A little diagnostic...

Posted on 16 Mar 2015 @ 12:42pm by EBH Mark I "Raven" & Lieutenant Asahi Kita
Edited on on 17 Mar 2015 @ 4:45pm

1,360 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: Episode 08 - NIMBUS
Location: Starbase 84: Childcare Center, Deck 264
Timeline: MD-02, 1000 hrs

[ON]

"Raven, call for you!" shouted the director, leaning out of her office. The hologram was busy with a group of six to ten year olds, monitoring their meal break for any food fights that may break out. "It's from the Galileo."

"I'll take it in the other office," she exclaimed. "Karen, cover for me," she called out before making a dash for a small secondary office which was shared by all the employees of the center. Closing the door behind her, she pressed a button to activate the terminal and was surprised to see Asahi's face appear.

"Lieutenant Kita?" she asked. "You don't have any children on the starbase, do you?"

"Thankfully, the only children I have are easy to keep an eye on." Asahi gave Raven a big, reassuring smile, grateful to have found time from his duties on the Atlas to check up on her. "I just wanted to check up on you, see how you're doing, and making sure your matrix is adapting to the Starbase's. Haven't had any problems, I hope?"

"Nothing too bad," replied Raven. "But now that I have you on the line, I've been turning slightly transparent about once every couple hours. Last time it happened, the kids thought I was a ghost. Is that something that you can fix remotely?"

Asahi frowned. "I wonder if your procedures aren't matching up with the holoemitters. I can definitely fiddle around and adjust the settings for ya, no problem." As he called the program up, Asahi smiled reassuringly. "Have you been able to tend to the kids well besides that? Interacting well with everyone?"

"The kids are great!' exclaimed Raven, a smile coming to her face. "Especially Delon, I think he really likes me. I taught him how to play kadis-kot; he's a natural." As she thought about the second part of the question, her smile evaporated. "I just wish I could say the same about my coworkers though."

"I haven't played kadis-kot in awhile. I guess that makes sense that that would be coded into your system..." Asahi paused mid-command code, frowning. "Coworkers?... Are you referring to other programming you have to interact with?"

"Not other programming, other people," replied Raven in a glum voice. "I'm detecting a certain coldness, so to speak, from some of the other childcare attendants. It's like they don't like me for some reason." She looked down at her feet for a moment, and the knee-high platform boots that her avatar had inexplicably been programmed with. "I think it's because I'm different."

Asahi's expression was riddled with confusion as Raven continued her story, brow creasing into a frown. He had never encountered an instance of holographic programs having emotions, but this was the first time an opportunity had arisen for him to have any sort of interaction with one. "Different? Do you mean because you don't look like the others, or maybe because you're a hologram?"

"I overheard them talking in the lunchroom," she explained, her voice wavering slightly. "A couple of them were talking about how I'm nothing more than a bunch of code, how I shouldn't be trusted to take care of kids, and how holograms are going to take everyone's jobs." She looked down at her outfit for a moment, an attempt to disguise the sadness that was readily apparent on her face. "I don't think my look helps either."

The internal panic set in as it sunk in to Asahi's mind that not only was Raven, a hologram, displaying an emotion, but said emotion was sadness. In his narrow-minded social experiences, the engineer rarely had an encounter with a sad person of any species, let alone a female. Even if Raven was a constructed hologram from programs and processors, Asahi had a distinct impression telling her she didn't have emotions was probably a terrible idea. How he was going to go about attempting to make her feel better, however, was another matter. "... Oh... They... they aren't being malicious, are they?"

"Not openly," explained the hologram, struggling with what humans might call their emotions, "but I've been programmed with extensive knowledge of human emotions, as well as the ability to perform detailed analyses on tone of voice, body language, facial expressions, etcetera."

Raven let out a mournful sigh. "According to my analysis, there is a 99.94 percent chance that they have strong negative feelings towards me."

Asahi leaned forward, fingers stroking his chin in thought. "So... they're saying mean things about you behind your back... and you don't like that. Right?"

"Yeah," replied Raven. "They're being mean. And..." she paused for a moment, pondering the right word. Her program wasn't designed for the sort of complex emotions that were added when Tuula's personality file was installed. "...hurtful," she added, holding back holographic tears. "I just wanted them to like me."

"Hurt... ful..." As Asahi repeated the word back, his eyes narrowed. He would have taken a look through her personality coding to see if there was a flaw, but with the limited knowledge he had of such a complex system, he was more afraid of breaking it than he was of anything else. Even if there were daycare workers there to watch the children, the engineer knew better than to take their primary care from them. "Is there someone over there who'll watch your back, Raven?"

The EBH pondered the question for a moment, doing a quick sociological analysis of her workplace. "I don't know. I'm so lonely." She held her head in her hands for a moment, trying not to cry. "Maybe I could talk to the director? Or there's this one woman, Karen, she doesn't seem as bad."

"Whoever you feel more comfortable with. If you've spoken with Karen, she might be willing to help out... hey, are you alright?" Asahi leaned closer to the screen, trying to get a good look at Raven's face from different angles.

"It's just not right," she said, her eyes welling up with tears. "How people don't like me just because I'm different. How it feels like they're just waiting for me to slip up so they can prove I'm just some worthless piece of code."

Brow quirking, the engineer frowned. "And getting them to see that you're a complex being capable of more than a single line of code... it's easier said than done..."

"Exactly!" exclaimed Raven. "It's funny, my program has gigaquads of data, and billions of complex subroutines. I'm probably more complex of a being than humans are." She paused for a moment and placed her finger on her chin, thinking. "Maybe I need some sort of grand gesture... something big, to show them that I'm just as real as they are?"

"Er..." Asahi's shoulders tensed. "You could do that, but maybe not too over the top? That might make it worse-And I'll fix that little 'ghost' bug so that you'll be all the more solid to them-Maybe you can get the kids to help?"

"Hmmmm, you're right," mused Raven. Asahi had a point; grand gestures tend to backfire, and the last thing she needed was to get them even more upset with her and make her even more of an outcast. And that was something that she wouldn't be able to take. The pain and frustration of being lonely, of being ostracized, was only growing more and more unbearable. "Asahi..." she started, her voice wavering, "will you be my friend?"

Hands hovering over the console to proceed in his task, Asahi gave Raven a hesitant smile. As much as he wanted to point his confusion out, the desire to cheer her up took priority. "... Of course I will. You might have to give me a little bit of a curve, though. You'd be the first hologram I'm friends with."

"Yay!" Raven was truly happy at his response, and she was beaming from behind her dark makeup. "It's good to have friends. Now, I just need to think of a way to make some more..."

[OFF]

Lieutenant Asahi Kita
Chief Engineering Officer / Executive Officer
USS Galileo / USS Atlas

Raven
Emergency Babysitting Hologram
USS Galileo

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