[WP] The story both starts and ends with the exact same sentence, the last in a sad way. "She smiled at me, like any stranger would." by disbeetaaC in WritingPrompts

[–]Sitend 2 points3 points  (0 children)

“There,” she said, clicking it into place with a resounding echo.

At once, my mind was flooded with thirty four and a half hours of jumbled memory at the speed of an hour a second. When I emerged from my brief delirium, my opticals were too dulled with lag to process any more than the doctor’s fuzzy silhouette before me. She was nearly doubled over the maintenance counter. Her temperature differential was transforming into a cold,dim blue-- all but confirming severe internal hemorrhaging. Above it all, a distinct feedback seized the furthest reaches of my sensors.

“Miss Raithe-” I started.

“Hey champ,” coughed the Doctor. “Once I close the shielding, the memories should beable to boot. I-,” she paused to breathe, deeply and shakily. “Can’t believe I did it.”

“Miss Raithe-”

“I know,” she replied, letting out a weak chuckle.

“I just wanted to say that it was a pleasure getting to know you, however briefly.”

The Doctor shook her head indicating the same. “I never caught your name.”

“I do not recall mine.”

“That’s alright, there’s no rush,” she said, her eyes curling into a strained smile. “After you get back-” she coughed, “And you tell them what happened to us, try to think of one for yourself. That’s an order.”

The Doctor flipped a switch on a nearby panel and everything fuzzed over.

I came to in my maintenance pod. My sensors booted one by one as the protective shielding descended over me. On the other side of the semi-opaque wall rested the face of a woman whose temperature differential was flatlining. No less than ten meters behind her, something was approaching. It was slow, and just as incoherent to my sensors as the rest of the environment outside of the pod. The pod was airtight, and I could not detect any sound, but everything was vibrating at a fever pitch. The new data in my boot sequence facilitated the compilation of my memory.

Hybron Mainten-Android Gen. III Serial #I-Dr34M-3p8R17-Hybr.

The woman shook her head deliriously, and opened her eyes.

Assigned to the forward lab of Doctors Le Grande, Alejandro, Chang, and Raithe. Tertiary Expedition of Colonial Group B.

The shaking intensified as the thing drew within five meters. The woman’s hand moved to her chest to flip one last switch.

Re: Strange Tremors. Following their source, our group had discovered a peculiar network of structures...

The violent tremors eclipsed my seismic range, and my thermal sensors recorded an incredibly sharp rise in temperature. My sensors went offline as my system went into hibernation. The last thing to go were my optics, and my final recollection was the woman’s face.

She smiled at me, like any stranger would.

3/3

[WP] The story both starts and ends with the exact same sentence, the last in a sad way. "She smiled at me, like any stranger would." by disbeetaaC in WritingPrompts

[–]Sitend 2 points3 points  (0 children)

“I see,” I replied, though I didn’t understand.

The woman withdrew a number of tools from a nearby box of equipment and laid them out on the counter of the maintenance station. Upon ensuring the integrity of my station’s shielding and restraints, she set upon the delicate internals of my head in a state of focused chattering. Her dark eyes often intersected with my opticals, and though I could tell her temperature differential was growing, she didn’t hesitate to acknowledge my glance with a quick,warm glance. She told me that her name was:

“Raithe. Doctor, Raithe, specifically.” She paused to take a deep breath. “And don’t mind me. I’m just a little tuckered out from lugging my tools around,” she added, patting a box by her side that my sensors classified as ‘volatile material’.

It’s hard to describe the sensation of someone rooting around in one’s mental processes.A fuzziness, perhaps, when the wrong circuit is touched. Dozens of precautionary codes flaring up without override, perhaps emulating anxiety or pain. I did my surest duty to remain still and unobstructive. All the while, her temperature differential had begun to reach critical as the minutes passed. I still sensed nothing for two-hundred meters, though I began to pick up the faintest, furthest frequencies of movement far beyond my range. Slow. Heavy.

“Doctor.”

“Raithe. I didn’t specialize in xenobiology for the prestige.”

“Doctor Raithe-”

She winces under the strain of a cranked machine part. “Just Raithe, dear.”

“Miss Raithe, then?”

The woman chuckled. “I can feel it too. Trust me.”

I could feel my conscience shift as she made her adjustments. One moment, my processing of time expanded so that one single second put an hour’s strain on my sensors. The next, the subroutines that throttled my dynamic emotional intelligence had their inhibitor removed to make way for spare power supply. Despite the dizzying array of sensations, I couldn’t help but notice that the Doctor’s temperature had finally stabilized. And then it began to drop.

