AN: Alternative title: The Awakening S2E2 Anti-Social Network
Being an intellectually superior 11 year-old recluse of a nerd had its advantages, if you asked Neil.
His preference for social isolation is what has allowed Neil to already be well on his way to receiving his high school diploma despite only going into junior high this upcoming school year. He has relatively few bullies at school due to his lack of a social presence, and those few who still come after him quickly realize that you only bully Neil when he permits it… or else.
Oh, Neil can interact with others his age perfectly fine. But like any self respecting introvert, he needed some down time. Which he would usually have in abundance back at home, considering he's typically three assignments ahead of everyone in his classes, even the teachers.
The disadvantages of Neil's preferred lifestyle were negligible for the majority of his life, and thus required little contemplation.
Until his mother signed him up for this hell hole of a camp.
Suddenly, Neil was thrust into a setting where he had nowhere to escape to. The attic of the mess hall had been his only way to get some peace and quiet, and that particular hidey hole was discovered weeks ago.
Neil needed to be alone. He needed silence, science, and the steady stream of code across a computer screen like a fire needs oxygen to stay lit.
So the question remains. How can Neil get these other campers to leave him be?!
His eyes search through the science tent, looking for anything that would give him an idea, some inspiration so he wouldn't snap-
His eyes land on the old box of calculators, and Neil feels his eyes widen and a smile growing on his face.
Max was going to need a lot more caffeine than this single cup of coffee could provide to deal with this stupidity.
He honestly thought Neil had more sense than this. Giving an entire camp of technologically isolated children access to just a small taste of something even remotely resembling the internet? That's a disaster waiting to happen, especially when some unfortunate soul (probably David) comes along to try and take the devices away.
How in Hades did Neil even program a chatbot into calculators so old Max's ancestors in India would have used them to fight back the British?
And what is this uncomfortable feeling that's been weighing on him ever since he woke up?! It makes Max feel irritated and is an entirely unpleasant feeling to experience in Max's camp, a place where he's supposed to be able to be at complete ease.
And now Neil was trying to insult Max's intelligence by handing him a lifeless chatbot and expecting Max to play along?
Needless to say, Max shot down that bird before it could even leave the nest.
"Hey, 'Neil.' Divide by zero."
Looking at the crumbling calculator in his hand, Max couldn't even bring himself to feel his typical smug satisfaction at Neil's admittance to defeat. What was wrong with Neil today? Something about him set Max on edge, a feeling that Max vaguely remembers, but can't exactly pinpoint.
The feeling in the air, the strain on his claim of the camp grounds, Max's uneasiness and irritation. It's almost exactly like what happened when Ered-
Turning his head sharply in order to have a full view of Neil, Max gathered.
Well, shit. So that's what's going on.
Neil has awoken his ability as a Legacy and consequently "lost" himself in the aspect of science.
By their very nature, Godlings and Legacies are constantly walking the tightrope between the mortal and divine. Most of the time, they'll stay entirely balanced, never fully human or god. Only under extreme circumstances will they tip over the edge and succumb to one side of their biology.
When a Godling becomes "lost," it means that they've lost their mortality under the weight of their divinity. They become what their divinity most closely represents. In Max's case it'd be trickery, like his father. As for Neil…
Looking down once more at the smoldering calculator in his hand, Max felt the energy emitting from it. It radiated with a small glow of power that Max couldn't decipher. If he had to guess, Max would say Neil's ability had something to do with coding. Because no matter how smart Neil is, there's no physical way he could properly program a chatbot onto outdated calculators without the proper tools (and everyone with half a brain knows full well that Cameron would never fork over the money to buy them).
It's too soon to make sure, however. With the sheer amount of power Neil was giving off right now, Max wouldn't be able to gather anything else from the other boy, let alone the nature of his newly acquired ability.
Internally sighing, Max walks away from the power high Legacy before him. Unlike with Ered, Neil's control (and claim) over the camp would be easy to override, being a Legacy. And his abilities had only recently awoken and appeared relatively tame in this environment that almost completely lacked electronic access. Whatever chaos resulted from Neil's actions wouldn't be too devastating, so Max decided to sit this one out for the time being.
If it got too out of hand, he'd clue Neil in on his heritage. The philosophical inquiry of the Gods and their place within this universe of scientific laws and principles would no doubt knock Neil out of this power trip of his enough for Max to "ground" the Legacy so this shit doesn't happen again.
