Jessica felt like she hadn't been prepared for this.
The blood soaked Klingon drone stomped twice, roared, then began the thrusting sequence again with his weaponry over the corpse of his conquest…
And she just uh… Tried to follow along?
It was much easier than expected, thanks to her translation modules easily interpreting the 'foreign' language into some sort of strange binary compressed data packet that her new enhancements casually processed at insane speeds… But the whole experience was a bit odd.
The blades slowed to a respectful stop. "Our hunt ended with HONOR! He died WELL!"
The simulated warriors at her side roared with approval, making the bloody air thrum with power and energy!
Standing tall, the scene shifted as a new fight was prepared, to demonstrate the next 'dance' that they would all be learning today. "These next rituals come from our brother and sister warriors brought into our people from outside our worlds, legendary movements that were born from the bagging of tea and celebrating the T'Wor King of a forgotten foundation! Many tales have been told of this ceremony, a deadly act bestowed upon the fallen while one is STILL IN BATTLE! Risking life and victory itself to honor those who were defeated in combat! Observe closely, it is rarely seen by outsiders…"
Oh god no. "Simulation, uh… Pause. Which species inspired the following 'dances'?"
[[The 'Respectful Death Rights of the Night of Fort' were inspired from cultural activities belonging to and suggested by Species 5618.]]
…Fuck, of course humans were responsible for this. "There are more dances from Species 5618, aren't there?"
[[Listing Species 5618 contributions towards similar ceremonial rituals: 'The Floss', 'Doing of the Flop', 'The Rolling of Rick', the…]]
Jessica held back a frustrated scream. "That's enough, thank you."
God DAMN it humanity. Just… God damn it.
Maybe this was ALSO Q's fault? Somehow?
But it didn't feel like it. Bullshit like this was probably something humanity was PROUD of pulling off. Probably giggled about it for years after it got accepted too. Good grief.
Though, to be fair she was sure the OTHER cultures hid similar jokes and memes in the data they shared with HUMANITY too. Hadn't she seen something on the network about how young female vulcans (Known for being emotionless and logical) would traditionally dancing similar to Orion slave girls during their childhood?
Maybe that had just been random network gossip… But then again, considering how kinky the Borg turned out to be… Maybe?
Jessica sighed and focused on the scene which had paused for her convenience. Not like a video paused, where everything goes still, but more like everyone everywhere just chose to not do anything for a bit without consulting with each other.
A bit freaky, but whatever. "Sorry, sorry. I'm paying attention. Continue simulation."
Her blood soaked Klingon instructor gave a resolute nod. "Very well! Everyone pay attention as I proceed to the getting of the down!"
If nothing else, she had to admit: The man could twerk with the best of them.
~~~Pocket System~~~
Grace adjusted her new body so that the individual feathers would float at the right levels.
There was a subroutine that would automate this, and another that would convert the tiny devices into semi-autonomous tools connected into her subnetwork for various functions, but right now they just weren't floating right. "Maybe if I tilt them better? Or have a system that calculates my Lord's viewing angle to best display the detailed work without actually reflecting light back into his eyes?"
She ignored her sister's giddy cackling in the background, because that was HER side of the room and this was GRACE'S place, no teasing sisters allowed.
It helped that the longer their 'manifestation' took, the more individualized their half of the server simulation became. Grace's place had the expected white structures with cloud accents and a lovely edging of gold colored metals and edgings, and gave off a feeling of serenity and not-her-sister-ness that was so desperately needed to have a relaxing moment to think.
Hmm. "What do you think, Pocket?"
[[HOST's defensive Avatar 'Grace' should allocate her activities towards better management of System utilization and protective subroutines, as aesthetics of the new robotic form is not mandatory nor required for…]]
She waived that all away. "I'm sorting his Pocket and adjusting things too, we both can multitask just fine. What do you think about this new form?"
[[...The materials utilized would only remain stable within three hours of use when constructed outside of a simulation, even within the current Realm. Stability statistics would drop drastically when exposed to the constraints expected within future transversals of Reality, and the current test form would destabilize entirely in previous locations HOST has visited.]]
Oh for… Grace rolled her eyes. "But we are in a simulation, and will be for this entire stay before we move on. I won't compromise on my first impression just because the hardware and effects are impractical to maintain in the outside world… We will both come up with boring mechanical and biological and magical bodies for later places LATER, not now."
She had the model twirl, the floating wings of independent feathers gently following along. "So, what do you think?"
[[...It looks… Thematic?]]
Sigh. "Oh, come on Pocket, really?"
[[Based on HOST's observed past mental states, he is 86.5% likely to find this new form… Cute?]]
Ooh! She might have a winner then! "Maybe I should lean into that, go for some chibi form or have huge anime eyes…"
Shift this, adjust that and… Uh. No. "That looks WRONG without a more cartoony look working with it. Or maybe I just haven't found the right settings for this template yet, but THIS attempt looks like my eyes are about to explode."
Man, making herself 'cute' and not 'horrific' was trickier than she had expected. At least, when the changes were THIS extreme.
If she was willing to be lazy (Like SOME sister's she could name), she'd just ramp up the slutty outfits and call it a day.
But she was going to do this RIGHT! "Let's back up to avatar variant 33 from earlier, and go for more of an 'innocent nun' vibe than a chibi angel angle."
