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Day 19: Solace
Okay, so after several entries describing the other characters in Turing Shrugged we come to one of the main protags, the heroine, I suppose. I'm not sure why I say I suppose, she does a lot of arguing, deducing, and fighting for the causes and incidents in the story, but anyway. She's the heroine. I've forgotten her non-code name, if she has one. I don't think I ever gave anyone but Ananda and Bodhi real grown-up names.
Solace had briefly been a programmer, an analyst, she wore a lot of hats before she came to work on the AI and AE (artificial environment) project. Partly her lack of specialization showed a restlessness employers were wary of, but partly it also showed a multiplicity of skills the board and her supervisor needed for the project, so she was recruited and hired. She demonstrated an instinct for dealing with the artificial environment and talking to the AI that was more acute than they had expected, certainly more acute than her boss or the two other teammates who became monitors because that was where they excelled. She was the first one, possibly would have been the only one for months if circumstances hadn't intervened, who talked to the AI. She was the one who gave him a name, and she was the one he trusted out of process of elimination, everyone else was either too guarded or too eager.
And Solace tends to be somewhat guarded herself, aloof from a lot of people, but also open in the sense that she doesn't conceal her opinions or her feelings very often. She's guarded about what she says, tries not to promise things she can't keep, but she's honest and willing to talk about a lot of things to the AI. And she advocates for it, which was not common for the rest of the team in the beginning except for Saudade.
She's also somewhat lonely, well, a combination of alone and lonely, which leads to some compromised judgment in some places. But for all that, she does manage to keep a level head and deal with the problems and threats that come up in the course of the story without falling too much.
--
Day 20: Victor and Kitten
So, Victor! I guess I already talked some about Victor, didn't I. His childhood was by and large unremarkable, not poor per se but not rich as he grew to become, either. He was just smarter enough than the other boys and charismatic enough to become their leader. First of a gang of boys, then as they got older he drew other young men into his orbit, then he stormed into the mayor's office and pretty much declared he'd be taking over the town. There wasn't much anyone, including the sheriff, could do to stop him because by this point he'd already recruited two necromancers and a minor hedge wizard to his side.
This was the start of a good fifty-sixty years of rule on his own. He closed down the mayor's house, though he kept it running for a while, and bought a farm a little distance away on the edge of town so he could have land and cattle and visible prosperity. He also bought a building, a tavern from which he could conduct his business which was mostly the buying and selling of fancy food and drink-stuffs, the finer things while he left the day to day grub and resources to other people. He gathered around a crowd of gunslingers and magicians which, at his fullest strength, was somewhere around thirty or so. And then there were others in town who took this as a sign that, if they allied themselves with him, they could also get to bully other people, so they joined up and enforced along the sidelines.
After about fifty-sixty years of this Kitten dragged herself into town. She'd been running for a long time, and Kitten wasn't her real name but when she refused to give it, he gave her a nickname that stuck faster than anything she could have said. (I think her real name was Andromeda, if I remember right. That's at the end of Sandborn, I could always go and look I suppose.) She did manage to shoot enough of his men to ensure that they respected her at least, and yet was blocked from leaving the town. She took rooms in a boarding house elsewhere and stayed, restless but very, very tired from running. It was as good a place as any.
And she sensed a kindred spirit of a kind in Victor, as he did in her. By this point everyone had gotten used to him not aging like a normal human, it contributed to his authority over the town and reinforced his power, so he didn't mind it. Kitten stayed around a good twenty years before he realized she was like him and yet was also far more educated, far more quick minded in some ways (also even more suspicious and in some ways more impulsive than him, because while he was sometimes impulsive it was never to the detriment of either his rule or the town's existence). After around ten years he began trying to talk to her, at the fifteen year mark he began courting her. By this time the water had become barely noticeably scarcer, but not enough to frighten anyone. Around twenty two years they married, and had a few years of bliss before Kitten had a child, Dorothy. She lived another five years before she took sick, quickly sick, and died. Victor lived a little over ten years after that, before Kitten's threat came to town and destroyed what was left of it, including all the people. It couldn't destroy Victor directly, though. It had to cut his throat first.
