Log01.entry

[ugh_emotions]

Who: SecUnit, Charles, and eventually other people depending on how things go lots of other people, everyone join in
What: SecUnit checks up Charles, no one has a good time
When: Just before the start of the Story
Where: The stacks
Content warnings: SecUnit getting accidentally bricked

Every time SecUnit or one of its drones caught sight of Charles, he seemed to look even more dead than the last time.

Which was weird. He was already dead (which was also weird), surely he couldn't get any more dead. You were either dead or you weren't.

Whatever. It wasn't SecUnit's problem. Charles wasn't one of its humans. It didn't need to worry about him.

(It worried about him.)

Eventually though, it gets to the point where it can't ignore it anymore, and it stomps over to where Charles is in the Stacks.

"What's wrong with you?" it demands.

Comments

[ugh_emotions]

When SecUnit comes back online, it isn't all at once. Its systems are still scrambled, trying to restart after being shutdown in a way they were very much not meant to be.

And it just so happens that its buffer is what activates first. It doesn't twist, it doesn't move its eyes, it doesn't even blink. It just starts to speak, abruptly.

"Please stand by. Your Unit is rebooting," it says, in a voice that sounds...different. Even, measured. It sounds like the perfectly calibrated customer service voice. It sounds nothing like how SecUnit usually speaks.

"Please be advised that initiation of a forced shutdown of your Unit is a violation of your contract and will incur penalty fees upon--"

The buffer is cut off, strangled as SecUnit finally gains enough control over its systems to react. Its eyes open, going wide. Visual and audio inputs online.

It stares, inhumanly still, at all the people who have surrounded it. It doesn't move.

But it's wearing an expression of ever deepening horror.

[birdchasingecho]

"... Well. Your heart beats, regardless." She won't argue the last tuesdayism of it all; she doesn't know Siobhan nearly well enough to say. "Let it beat for who it may. And I agree."

Slowly, SecUnit comes back online, and--

And despite her expression remaining perfectly neutral, Mei's heart-rate spikes in fury, her fists clench. She knows damned well what would cause someone to have to do that after a catastrophic shutdown on her world and she likes the implications not one whit, not least because of her own restrictions on her behavior.

She lets go, nods. "Welcome back, then. Apologies for the rough treatment earlier."

[codeswitchcraft]

"Rin," Siobhan says in a too loud whisper, still a little woozy, "you don't want to say that out loud."

[obeir]

By this point K has managed to track everyone down — or everyone aside from Charles, whose absence he notes — so SecUnit's concerned audience grows by one. The android takes in the odd scene before him, not entirely sure what to make of it.

"What happened...?"

Charles's panicked message hadn't included many details, but it's obvious SecUnit had been knocked offline somehow and has just now rebooted.

[ohaiyo_isekai]

Hikaru maneuvers so he can be a supportive shoulder for the very out of it Siobhan, trying to work out a spell for clearing EMP scrambling on the fly.

He was there for Rin's boot-up sequence. He understood what it meant. Perfectly Ordinary Progress Level 12 Human With Cybernetics, huh?

Nevertheless, his reaction is:

"Good morning, Rin." He chokes back the urge to say hello world. "Gave us a bit of a scare. Are you quite yourself again?"

[ugh_emotions]

They're all looking at it.

It doesn't know what happened, not yet, but they're all looking at it, and they all heard its buffer. They heard it say it was rebooting. Heard it call itself...a unit...

It's too much. The concern, the attention, everything. It's too much. Everything has just gone very wrong, very quickly, and it's too much.

In less than a second, SecUnit goes from being completely still and stationary, lying on the ground, to scrambling up and onto its feet and bolting through the Stacks at full SecUnit speed.

And it doesn't stop running until it finds a place to hide.

[birdchasingecho]

Mei watches it go, then... "Perhaps that was too much of a scene..."