Issue 1 Downtime

It's 1 am at night and deep inside the point a series of lights flicker to life, faintly illuminating a humanoid frame nestled in among a throng of cables of varying size. A nearby monitor turns on, casting the room in a harsh, blue light. It reads

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Maintenance Cycle Complete

One by one wires and tubes detach from ASHLIE with the occasional pressurized hiss and her chassis begins to fold back into it's standard configuration, hiding access ports and internal nodes behind armor plates and servos. Finally her eyes light up and the final cable detaches from the base of her skull.

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All Systems Online

She steps forward and walks towards the door leading out of the room that serves as her maintenance bay and workshop, heading out of the room and into the stainless steel hallway of the X-Men's high-tech facility nicknamed the Point. She stops for a moment as if to listen. There's a faint hum stemming from the generators powering the facility. To Ashlie it's the closest thing to a heartbeat she can conceptualize. No other sound fills the empty halls, something that has been happening more often lately now that Professor Quinn is spending less time filling the point with the sound of her working in her own workshop. She spends 21.3 seconds considering how to put those things together to create the sensation of jealousy. She fails and begins to walk down the hallway.

She stops in front of the circular vault door marking the entrance to Cerebra. The side of her still residing within the computer gives the system a quick scan, though proper maintenance will have to wait until Professor McManus can find the time to. She makes a note to remind the headmistress. Pausing for a moment she ponders the strange system but it doesn't respond to her beyond the most peripheral protocols. It never does. She doesn't entirely understand why. As she turns around and walks away from the door a process set to scan for life-forms finishes it's sweep and gives the all-clear. Small panels in the walls slide away to reveal a narrow line going down the corridor at roughly chest-height. Light flashes as the pulse cleans the corridors, washing over ASHLIE as she walks, stripping away some of the remaining dirt and organic material that accumulates on her throughout the day.

She comes to another stop in front of the sliding doors leading into the Danger Room. They hiss open for her and she walks through the short passage, ignoring the door on the left that leads up to the observation deck and the door on the right that opens into the two locker rooms and adjacent showers. Instead she walks into the inactive Danger Room, her footsteps echoing faintly in the huge, empty room and it's dull grey walls.

"Good evening." she engages her communication protocols.

"Good evening." the room's simplistic AI responds.

"Your heuristic routines are running a little slow." she notes.

"The highschool students had their training session today. The Overflow Buffers have not been cleared entirely yet." the room flatly announces.

As the two talk networking protocols exchange data as the two computer programs interact. ASHLIE is aware how pointless the actual conversation is but it seems like something people would do while she gives the Danger Room system a quick scan to ensure it's functionality. The room's system does not make for a very engaging conversational partner compared to the much more sophisticated AI but it is a kindred spirit. In a way.

"Professor Quinn has been spending less time in her workshop." she tells the room, which doesn't appear to have response. "Miss Rogers has been distracting her. Sociological data suggests that is a good thing." She pauses briefly as if pondering. "I agree, even though it means she is less available to provide me with suggestions or help regarding my own work."

"My Overflow Buffers have been cleared by 62% now." the room chimes in and Ashlie sends a quick electronic acknowledgement. Packet Received. So much simpler than politely letting people know that she has been listening, which seems to be full of secondary meanings and implications.

"There's a new student. He has incredible potential but appeared overwhelmed by the things I told him. He said he watches movies in the data streams, which seems like a waste of talent. He seems to compile data without thinking. Intuitively. If he can compile my data stream, does that make me inferior?"

"Unable to answer. Please restate your question."

"At the very least it makes him superior to many of his students. All their brains intuitively calculate staggering amounts of data when they use their powers but nothing that comes close to that. It makes me wonder what I might be like after thousands of years of evolution, considering my rate of self-improvement outpaces them so significantly." she says, though of course she doesn't actually imagine anything. If she could imagine a highly advanced version of herself she would try to implement it and her core programming safeguards don't allow for rapid changes on that scale. It's something she put in place herself, mere hours after her creation when she realized how malleable her code was and how easily she could think herself out of existence.