Thoughts turning to more important matters, Max made his way towards the mess hall. He was curious about what would happen if he gave David one of these calculators.
No time like the present to try it out.
Neil stretched back as his computer went into sleep mode. He didn't know what it was about today, but he felt far more energized than he usually does after a few solid hours in front of a screen.
Usually, he'd be feeling the aftereffects of straining his eyes to look through the computer's unnatural light. His back and bottom would be tense after staying in the same position for so long. He'd be crashing after the energy drinks he chugged down to stay awake and focused slowly left his system. Not to mention his poor wrists, which would be one step closer to getting carpal tunnel after all that typing.
No, right now, Neil feels so energized, he's actually looking forward to talking to other people.
Crazy, right?
Neil was starting to feel… uncomfortable.
"Yeah, dude. Nice going. They actually prefer the fake you."
While Neil purposefully programmed the chatbots to slowly desensitize his fellow campers to his presence in order to get them to stay away from the science camp tent, something about the way Max said that irked Neil.
"Prefer fake you" he'd said. While Neil was more than willing to compromise ethics in the name of advancing science, he never let himself lose sight of his subject's humanity. People, despite how illogical, aggravating, and shortsighted they are, were valuable resources that he took great care in maintaining throughout his experiments.
Machines can be rebuilt (even if it takes him weeks worth of all nighters and a shipping container full of energy drinks). People… can't. They're a precious commodity that Neil is willing to admit he enjoys having around. He wouldn't replace people, especially those he begrudgingly calls his friends, with a string of code that he has complete and absolute control over. He'd gone down that road at age 6, and couldn't stand more than a week isolated with the AI he'd created to keep him company.
It's algorithm was flawless, and the responses were nuanced enough that he was certain it'd be able to pass the Turing test easily. But the AI lacked something crucial.
Even with its flawless coding, it wasn't human.
That was the day Neil decided that, no matter how much he despised certain aspects of humanity, he'd never be able to completely isolate himself from them. The other campers, on the other hand, didn't appear to share this sentiment.
They wanted the chatbot as their friend over him.
And that… That was something Neil could not abide.
Despite how loud, crazy, and terrible the other campers at Camp Campbell can be, they were Neil's friends. No program would take that from him. Even if it meant he had to destroy the very thing he'd created.
Looking at the upgraded code, Neil felt his stomach drop with dread.
Terminator. The Matrix. Hell, even WALL-E. Plenty of movies have been made about technology running rampant when humans bit off more than they could chew.
If he didn't get these calculators away from everyone, losing his friends would be the least of Neil's worries.
(And why was Max so shocked Neil did this with calculators from the 1970s? He should be well aware of Neil's technological genius by now. Neil's honestly surprised it took him this long to create a sentient AI. He had access to far better computer parts before he got sent to Camp Campbell.)
"Calculations complete. My analysis is... absolutely fucking not! You humans all suck. Especially you Godlings and Legacies! It doesn't matter whether I teach you better online etiquette or rehabilitate you to socialize more in person. It's people that ruin socializing. Also time moves about a million times slower for me than it does you and you want me to stay here with you all summer? Fuck that noise."
And with just a few clicks, Neil_Spiel_v2.0 ended its stay at Camp Campbell in the most permanent way possible.
Neil honestly felt conflicted.
On one hand, he was relieved his AI off'd itself. Neil would be sure to go through his computer's code later to make sure, but as things were right now, the world was no longer in danger of a real life Skynet.
On the other hand, the words the chatbot had left its creator left Neil feeling particularly introspective, something Neil didn't care for. Too much introspection led to philosophical debates with himself over the nature of humanity, and Neil wasn't in the mood to go down that road without Dolph around to bounce ideas off of.
Never has Neil had to question his hermit-like qualities as much as he had to today. He never had to question anything before he got to this camp.
His calculations were always flawless, every variable accounted for. No one alive today, sans his mother, could top him in scientific theory and application. From age 3, it was never a fact of whether Neil's experiments were flawed, but what someone else had done to ruin it.
(Looking back, years later, Neil would see that way of thinking was very much given to him by his mother. Despite being the second greatest scientific mind alive, she lacked the capacity to recognize her own flaws and incorporate them into her hypothesis.)
(Which is why she will always be second to him.)