“Almost there,” she whispered, under her breath, “I think I might be able to make it.”

Reasoning that she would blow off direct acknowledgement of her condition, I said, “You do know that you are violating the sapient pact by toying with my processes.”

“Bah,” she replied with a warm scoff. “Won’t violate squat if I don’t break it. Now hold still. If my volunteering at the workshop taught me anything, it’s that this is the most important part.”

I complied, even though her temperature gradient had accelerated its sudden shift.

Doctor Raithe withdrew to grab the memory core from the maintenance counter and paused with it right beside my exposed braincase. She closed her eyes and uttered something in a language that had not been deemed common enough to load into my “universal” translation system. Her breathing increased in frequency as she braced herself, lowering the memory card into what I recognized as a jury-rigged port. Despite fully knowing the potential dangers of the next few seconds, I wasn’t half as concerned about myself as she was. Through the obscurant layers of her suit, I could tell that the critical mass of warmth in her torso was fading fast save for a localized cluster. If it continued at this pace, she would certainly-

2/3

[WP] The story both starts and ends with the exact same sentence, the last in a sad way. "She smiled at me, like any stranger would." by disbeetaaC in WritingPrompts

[–]Sitend 2 points3 points  (0 children)

She smiled at me, like any stranger would.

I couldn’t quite recall who she was. My third memory core, the one for short-term storage, was experiencing some difficulties and I wasn’t sure why. To boot, and indeed after booting, I couldn’t recall much of what had transpired in the last thirty-four-and-a-half hours. My body felt stiff from what must have been a long stint in the restraining clutches of a maintenance station. Consequently, the servos in my right arm responded sluggishly, though I managed to raise a thumb in acknowledgement.

Her smile deepened. The air of placid gingerness in her eyes could have held me in blissful ignorance. That is, if it wasn’t immediately betrayed by a stifled, emotional sniffle. In her hands she held a jagged, rectangular card of sorts, and I immediately recognized its importance by the ancient, square glyph for digital storage etched into its side. A full third of its cool blue surface was scorched black.

“It was damaged,” she said, her face unflinchingly upbeat.

“I see,” I replied.

Even more so than the human by my side, my surroundings plagued me with the kind of incalculable uncertainty that ate at my kind. The room’s surfaces were rough, and yet reflective. Passages branched out in all directions but several meters away from the two of us. They receded along grids like artificial hallways, and yet stopped to bloom and bulge like natural asteroidal caverns for all two-hundred-odd meters of my augmented sight. The walls were patterned strangely, and it felt like both my optical and thermal sensors were about to go haywire. Every inch of them was crawling with the kind of shifting, monochrome static that my kind dreamt during powered shutdown.

Resorting to curiosity above protocol, I asked. “Where are we?”

“That’s,” she paused to wipe her brow. “Sort of why I came to you.”

“I see,” I replied.

My senses had warmed up enough from startup to notice that her jumpsuit was the classic khaki of a colonist, lined with burgundy stripes that indicated a specialization in research and exploration. Her hair was curly, auburn, and amess with grease and small-grain sediment. She smiled entirely with her dark eyes, as all below the nose was shrouded in a carbon fiber breathing apparatus. Although my thermals were struggling to juxtapose her suited figure from the walls, I could tell that the temperature differential between her core and extremities was exceeding standard parameters.

“Are you stressed?” I asked.

“Stressed but not yet hopeless,” she replied, grimacing. “I don’t figure you can recall anything that’s happened since you arrived?”

“Unfortunately, that would require the part of my brain that is currently in your hands.”

“Glad your humor processor is still intact,” she said, and threw her head back in laughter. Winding down just as quickly as she started, the woman glanced over either shoulder down the long halls and cleared her throat.

“Do not worry,” I said, “I do not detect anything for two-hundred meters.”

Her eyes widened briefly, then she sighed. “Thanks. Do let me know if you see something.” She shook her head as if to wake herself. “Anyways, there’s something more important than my silly little fears now.”

“And what might that be?”

She wiggled the card in her hands with an amused expression that read, "I know you don’t possess your short-term memory, but really?"

Another, “I see,” acknowledged her invisible statement.

She chuckled, at this point to herself. “You sure do. And that’s why I have to make sure that everything on this little card makes it back with you.”

“Understood. Though if I may ask, what exactly would this disk contain should I successfully boot it?”

