Turn 48

--- Maya ---

Given how she now knew she shared her lab location with both a Deadman and (whatever the fuck is sitting in the Alchemilla wing) she decided that her priority for the day would be upgrading her lab’s defenses something that would require a sizable amount of Scrap.

Which is why for the fourth time in the last week, she found herself searching through the trainyard for as much scrap as she could manage.

“We’re really going to be testing the Grav-Pack today.” She groaned, throwing another slab of metal into said M.A.D. tech backpack.

(And our pain tolerance, with all of the back pain we’re going to be giving ourselves.)

“The whole point of an anti-gravity backpack is to avoid back pain.” She reminded herself.

(Which doesn’t necessarily work when you carry enough weight to cancel said effect.) Herself reminded her right back.

(Yeah, I get that you were trying to be witty there, but that was just bad grammar.)

(Apologies, it sounded good until I actually said it.)

“Either way if we want to start turning our lab into a proper fortress we’re going to need a fair bit of scrap.” She told herself, grabbing even more metal than she could usually manage in a single trip, she ended up pushing her Grav-Pack to its absolute limits as the backpack portion of the pack was beginning to stretch its seams.

Taking a moment to catch her breath she couldn’t help but notice this little detail, and in similar fashion couldn’t help but admit, “The trip to the lab is going to suck.”

(Warned you.)

---

“Alright, that should do it for the windows.” She told her minions as they helped her hold the shutter frame in place.

Cautiously -and not wanting a repeat of the last three times they’d dropped it- DM-1 and DM-2 let go of the shutter frame before skittering several feet away, in case it fell (again).

“Look how was I supposed to know the window frame couldn’t handle that much weight?” She asked her snarkier self as she gave the shutters a few careful taps.

(Because you had to use the COMP to lift them?)

“Well… that just threw off my calculations for the whole thing.” She argued.

(Meaning you got your math wrong?)

“Bullshit!” She growled at the voice in her head. “I never get my math wrong you excess thought process backlog of an overactive imagination!”

(Okay! Sheesh, no need to go to the mad place!) Her inner passion defended.

Shaking her head at the sudden bout of anger, she turned her attention over to her LCMs who she’d shown how to set up the switch that slam the shutters shut on both the door and windows to her lab.

“How’s the wiring coming boys?”

1A gave her a thumbs up while wearing the little goggles she’d made her two organic minions in case of a lab accident, (such as the one 1B was currently in the middle of.)

(Wait, what?!) Her eyes snapped to her other little critter just in time to watch 1B shoot away from the electronic bits.

“Oh shit!” She cursed, rushing to her downed minion. “1B are you okay?!”

The little critter sat up woozily before giving her a shaky thumbs up and promptly falling on his back.

(Eh, he’s fine.)

“No he’s not!” She cried picking her little critter up.

(Yes he is.) Her inner madness sighed in exasperation. (That jump was a reflexive response caused by an instinctive adrenal overload upon sensing a nearby disturbance that could result in bodily harm. Ergo he was not actually hurt in any way, he’s just suffering from an extreme adrenaline crash.)

She blinked.

“I…” She felt the need to blink again. “How… how many hidden perks did we give these two?”

(Uh, if they’re hidden perks how am I supposed to know?) Her inner passion scoffed.

“But you… you just explained what happened with the whole… reflexive adrenal… system thing!” She pointed out, calling her other self out on her bullshit.

(Adrenal what now?)

“But… but…” She ran her hands through her hair before finally giving up and letting out a cry of frustration.

(What’s her problem?)

---

Having reached a point of just being done with the voices in her head, as well as having finished setting up the necessary upgrades to turn her lab into a panic room, she decided to make a more recreational upgrade to her minions for fun.

Which is how she found herself getting lost in hours of coding as she figured out the best way to grant an adaptive AI the ability of speech. Something that on paper sounded relatively easy given how all it should require is teaching her little drones how to pick and choose the appropriate recordings for a specific idea, or perhaps just setting up a simple text-to-speech drive.

Unfortunately, as she was coming to learn the whispers -as well as the voices in her head- liked to slip all sorts of fun little secrets into her programming that she was largely unaware of until she reached the point of needing to modify said program.

In this case, she discovered that while her minions were capable of understanding what she said, they weren’t actually understanding what she said, so much as how she said it. Instead of understanding her words her minions would instead pay attention to the tone of her voice, the pacing of her words, as well as her physical gestures to determine a rough approximation of what she was saying and then apply it to the most similar definition listed in their protocols.

Put into the simplest of terms, she was essentially the only human being they were capable of understanding.

Meaning that in order to give her minions the most basic form of speech possible, she had to go through and physically write out the definition of every word they might use in a way that made sense to her mechanically minded minions, while also accounting for the fact that they didn’t actually know any words.

A task that was as time consuming as it was tedious.

(Well, I did want something mindless to relax with…) She sighed, already feeling a crick forming in her neck.