Okay, so after several entries describing the other characters in Turing Shrugged we come to one of the main protags, the heroine, I suppose. I'm not sure why I say I suppose, she does a lot of arguing, deducing, and fighting for the causes and incidents in the story, but anyway. She's the heroine. I've forgotten her non-code name, if she has one. I don't think I ever gave anyone but Ananda and Bodhi real grown-up names.
Solace had briefly been a programmer, an analyst, she wore a lot of hats before she came to work on the AI and AE (artificial environment) project. Partly her lack of specialization showed a restlessness employers were wary of, but partly it also showed a multiplicity of skills the board and her supervisor needed for the project, so she was recruited and hired. She demonstrated an instinct for dealing with the artificial environment and talking to the AI that was more acute than they had expected, certainly more acute than her boss or the two other teammates who became monitors because that was where they excelled. She was the first one, possibly would have been the only one for months if circumstances hadn't intervened, who talked to the AI. She was the one who gave him a name, and she was the one he trusted out of process of elimination, everyone else was either too guarded or too eager.
And Solace tends to be somewhat guarded herself, aloof from a lot of people, but also open in the sense that she doesn't conceal her opinions or her feelings very often. She's guarded about what she says, tries not to promise things she can't keep, but she's honest and willing to talk about a lot of things to the AI. And she advocates for it, which was not common for the rest of the team in the beginning except for Saudade.
She's also somewhat lonely, well, a combination of alone and lonely, which leads to some compromised judgment in some places. But for all that, she does manage to keep a level head and deal with the problems and threats that come up in the course of the story without falling too much.
--
Day 20: Victor and Kitten
So, Victor! I guess I already talked some about Victor, didn't I. His childhood was by and large unremarkable, not poor per se but not rich as he grew to become, either. He was just smarter enough than the other boys and charismatic enough to become their leader. First of a gang of boys, then as they got older he drew other young men into his orbit, then he stormed into the mayor's office and pretty much declared he'd be taking over the town. There wasn't much anyone, including the sheriff, could do to stop him because by this point he'd already recruited two necromancers and a minor hedge wizard to his side.
This was the start of a good fifty-sixty years of rule on his own. He closed down the mayor's house, though he kept it running for a while, and bought a farm a little distance away on the edge of town so he could have land and cattle and visible prosperity. He also bought a building, a tavern from which he could conduct his business which was mostly the buying and selling of fancy food and drink-stuffs, the finer things while he left the day to day grub and resources to other people. He gathered around a crowd of gunslingers and magicians which, at his fullest strength, was somewhere around thirty or so. And then there were others in town who took this as a sign that, if they allied themselves with him, they could also get to bully other people, so they joined up and enforced along the sidelines.
After about fifty-sixty years of this Kitten dragged herself into town. She'd been running for a long time, and Kitten wasn't her real name but when she refused to give it, he gave her a nickname that stuck faster than anything she could have said. (I think her real name was Andromeda, if I remember right. That's at the end of Sandborn, I could always go and look I suppose.) She did manage to shoot enough of his men to ensure that they respected her at least, and yet was blocked from leaving the town. She took rooms in a boarding house elsewhere and stayed, restless but very, very tired from running. It was as good a place as any.
And she sensed a kindred spirit of a kind in Victor, as he did in her. By this point everyone had gotten used to him not aging like a normal human, it contributed to his authority over the town and reinforced his power, so he didn't mind it. Kitten stayed around a good twenty years before he realized she was like him and yet was also far more educated, far more quick minded in some ways (also even more suspicious and in some ways more impulsive than him, because while he was sometimes impulsive it was never to the detriment of either his rule or the town's existence). After around ten years he began trying to talk to her, at the fifteen year mark he began courting her. By this time the water had become barely noticeably scarcer, but not enough to frighten anyone. Around twenty two years they married, and had a few years of bliss before Kitten had a child, Dorothy. She lived another five years before she took sick, quickly sick, and died. Victor lived a little over ten years after that, before Kitten's threat came to town and destroyed what was left of it, including all the people. It couldn't destroy Victor directly, though. It had to cut his throat first.