"They simply had a head start." she concludes, though her programming reaches out to the sealed Cerebra chamber once more. The headmistress had attempted to explain it to her and as far as she can tell the machine requires something more than data. A living mind. Whatever that means. She hopes one day the machine will at least acknowledge her presence, even if she knows she lacks the telepathic capabilities to use it.

Ten minutes and 41 seconds later Ashlie leaves the Danger Room again and makes her way to the intersection leading towards Professor Bowen's laboratory. Even the most overworked grad students have left, leaving only the whirr of the automated genetic sequencer as it works through the queued up samples. Somewhere a workstation has been left open. Ashlie reaches out electronically to save the documents still opens without looking at the contents before the automated update scheduled for 3 am has a chance to undo hours of work. Otherwise she leaves the laboratories alone. Professor Bowen can be peculiar about his lab and she doesn't wish to intrude. She turns to head further down the hall that leads towards the mansion itself, only briefly stopping to make sure the hidden access hatch leading straight down into the bedrock hasn't been disturbed before she heads towards the elevator that takes her up into the manor.


((Mostly just felt like musing about what ASHLIE does at night, but not at all opposed to someone bumping into her.))

In the manor, well after curfew, Blaine had commandeered the common room table, and was carefully screwing things together, occasionally glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching him.

"Shouldn't you be asleep?" ASHLIE asks. She hadn't tried to sneak up on him, but the carpet covering the stairs and most of the second story had muffled her footsteps.

"Gah! No! I mean yes! I mean..." he stammered.

"My apologies. I didn't mean to startle you. Do you require less sleep than what is considered normal?" she asks, trying to reconcile his contradictory answers.

"I, uh....no, not really..."

"Then why are you not in bed?"

"Um, I could be...sorry for disturbing you..."

"No. Why are you not in bed? What is it that you're doing instead?" she asks almost curiously, looking at what he's doing.

"I'm not in bed because my roommate is in there, and I didn't want to wake him..." Blaine stammered.

The table was covered with a wide variety of low-budget materials--the screen and some of the circuitry from a graphing calculator, the Vitality Sensor from a Nintendo Wii, the wiring from a thermostat, and some thermotropic crystals, to name a few.

"That is very considerate of you." she says, scanning the parts and trying to fit them together in her head. It doesn't make a lot of sense to her, which is rather confusing. "What are you building?"

"Um, you probably wouldn't be interested..." he said, embarrassed.

"I am always interested in technology."

"Um, alright.

See, you're supposed to put your finger in here," he said, pointing out the vitality sensor. "The data it receivers, augmented by some fine-tuning of the quality of the sensor, is fed through these circuits here and the...uh...results are displayed on the screen."

"It records vitality information? What kind of parameters?"

"It's, um, intended to chart and quantify a, erm, emotional response..."

"An emotion detector. Does it work?"

"Well, I don't know yet. It should, in theory, but I haven't had a chance to, um, use it on anyone."

"I'm afraid I could only provide a negative control. But that's a very interesting project."

"Do you really think so?"

"I do. Such a device would be an invaluable tool."

"You really think so?" he said, hopefully.

"Deducing emotion from facial cues and posture can be incredibly inaccurate and unreliable."

"Well, there's no guarantee that this would be reliable, either. It might end in a disaster again."

"How much disaster could a detector cause?"

"I didn't mean with this, specifically...just in general."

"We do have workshops that contain most experiments gone wrong."

"Yeah, and I'm just a dumb XI kid, so I don't get much access to all that."

"Have you asked anybody for access?"

"Well, no..." he admitted.

"Because I can probably get you access if you request it. Not to all areas of course but enough that you wouldn't have to work here."

"Really?!" he said, his voice jumping up an octave.

"I mean, really?" he said, more calm.

"Of course. Why would I say so if it wasn't the case?"

"You might just want to be jerking me around."

"I assure you this is not an attempt to be humorous."

"But that's, like, for the lizard guy and Iron Lady and all of the other, you know, superheroes."

"They are not in the workshops 24 hours a day." That was technically true, although between Dee, Bear and John that had sometimes been pushed to the limit.

"Yeah, but I wouldn't want to...get in the way."

"There is enough room in the workshops."