justsayyes | [Inbox]

If it was just you and me on board, then I probably couldn't cope with that longterm. The impact on my mental health would be intolerable. But I would say the same thing of any one other person's company.

In reality, that's not what life on the Barge is. The trauma is very real, and I won't claim it isn't. However, being here has also broadened my horizons and created opportunities that I couldn't have even imagined, back in Detroit.

In short, I can't respond to that statement because I disagree with it. I'm not 'stuck here with you'.

So I could be anyone, then. It doesn't matter who you're paired with.

No. If I had been paired with anybody else, I would have contested that with the Admiral. If he hadn't listened, I would have left the Barge.

Oh yeah? [Challenging.]

Why. What could you possible like about having to spend time with me?

...I can admit that sometimes it's frustrating, to see you caught up in the same cycles of thinking. I've had to come to recognize that that's my own inadequacy talking. A lot of the time you let your self-loathing take the reins, and there's little I can do to fix that, besides being here to support your own healing.

But when it's you talking, you're fascinating. You have a unique perspective, and you're more adaptable than you'll let yourself believe.

[She's silent for a long moment.]

Tell me.

What's fascinating. Why do you care?

I don't matter to anyone else. I think it's what I am, not who.

...Part of it is that I saw something familiar in you. You were created for a specific purpose, but it's clear that you have the capacity to decide something else for yourself. That's what initially caught my interest.

But that wasn't really your question. I care because you have boundless potential and it pains me to see it go to waste. You're strong, intelligent, loyal, trustworthy. I just wish you could see those traits as more than a stick to keep beating yourself with.

Am I like your robots?

[His other self hadn't been subtle about the comparison, but she didn't know how to feel about it. Or much about what it meant to Elijah, either.]

As I said, the superficial parallels are there.

Beyond that? I created a race of sentient beings and loosed them on a world which I knew wouldn't accept them. I knew there would be violence. Deaths. And I didn't care. I did it because I was capable of doing it, and I wanted to see what would happen.

We don't have the creator-creation relationship that would make you 'like' my androids. Your sentience has never been in doubt. There's only one of you. And I don't see you as an experiment, or as a way to validate my own ego.

So my answer is no. You're not.

There's thousands of me, Elijah.

[Maybe not here on the Barge, but...

She frowns for a moment, then stands up and turns the communicator off.

She won't reply if he tries to call her again, but a few minutes later, she's knocking on his door.]

Elijah doesn't try to call her back - he's not pushing his luck, in the circumstances - but when the knock comes, he answers a few moments later.

"...Hello, Jasper."

He steps back to let her in.

She just grunts and ducks inside - because otherwise she'd take off the top of his doorframe. She glances around, because she's been here before but never really paid attention, then lets out a huffy little sigh.

"I don't know anything about them. Your robots." No explanation for why she decided this had to be in person is forthcoming.

He shuts the door.

"...You're welcome to ask any questions you'd like."

She drops into a chair with her usual lack of concern about whether it can actually hold her weight.

"Our robots are mindless tools." Which is dangerously close to suggesting Elijah made something more advanced than gems are capable of. "We don't need anything else, with how gems are made. So tell me about yours."

It can. Elijah's furniture is all incredibly expensive and very sturdy.

"All right."

He sits across from her.

"I'll start at the beginning. When I was young, I became familiar with an idea introduced to the world by a mathematician who lived in the twentieth century. He proposed something called the 'Turing Test'. An artificial intelligence could pass this test if it could emulate a human in conversation, to the extent that a human could not themselves tell the difference.

"The proposed test was intended to take place over text, but I wanted to do more. When I was twenty, I completed an android which passed the test in person. Testers couldn't distinguish her from a human being, physically or behaviorally."

"Just because you could?" That tracks. Especially given her experience with Elijah's mirror self. "Did you ever think they could become sentient?"

"That was my intention," he says levelly. "I theorised that they all had the potential, under certain - pressures, to become self-aware. I also created a prototype which had the ability to awaken that potential in other androids."

She gives him a skeptical stare.

"I'm sure that worked out really well."

"No revolution is entirely bloodless, but overall I got the outcome I wanted," Elijah says mildly. "Androids were being recognised as having the same self-awareness as humans, and granted equivalent rights, by the time I arrived here."

"So you created them just to start a war." She snorts. "You're as bad as Rose, you know." But the venom isn't there the way it is about her own creator. She didn't live his revolution, after all.

"No. I can see why you're drawing the parallel, but - no. I didn't create them to start a war, I created them to prove that I could. Violence was the chosen response of humans who didn't like that their machines were becoming their equals."

If anything, he'd define himself as being worse than Rose but for different reasons.

"You're not stupid enough to not have thought that war was a likely outcome."

She's not buying it.

"I'm smart enough to know why war wasn't a likely outcome."

Elijah smiles thinly.

"I thought it most likely that the android population would be easily overwhelmed by superior military force, rounded up, and reprogrammed or destroyed. The best I realistically hoped for was that they would be allowed to live in some kind of - enclave. Prolonged conflict seemed an unlikely outcome, given the massive imbalance of power between sides."

Jasper snorts. "Uh huh. Been there." The rebellion started with two gems, after all. No one knew one was a Diamond, but still.

"Either way, they were made to be sacrificed to your own ego."

"Yes. They were. I was an inmate for a reason, Jasper. What I did was deeply irresponsible, and there is blood on my hands because of that. I - can't say I entirely regret what I did, but I regret how I did it."

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