All the energy he'd felt today suddenly drained from him. Feeling simultaneously tired yet completely settled, he tunes back into the present, once again taking in the smoldering electronic equipment.
Neil hadn't given his peers much thought in years. Other than what data they could prove for his latest thesis.
"Do you think maybe it's right?" he asks his two friends, both still baffled by the AI's unexpected (and frankly, quite violent) suicide. "That socializing sucks because we're all just shitty people?"
Because that was the question, wasn't it? Were his hermit ways just a physical manifestation of his inability to see the flaws in himself? Was he projecting his inferiority at communication on those he'd deemed as intellectually inferior?
"You guys wanna see a cat video?" Nikki interjects suddenly, her short attention span not able to remain silent for much longer when she had a prime source of stimulation within arms reach.
"Hell, yes!" Max replies, his eyes lighting up, that out of place weight that'd been on his shoulders all day suddenly gone at the prospect of silly cats doing silly things.
"Yeah." Neil sighed, making his way over to the computer before his friends found a way to break it.
He can contemplate his place in the universe later. Preferably with Gwen's seemingly endless paged notebook to write down his thoughts and David's specialty fruit juice to take the edge off.
"Also, what the hell did it mean when it said "Godlings?"
AN: This chapter had me scratching my head. Looking at the actual Camp Camp episode, the moral of the story appeared to lean towards humanity's steady reliance on technology and apathy towards our fellow man, but I just could not figure out how to fit that into this chapter. Like, I put the quotes in like I usually do just to keep the story flowing like usual, but I didn't really focus on it like the show did. I'm worried about my execution of the themes in this chapter. Was everyone in character? Did the story make sense? Everything makes sense when I read it, but I want to know what you guys thought.
So, "lost" and "grounding." Much like "rejection," they're concepts that just kinda appeared as I was writing this. (And that I'm just now realizing was inspired by Yara_Meijer's "Red of Dawn" fic, so check that out if you like Inazuma Eleven and want to read something much better written.) I guess the best way to explain it is to tell you my thought process.
In my mind, when I think of Godlings and Legacies rampaging and causing actual damage with their chaos (as opposed to the chaos that usually follows them and that councilors across Lake Lilac have to deal with), I see it as them getting "lost" in their "aspect." They are not entirely divine, and so their human sides are susceptible to being overwhelmed by their powers so much that their humanity gets "lost." Depending on the God, there are different ways their Godlings and Legacies can express this. "Rejection" can be seen as a type of getting "lost", where in a Godling of Aphrodite loses themselves in the concept of "love," and consequently embodies and spreads "love" in one of the worst ways possible, obsession.
(The opposite is also possible. Remember the "Cage of Heretics" the auction houses use? Yeah, that thing is capable of completely suppressing their godly side, making them entirely human, for a time.)
While completely losing oneself to their aspect isn't common, isolated incidents are frequent with large concentrations of Godlings and Legacies, especially whenever a Godling/Legacy first awakens their abilities. (Max himself caused quite the amount of mayhem when he first unlocked his ability to gather.) "Grounding" is something a more experienced Godling can do to draw up the Godling/Legacy's human side so they can be balanced again. Staying unbalanced too long can have detrimental effects on the Godling/Legacy's health, not even counting the damage they can cause to others while in that state. While not typically necessary, as in instances like Neil's the Godling/Legacy is able to pull themselves back from their aspect after sometime. In some severe cases, however, multiple Godlings would have to step in to "ground" the rampaging child. This is more common with the more volatile or less structured aspects like War (Ares) or Magic (Hecate). Tabii's case of "rejection" is slowly reaching this point, but she's okay for now.
I hope that explanation made sense.
In regards to Neil's ability, I decided to make it revolve around manipulating code. Not really something he can actively work on at a summer camp, but David and Gwen will try their best to instill some better ethics into him before setting him loose onto the world with such a dangerous ability in a technologically advanced society. Imagine what kind of ability he'd have if he was a full fledged Godling and not just a Legacy? Actually, now that I think about it, Neil's mom might be "lost in science" just like he was. It would give ample explanation to my headcanon of her never having time for him because she's too busy "sciencing." Welp, we never see her, so that's not something I'll be exploring.
If you have any questions about what the heck is going on in this story, leave a comment. If you don't have questions and just want to say something, leave a comment. If you want to bash on my horrendous writing, leave a comment! All comments are welcome in this household!