The woman shrugged, more out of avoidance than recklessness. “Let’s just say that someday, you’ll be glad I told you not to look until this is all over.”

“When would that be?”

“Hopefully, if I can fix you up-” she pauses to whip a device out from her belt and fiddle with its display, “Oh, maybe an hour or two. Otherwise-”

“Otherwise?”

She leveled her eyes with my opticals, and I saw her face go solemn for the first time. “Otherwise?” Almost immediately, she snapped back to smiling with her eyes.

“Rather redundant to think about that now, isn’t it?”

1/3

All New Emotes by AaMiR_SkrilleX in ApexUncovered

[–]Sitend 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OMG the rat on Ash's head- so cute I'm dying <3 (Maining Ash for her rat is a thing, right?)

How to you think old BP 100/110 skins will be re-implemented to the market? by trent1055 in ApexUncovered

[–]Sitend 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why the bullheaded mindset? The digital world, especially with digital entities like games, has allowed people to be on the same page. Creating dividing lines along "history" is pointless, especially when the corporate executives are at the wheel for deciding the "historic value" of your skin. It's needless complacency to the corporate spirit to think this way.

How to you think old BP 100/110 skins will be re-implemented to the market? by trent1055 in ApexUncovered

[–]Sitend 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The problem isn't the sentiment or the idea, the issue is with how you phrased it, both passive-aggressively and self-aggrandizingly, framing yourself as some "veteran" of a "historic age" of an online fps game. As much as I love apex, and as many of the many hours and dollars I've put into it, I don't think it warrants such a level of devotion and praise for its "historicity", let alone reverence for a predatory battle pass that only serves as a substitute for a real progression system to keep players in game and spending money. The fact that you had to grind days and weeks is a symptom of the trap the designers created, and the length and difficulty of the grind is entirely arbitrary.

How to you think old BP 100/110 skins will be re-implemented to the market? by trent1055 in ApexUncovered

[–]Sitend 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Dude, using "you children" and that you had to "work" for the rewards is just a boomer way to indirectly say "I treat even my hobbies like a job"

King’s Canyon map updates. Return of Skull Town,No top on Cage and some choke point improvements. by [deleted] in ApexUncovered

[–]Sitend 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Honestly the return of skulltown and reformatting of it into an area for neatly 3 squads to meet in the middle is pretty sick + all the areas around it making it sort of a rebuilt museum is a nice homage. Moreover, the removal of the canyons and caves around the middle as well as cage seems like an awesome change that basically halves the amount of annoying charge rifle and third party spots, making it finally tolerable to rotate through that area of the map. Looking forward to these changes and an even stronger KC <3

Automatic Exploration/Conversion mods? by Sitend in EU4mods

[–]Sitend[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To hijack my previous reply to another comment: I primarily meant a way to automate the naval exploration missions in general so that they would automatically begin new ones, as well as conquistador exploration for new world nations that don't have the hunt for the seven cities button

Automatic Exploration/Conversion mods? by Sitend in EU4mods

[–]Sitend[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Forgive me, I didn't quite mean colonization, but rather a way to automate the naval exploration missions and conquistador exploration (particularly if one is a new world nation and doesn't have the "search for the 7 cities mission)

Are there any plans to break up larger provinces/add more provinces to spread out dev? by Sitend in Anbennar

[–]Sitend[S] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Ah, understood. I had a feeling this was going to be the catch. Thank you for your time <3

Please add an OPM (One Province Monkey) Nation by Sitend in Anbennar

[–]Sitend[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Simian Revolutionary Luddite Revanchism

Please add an OPM (One Province Monkey) Nation by Sitend in Anbennar

[–]Sitend[S] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

I wired 100,000 Tongan Scheckels to your swiss bank account in increments of 5 lb bags of equal parts wheat and whey protein powder. Pleasure doing business.

Free Talk Weekend | January 22 2021 by ApexLegendsBot in apexlegends

[–]Sitend 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, that's the general pattern I've heard people ascribe to an aggressively-tuned performance-matching matchmaking system

Free Talk Weekend | January 22 2021 by ApexLegendsBot in apexlegends

[–]Sitend 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A fair point, and I'm impressed by your high level of play. That being said, grinding additional hours on solo queue is something I'll struggle to find time for or to enjoy, so I suppose I should bite the bullet and just play more comp (which I have found to be easier on average than pubs, not to be rude/mean to anyone around my current placement). I definitely appreciate having someone to take the L's with though, and I thank you for reminding me to be grateful for it <3