championoftime | (no subject)

[Log for Vasilia Aliena]

The Doctor was busily working in the TARDIS, ignoring the furry shape slinking along the floor behind him and trying to pull away a pair of pliers with all its might, when the strange urge overcame him that was hitting so many others simultaneously.

At first, dread hit with it. The last time he felt this way, the Time Lord flu struck him. It was the beginning of the couple of the worst two weeks in memory (yes, he hated it more than the death tolls for the simple fact that he hadn't known what was going on), but still he straightened himself out and staggered to the TARDIS door.

He left the Mongoose to slink around the console room, and headed out in the halls. He went in the direction that made him feel less like retching all over the floor, stopping occasionally to hold on his hat and catch his breath. He was nigh on exhausted when he reached Vasilia's door, knocking earnestly as he pulled out his fobwatch.

"What is this nonsense?" he muttered to himself.

[Private to Dallas | Text]

It seems that I'm going to be indisposed for the next few days. But if you need anything, I'll still find a way to be there.

How are you feeling now about what happened with David? [He saw that unfortunate start of a conversation in David's journal.

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"Precisely," she said, simply, dully.

He raised a brow and leaned his head back slightly. Well, that was particularly odd.

"Haven't you done anything that brings you lasting enjoyment? Something that you can go back to time and time again?"

Vasilia turned in her chair, starting her terminal with a few listless taps; it booted to a prompt-- she was more comfortable with a command line than with the nannying graphic interfaces-- and a few strokes started her simulation program.

"I have," she said, watching the initial random population -- represented as a hundred-by-hundred grid of colored squares, of various brightness and hue to represent their default strategy and status-- start to shift and interact. "I have been a roboticist for twenty six decades, and I studied it for two decades before I was qualified for the title. It has brought me a great deal of joy. But; I had never considered an end to that work." She finally looked back at him, her interjection of pre-emptive argument perfunctory and without bite- "I am aware that it was a short sighted view. You hardly need to tell me."

"Oh! I was thinking of putting some work into an android- a robot. It's difficult, because= Oh well, don't pay any mind to me. I've gotten side-tracked." He peels his eyes away from her simulation and tips his hat more forward on his head.

"Why is it a short-sighted view? Why is engaging in anything you love with a passion a short-sighted view? Investment and specialization means both excellence and sensitivity to the subject. To have that subject matter ripped away from you is as damaging as removing all the nesting materials from a bird's native region.

"It's not damning. They may adapt. But it's certain unpleasant, inconvenient, and practically painful in some cases."

She would have told him what a transparent ruse that was-- if she could only figure out what he would gain from it-- or if she was simply so beneath his notice that it simply had come to mind. Her face showed mingled temptation and confusion and wariness; she was so absorbed in trying to guess his motives that there was some delay before she understood what he had said-- a metaphorical processing lag between hearing and comprehending.

"But-- if I were returned to my estate tomorrow, and continued to design until the day I died, with all the success and acclaim that could be wished; would any of that ease the last moments? Be consolation as I lost my faculties? In the universe, what is gained by a hundred years of enjoyment? Even my work-" she would not admit aloud that she was not the great innovator that Fastolfe was, except in one accidental way that she dared not repeat. Some pride choked down the admission of her own insignificance, even as she felt it.

"Then your work is only insignificant as you make it? No matter what you feel about yourself, you know all that passion, all that creativity went into accomplishment. Will formed matter into shape and ingenuity gave that shape motion. It's a profound accomplishment that is in essence life continuing life." He sits up, cross-legged, and makes as if he's trying to clasp that life out of the air.

"Life, creativity, and genius gives the universe means to shape itself, and marks the passage of time. Those fleeting moments of unrest at the end take up only an insignificant portion or an otherwise potentially extremely meaningful existence."

"Life--" She shook her head, her limp hair moving with it. "To what end-- besides that end. That last inescapable moment."

She had not considered it before, it was as simple as this. And she did not want to think about it-- it was frightening, and it made everything seem so purposeless.

"You mentioned a project. Was it your intention that I bargain something with you to be included-- or was it rhetorical? If the former-- if you do intend to create a programmatic intelligence-- I am willing to bargain," she said, a little more spirit in her voice.

"What end would you like it to have?" It was a very bizarre question. He knew he didn't want to stop. He came here to avoid stopping, and at the same time to continue to be his own man.

He actually boggled a bit at her questioning of his intentions, not really knowing what to think of it.

"No, I was just wanting to discuss it. I like to talk about things. Most of my friends on board are mathematicians and engineers, and we like to talk about what we know and what we've seen." Science; always a good topic of conversation for the socially displaced.

She ... simply ignored the first question, having no idea where to start, how even to approach an answer to herself, let alone a stranger.

Instead: theory. She pursed her lips. "I have discovered that the type of robotic theory I know is uncommon. Most have not heard of its base premise, the three Ascenion Laws. Have you, Doctor Smith?"

He didn't mind it being ignored. He could tell that it was personal. Whatever fidget had overtaken him, he still hadn't worked out of his system.

This bit was easier.

"I've heard of it. And I've seen it put into play." Emulated by some aspiring robotics. "Usually, to the end that many intelligences are indeed, intelligent, and capable of finding loopholes. Even if those intelligences were artificially constructed."

"When implemented from the base up-- the first principles from which the rest of the system is constructed-- it should not be possible to circumvent," Vasilia said dutifully, and to a large extent she still believed that to be true. "It makes for a proper symbiosis; if we wish robots to be our servants and aids and no more, then we should design them to be satisfied in those roles, their optimum potential reached there. It has-- for millenia-- succeeded, with only apocryphal tales of robots who were built, by factory accident, without the first law.

"But. I heard a theory broached to me, once." How delicately to put this, when she still feared that Daneel Olivaw might discover that her memory block was gone-- and for the good of his 'humanity', destroy her. "That more important than the first law was a zeroeth law; that higher priority than the preservation of one human is the preservation of an abstract concept, humanity-- its development and well being."

She tangled her hands in her lap again, to stop them from fidgeting on the keyboard. "One robot was exposed to this idea, I believe; I know only that he harmed a human, to save a large number of humans, and in doing so broke the first law; he suffered mental freeze out. The zeroeth law, if he had heard of it, did not protect him."

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A wild mortality appears

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