[RadioDust] Artificial Love

Chapter 5: The One Behind the Curtain

"Do you understand yet what you asked for?" Baxter asked, taking a break from looking over Anon's shoulder to glance back at Angel. Alastor was seated in a chair nearby, essentially shut down, with a wire like an IV connected somewhere behind his ear. Angel tried not to think too hard about it. Anon's screens, which had been full of different Web tabs and applications before, were now all filled with windows that looked nearly the same but with different lines of code. Angel couldn't make heads or tails of what he was seeing, but Versa had described it as 'basically tom DNA.' That thought wasn't real comforting, knowing Anon was poking around and messing with it.

"Sure I do. Otherwise I wouldn't've asked for it," Angel said, tearing his eyes away from his tom to look at Baxter instead.

"That sounds like a 'no.'"

"Weeell, he'll find out soon enough," Anon snickered without once taking their eyes off their work. "I hope for Alastor's sake you're prepared for the challenge."

"Whaddaya mean, challenge?" This process was supposed to be making things easier for them.

Baxter answered his question with another one: "Do you think there's just a switch somewhere in there that you can flip between 'robot slave' and 'fully self-aware person'?"

Before Angel could get irritated and snap at him, Versa scolded from her seat on a huge fluffy beanbag in the corner, "You know that's not very helpful, amore. If you're really worried about this going well for Alastor, the least you can do is explain." Surprisingly, Baxter actually looked mollified, even a little guilty.

"The Laws do a lot to inform a tom's behavior and how they interact with others," he said, glancing over Anon's shoulder at the code again. "Altering that is not a small change; it's a major, fundamental shift in how they see the world. You're going to have to be conscious of that and help him adjust."

"Wait, you're not gettin' rid of the Laws completely, are you?" Angel asked, a hint of nervous discomfort sneaking into his voice. Anon finally paused what they were doing and turned to look at him critically, just like Baxter and Versa were.

"Make up your mind, Lino: do you want him to have free will or not?" Anon asked plainly. Suddenly the mood in the room had gotten real tense, and Angel figured if he gave the wrong answer, he might just get thrown out. Anon was and always had been against the Laws, insistent that they were outdated and even unethical. There was a reason Baxter used the word 'slave' before; that was genuinely how they saw it. Even if Angel didn't fully understand that perspective, he still knew what he was looking for from his own tom.

"'Course I do. It's just, when he brought it up, he only mentioned the second one."

"So consider this a bonus." Anon shrugged and went back to work, allowing Angel to relax a little. "Look, it's not like I'm erasing them altogether. He'll still know what the Laws are and that he was originally designed to follow them. I'm just giving him the option not to."

And how could that possibly backfire...?

After a few seconds of silence, other than the clicking and scrolling that came from Anon's mouse, they asked, "Are you sure you haven't been messing around with any of this already?"

"What? Me?" Angel laughed. "No way; I wouldn't even know how. Why? Is there somethin' wrong?" Maybe they were finding whatever had made Alastor get so passionate earlier.

"Not 'wrong.' Just weird. You said you've only had him for a day, right?" They waved Angel closer, so he went and followed their cursor across a few different lines of code. "But every script I'm seeing that dictates his relationship with his link is set up to make you priority number one, just like he said. He's programmed to get a ton of positive feedback for anything that benefits you: actions that ensure your safety, visible signs that you're happy, verbal praise, whatever."