Voicemail (IC Contact Post) OLD - at capcha

[abrightboy]

 This is Bright. Leave a message.

Comments

[junoit]

She frowns. Her brows knit. "...I never thought about that. The psychological evaluations required by Goddard Futuristics never get any follow-up or enforcement. This is the first time I've talked to an actual counselor."

[abrightboy]

“Well, I know about emotions. My emotional regulator is broken, so I feel them all a lot more and I can’t stop them like other people,” Malcolm tells her.

[junoit]

"Broken?" She tilts her head, studying him with interest and without judgment.

[abrightboy]

“Broken. Look at it this way: emotions are just responses to stimuli. The ability to downregulate them - to suppress emotions that work counter to your longterm goals - is something that only a being with a frontal lobe can do. Nonsentient creatures - beings without frontal lobes - can’t do it. It’s stimulus response stimulus response. But what if your frontal lobe has defects?”

[junoit]

"Oh right. Neurodivergence. That's the word." Ha, data correlated. "You have frontal lobe damage? Or is it a developmental defect?"

[abrightboy]

“Part of it’s developmental. Part of it is complex post traumatic stress disorder,” Malcolm admits.

[junoit]

"What makes it complex?"

She's fascinated sorry Malcolm.

[abrightboy]

"Childhood trauma over a period of time," Malcolm tells her. "Repeated or prolonged."

[junoit]

That makes sense. Mechanically and psychologically speaking. The longer a problem persists, the more of a problem it tends to be.

But it brings up another question for her.

"What's it like, being a child? I never was."

[abrightboy]

He considers that.

“What’s the first thing you remember?” he asks her.

[junoit]

She has to think about it on her end, too. Try to figure out how to put it. "...Awareness. Being aware that I was aware. Knowing so much and not knowing why. I remember being confused, and scared, and then angry."

[cactusy]

Yeah, I know; Eiffel's best friend. But she has a human body that's fully organic, so that makes it... somehow more and less weird. It's hard to think of her the way I think of other AI.

[abrightboy]

Oh. She told me that she’s only partly organic.

[cactusy]

... Huh. She looks and acts fully organic; I just kinda assumed.

[conning]

[He hasn't heard the word "breachform" before, but it helps in an odd way. Reminds Neal that while what they lived was real, to some degree it also wasn't them.

--And he also can't even be too mortified by the details when Malcolm shares them, softened as the biology is by the man's enthusiasm.]

Yeah. [AT LEAST THE WORD IS FOND, even though he's not sure how to respond to anything else.]

[abrightboy]

She had just arrived so she could have also been wrong.

[abrightboy]

Well. If you don’t talk to him you’ll never reconcile. So those are your choices: talk to him and risk not gaining his understand or forgiveness, or don’t talk to him and make sure of it.

[conning]

"I don't know if that's better or worse," Neal confesses. He closes his eyes again, still holding Malcolm's hand. "It shouldn't bother me like it does. It's beneficial. It keeps this from happening. I can't explain why I don't want to."

[abrightboy]

“You don’t have to explain. I didn’t want to either… until I got my throat cut. After all that… I guess I was too exhausted to stick to something arbitrary,” Malcolm tells him.

[conning]

"It's not that I don't want to explain," Neal admits. "It's that I don't know how. I can't tell what bothers me about it."

[abrightboy]

"Do you not know intellectually or do you not know emotionally?" Malcolm asks curiously.

[conning]

Neal continues to give him a blank look. "I don't... know."

[abrightboy]

“That’s not completely unusual, you know. Do you need help identifying it?” Malcolm asks.

[abrightboy]

“Why angry?” Malcolm asks.

[conning]

"No," he says, sighing softly. "No, it's fine. I don't think I'm up for it right now."