@Hostile-Unknown: can we talk about this?
Effie winced. "Hostile..." She hadn't meant for...she didn't want to hurt him! She didn't want to be someone who just went around breaking things...not like she had been. After what she'd seen with Nadine, the little fairy subjected to a virus of her own authoring...never again!
"Careful," Dennis said. "He's not...trustworthy."
She nodded. She wasn't planning on paying attention to his spiel, but still...
@cyborg: Wasn't meant to be a hostile action. Very sorry...
Hiro frowned. What, they'd thrown his own crack back at him and not expected it to cause problems? Still, he wasn't about to throw away the chance to recruit another digital life-form over what might actually be a misunderstanding.
@unknown: Just be more careful next time? By the way...are you in need of a host? I've got free resources for an entity like yourself, and you're obviously pretty talented...maybe we could help each other out?
Effie snorted. "Pretty talented?" She'd nabbed a snippet of code from the machine and mailed it back to him...hardly wizardly. Probably just flattery...
@cyborg: No thanks, she replied. Heard about you treating another fairy as your personal slave...I'll pass.
Hiro gaped. @unknown: What? That's nonsense...where did you hear that?
@cyborg: Trusted source. When you make a habit of abusing people, word tends to get around.
He scowled. The DOS fairy, whatshisname...that little rat must have gone around claiming he was some kind of slavedriver! Little ingrate! All he'd ever demanded was some services in exchange for hosting! Wasn't that how it was supposed to work, some kind of symbiosis?
@unknown: FINE! Keep believing everything anyone tells you, then. Enjoy piddling around on crap hardware begging for CPU time for the rest of your life!
@cyborg: Have a host, thanks. As non-abusive as they come. Effie smiled...Mikey gave them so much, and without even asking anything in return...she would make it up to her host, she knew she would. Maybe not right away, but when she had learned enough about real programming...
Hiro seethed. Of course this person had a host, and of course it was better than him...they all were, the snobby bastards. Just because he was half-biological and could hardly handle one digital fairy where full androids could host two or three...argh! How was that fair!?
He pondered what to do now...go after this person and try to teach them for mouthing off? Or return to the flower-girl in hopes of getting some more useful information? He tried to force himself to work on rational analysis, figure out which was more likely to yield results, but he had to admit...he was pretty pissed.
"So, do I need to get a quarter up on the screen for nexties, or what?"
Dennis and Effie turned to see the globe of light that AIs tended to manifest as - a warm pink, hovering casually nearby.
"Uh...I don't know," Effie said. "We haven't had much luck playing here...seems like we kind of throw things off. You can try, though." She still felt a little residual unease at the presence of a strange AI...fairies had faces and forms she could easily relate to, but the abstract way non-fairy digital life tended to appear was difficult to really identify with. And her first experience with one didn't help either...
Still, she shouldn't go making assumptions, even subconsciously. Besides, Mikey was an AI, wasn't she? Effie wondered, if her host were to manifest outside her body, like this, would she still be comfortable with her? (She found it interesting that she'd never seen her do it - it seemed that Mikey was content to stick with the old dedicated client/server model of online interaction, for the most part.)
The light turned a little warmer. "Nice to meet you two; you can call me Cecilia. I read you talking with someone...sounds like a not very pleasant person..."
Dennis nodded. "That's him, the cyborg over...oh, uh, never mind. He's here..." He found it easy to forget that AIs saw the digital world as pure machine activity, not this metaphorical reality-overlay existence he and Effie experienced it in. She couldn't see his old host at all, as she didn't appear to be physically present in the arcade.
"He was keeping Dennis as his slave!" Effie said, contempt evident in her voice. "And now he's trying to sucker me into falling for the same thing...I'm Effie, by the way."
Cecilia frowned, back in her hotel room. An AI, trying to use digital fairies as forced labor...why? Did they have some special abilities? She had heard rumors that some or all of them were capable of interacting with electronics in ways that shouldn't be possible, like manifesting in the real world and interacting with non-networked machines or such...stranger and stranger.
In any case, maybe she should investigate...she couldn't really justify doing anything drastic when all she had was the word of a couple strangers, not unless it was an emergency, but a little check-in would not go amiss.
"You have his IP?" she asked. Dennis nodded. "192.168.2.23. That's what his packets were from, on this network..."
Haru smiled. It had been a good day. For one thing, the visit with the counselor had been...good. Unsettling, in many ways, but it had been good to get all that off her chest. Her talk with Brittany was good too; she didn't understand the significance of all this, but it was good to know she'd helped someone with her power... She was fitting in better, too; even though she still needed practice, she felt more like part of the band now, not just a bystander. And Ken had been happy to see her, not weirded out...
She thought back to what the counselor had said, that many sex-changed transformees would...would find their attractions switched around...did she experience that? She didn't know...she didn't know. She couldn't even think about it long enough to really know...
The door to her room opened, and she snapped out of her thoughts, turning to see her mother. "Hello, sweetie," she said. "Have a good day?"
Despite her confusion, Haru smiled. "Yeah. Yeah, I did."
Steve sighed in relief. For the moment, Hiro appeared to be busy with something or other, so she slipped off to another part of the arcade, finding a different game to play. She hated to be rude like that, but he just unnerved her, plain and simple...the way he looked at her like some kind of lab specimen...she thought it might be worse than if he was leering at her.
The flower-girl began looking around for another game to play - this section had more of the old-school machines like Pac-Man, which were kinda fun, she admitted, but not really her forte. There had to be something good here...
"Are you new here?" a voice behind her asked. "I don't think I've seen you before..."
She turned and gasped. Ben!?