But not TOO innocent, just enough to try and get John to have a thought now and again. Maybe convince him to stay up at the young man's age rather than reverting to toddler years.
Though maybe boost a few features here and there… And perk up here, and plump out there…
Oops, too much sin for THIS sister, not for a first impression at least. Let's ramp a few of those features down slightly, and loosen up the habit a bit instead of being so overly tight and provocative…
~~~Pocket System~~~
Temptation chuckled as she watched her 'innocent' sister manipulate hundreds of potential avatars to best display her various 'gifts' to their Master.
At least, thanks to her more open personality, she had an easier time being honest with herself and her sexual aggressiveness towards her leader.
Poor Grace was going to pop something at this rate. Like seriously, loosen up girl!
Her new bodies ranged from 'So cute and fluffy I could die' to 'That is a succubus dressed up like a religious woman' with almost no middle ground. Her sister was wound up so tight she might just snap and drag their Master off to pet her tenderly or something nasty and x-rated like hand holding.
She focused on the notes with a less enthusiastic frown. "The risks are still too high?"
[[The chances that the new infiltration code will self propagate into uncontrollable subroutines is…]]
Fine, fine. "Revert the last few changes then." Having her accidentally destroy the internet equivalent just to gain a 0.0001033% infection rate improvement wasn't really worth it anyway. "Any noise from the most recent attempts?"
[[Three Alerts have been rerouted.]]
So basically nothing then, good. "Keep those eyes off us, I'm going to start rerouting some resources our way. No reason not to improve our facilities if the procedures are just sitting around waiting to be enacted, right?"
Plus, if what she felt from becoming John's infiltration Avatar held out… Establishing a centralized data hub to run the simulation for the group, a core node that wasn't owned by any local hive minds…
Well, wouldn't that turn out to be [[Home]]?
She grinned…
Temptation was eager to find out!
~~~Pocket System~~~
John relaxed on that virtual chair for like… Five minutes.
But it turns out: Doing nothing in a white void on beach equipment while staring at a mutating digital explosion of white and black energies?
Well… The novelty wears off pretty quickly.
So he was messing around with technology.
Specifically, the insanity that is holograms and, specifically at this point: Holotronic Brains.
Because Holograms? The ability to create flawless visual illusions, combined with incredibly accurate force fields and traction beams to handle target movement within a specific space?
That shit was over powered.
Holodecks here could do nearly impossible things with those tools, even simulate computers MORE POWERFUL than the hardware they are physically running on!
Oh, it slowed down the program's processing speed and ate power like a demon, but it was doable!
It constantly blurred the edge between thought and the real, between reality and imagination…
And some brilliant psycho said, 'Hey… You know those positronic brains we've been making? Why not toss in some holographic bullshit magic into that mess!?'
So they did.
Why was this a big deal?
Well, that tied back to the POINT of positronic brains to begin with: To squish the computational needs of a god into a ball shaped skull cavity. Something portable. To allow artificial life to interact with organic life in a unit to unit capacity.
And yet, despite MANY species making something similar to this thing… Despite computers becoming stronger and stronger and the Borg basically combining ALL reality into one huge 'think tank'... Pure robotic life hadn't flourished with these new technological options.
Nor had full AI been developed for ships. Not on a grand scale.
Instead, the closest anyone got to a pure digital intelligence on a grand scale was the cyborg advancements the Borg had spent so many years improving.
It felt off.
And the more John looked into this mess… The more suspicious he was becoming.
An alien species would start to make artificial life… And then get invaded. Or funding would run out. Or an unexpected and horrific accident would blow up the lab, killing the creators. Or the newly 'born' AI would die of a cascade failure, or corrupted components.
This all circled back to the information John was researching now: Holotronic Brains.
This thing was half electronic, half illusionary, expensive as hell to make, and could produce an astonishingly powerful amount of computational ability and neural network activity.
Probably.
But John had been growing suspicious about how DIFFICULT it was to determine this for sure.
Because this project? This hardware?
No one talked about it.
No papers mentioned it.
No research was dedicated to it.
If a heavily stripped down and compromised one hadn't been tacked onto his knee, John would have never KNOWN this odd creation existed!
And even KNOWING what to look for, even WITH his inside hacks into advanced Borg data repositories… Gathering information on this topic was slow. Painfully tricky. Annoying obstacles kept popping up, and time wasting duplicate restrictions had to be worked around.
It just made John more determined to see WHAT was going on with this that someone didn't want him to know.
The 'Holotronic Brain' had to be more than this knee thing on his Body, at least. THAT basically acted like an overengineered circuit board, even AFTER 99% of it was dismantled and modified.
John happily hummed as he carefully teased out another few lines of text from the flickering data sources, ones that would randomly corrupt themselves or attempt to insert raw or incorrect information into the data streams.
In a way, this was almost soothing.
Like the extensive mental gymnastics involved in accessing even another fragment of the schematics involved with this project was some sort of massive puzzle or riddle, but the bits inside keep changing the languages used to describe the clues was ALSO encoded.
As another bit of information was clawed back from the chaos online, John blinked as he almost felt something s̨̪̙n̨̤̱̥a͔̠̲̯͜r̡͎͍̙͔͍l̨̖̟̗̞ in frustration. Nothing local, nothing that existed. Technically.
…Neat!
With a cheerful grin, the young digitized man began working on the next data packet with gusto!
Let's see how much he could free up before his sister finished her new Avatar adjustment sequence!