Opinions without 3.1415 are just Onions (Week1 post trial)

[ghostricked]

After everything, the house seems almost too still and too mundane. At least as long as the doors to that room remain closed. One by one those covered in what was once their teammate are lead to the showers or change in silence. There is no warm meal waiting for them. No words of encouragement.

Life goes on, regardless.

Comments

Room 6

[dreamdispersal]

[ Though none of what happened has affected Zabuza much in theory, he still dwells on the event of the day even into the late evening. He'd thought it was all a whole lot of nonsense, but even nonsense can stick to one's mind for a bit. So sometime in the evening, Saphir will find himself addressed from the bed across, where Zabuza is sitting and sharpening his sword. ]

You're into robots. Do you think it matters, the whole personhood deal?

pretend he's wearing a shirt in this icon b/c i can't not use "thoughtful while lying down" here

[reanimania]

[ Saphir had been curled up under a blanket and staring at the wall before this; if nothing else, the sound of scraping metal was more comforting than annoying to him. When he's addressed, there's a pause before he rolls over and slips his glasses back on.

...Before this, he would have been able to easily say no. Even his replicas that are full biological humans are just objects to him; when one doesn't meet your standards, you poison it and dispose of it like you would any other garbage. ]

Not really.

[ ...But those replicas were also all blank slates that lacked any memory or personality. There weren't any intelligent interactions with them. He'd certainly never played party games with them.

He also hadn't even realized Olympia was a robot the first time he'd met her, so she'd been a "she" in his mind already before he'd had a chance to demote her to an "it." ]

I do think... that it's a little complicated in this case. Olympia was much more advanced in both form and function than any robots I ever worked with in my world. The brain is essentially a computer, and memories and personality data that can theoretically be saved and reproduced, so it's difficult to determine where to draw the line between artificial intelligence and "real" intelligence.

[ If he could have built a robot on that level with the Professor's appearance and memories... he thinks he could have convinced Jade that it was enough to count as her. He's sure he could have convinced himself. ]

But when there's a chance to rebuild her and restore her memory data, I think it's stupid to refuse to acknowledge that just because we want to pretend she was the same as us in every way.

[ Isn't it much crueler to abandon something that could potentially be saved if you claim to care about it? ]

that is a beautiful icon, his nakeyness is forgiven

[dreamdispersal]

[ Zabuza never had reason to put any thought into these matters before. In his whole life, he's never encountered anything like a robot. And even now that he has, he's not really thought much of it. Olympia's functions were fascinating, sure, but he'd never felt a desire to get philosophical about her.

Now everyone's tripping over one another to re-affirm her as more than a tool and it's... it sits oddly with him, a man who has defined his life around being a tool. ]

A broken tool can be discarded. That's what I'd ordinarily say, but she does still have a lot of use left to you science types, doesn't she? Understand what makes her tick, use it to go to greater heights.

[ Like when you'd take the body of an enemy ninja to get all their techniques from them. ]

Not that any of that relates to being a person either way.

[reanimania]

Y-yes, there are a lot of things I'd like to understand about how she was designed and constructed.

[ That had been the entirety of his motivation for wanting to examine her when she was still in operation; so he could apply whatever he learned to his own projects. He'd never had any strong feelings about Olympia as a person -- setting aside the debate about whether she qualified as one in the first place -- and research opportunities aside, her absence isn't something he expects to feel much.

But...

It's the combination of Dazai's and Sho's accusations, he guesses -- that his desire to bring her back meant he considered her replaceable, and that he could have prevented this if he'd acted sooner, as if it wasn't the damn killer's own fault. This has nothing to do with the Professor, and yet he can't stop thinking about her now. About the gradually dawning reality that he may never get back home to save her and might never get back that happy time he's been so desperately looking for. Bringing back Olympia -- as easy as it should have been, when he'd had her backup data right there in his hand -- would have at least made him feel like there was some hope. But that's out of the question now.

He refuses to doubt that bringing her back is the right choice, though. Dazai doesn't know anything. If he thought the Professor was replaceable, he wouldn't be trying this hard to get back the one he remembered. ]

That's all.

[dreamdispersal]

[ It's not all. It's obviously not all, but who is Zabuza to ask? He doesn't even care, not really. Saphir is among the people he considers more useful than not around here and he's committed to having some kind of functional working relation to him, but what does he care about his thoughts and feelings? Nothing, not really.

Working in a team again is strange. For most of his life, Zabuza had been working with a variety of groups, but the last year or so he'd been mostly on his own. Everyone had betrayed him, left him, spit on their common goals. He'd gotten used to being with Haku and Haku alone, not considering anyone's priorities but his own.

Now he's looking at these people he's spent the past two weeks with and thinking to himself that they're his team - and most of his team has just proven themselves to be complete idiots. It sucks.

And somewhere in that uneasiness, he finds the motivation to not simply let the conversation die out right now and instead offer some of his own thought. ]

Humans and robots can be the same in this regard. In my world, we'd take back any enemy ninja's body to take them apart and gather their secrets. The body is a powerful storage media full of insight into one's life and abilities. Often it's more valuable than the person had ever been alive.

Olympia and us haven't been different at all, but that's not because she's a person. It's because we're all tools to this mission.

[ Maybe that's what bothered him about all this. The ridiculously high and mighty thinking that rejected this simple reality. ]

[reanimania]

...That's not entirely unlike the way we collected replica data, I suppose.

[ He's a little hesitant to say it when he's still trying to play the part of a good doctor here, but honestly, it's strikingly similar. And he'd never been bothered by the corpses he and Jade had collected from the battlefield -- or, well, maybe he had once, but it's been a long time now -- when they were just a means to an end that was much more important than any of their individual lives had ever been. He may be weak in some regards, but he isn't a softhearted person by any means. ]

But this wasn't like that. It was a stupid and pointless death and none of us got anything out of it.

[dreamdispersal]

[ Far be it from Zabuza to judge Saphir for disclosing this information. Taking what you need from corpses is reasonable to him and the people who oppose it are not good or kind, they're just not utilitarian enough.

If anything, Zabuza is pleasantly surprised at how many views Saphir seems to at least somewhat share with him. ]

We're going to be seeing more and more of these. It's not the first battle royal I've seen, but it's certainly even more senseless than the others. If I weren't so keen on surviving, I'd consider the idea of killing us all in one go just to spoil that thing's fun.

[ He's... joking. ]