her vacant expression. She was stupid, in point of fact. Hah.
Ivy's eyes widened as she grinned. "A little bit, yeah!"
Chris crawled over to them, looking concerned. "Is it - are you OK?" he patted Ivy's arm, but the motion almost caused her to fall over.
"Wow! Wobbly." she muttered, "That's…interesting…"
"Ivy, are you copying Titch?" Chris laughed.
"Yes! Ah, not exactly… it's different…" Ivy corrected herself. Her face was slowly becoming flushed; it appeared working her processors was generating a reasonable amount of heat. Titch interrupted her, eager to set her idea in motion.
"Close enough, Ivy. Anyway Chris, now that she's hammered she can stop torturing us and test herself. Isn't that great?" she sighed contentedly. "Ivy, why don't you wander off and try some of those experiments yourself? Maybe try and stand on your head, see how that goes." she made a shooing motion as if to dismiss Ivy from the room, but the bigger persocom misunderstood.
"That's a great idea Titch!" she mumbled as staggered to her feet. "Chris, help."
"No-" Titch began, her plan beginning to fall apart already.
"Ooookay." Chris replied, struggling to stand himself. He stood in front of Ivy as she wavered from side to side and they smiled at each other stupidly.
"On th-three." Ivy tittered. "One…. two… three!"
She fell forward, deftly catching herself on her hands, but appeared unable to finish the motion and wound up standing on all fours. This was immediately hilarious to her, and she burst into laughter that became all the louder when Chris tried in vain to pick her up by her waist. Ivy managed a few feeble hops with her legs, trying to lift them into the air, but they weren't enough and the two of them fell to the floor, snorting and giggling.
Titch rolled her eyes, aiming a kick at the ruler beside her as the others continued to while away the evening in a drunken stupor.