Work Text:
Karl was raising his voice again. A self-resetting mechanism that responds to disagreement. A background subroutine. You could set your watch to it.
“People aren’t predictable, Soona”.
Her father had a variety of ways to say her name. This time it was drawn out, soft, warm. “Sooooh-na”. This usually meant Soona did not recently offend anybody, or forget to do something important. This “Soona” usually came with a lesson, some important point, a tip or trick in interpersonal relationships. Other people tried to do it as well, sometimes, and Soona had her own spring-loaded, irritated mechanism that could trip. Not her dad. Most of the time, at least.
“You can expect the radiocomputer to always do what you told it to. When it doesn’t do what you wanted, it can be either a defect in the hardware or an on-air anomaly, a disturbance, both of which you learn to work with and recognize. The other option, which is much more likely, is that you and the radiocomputer have different understandings of what you meant. Luckily, you can explain yourself to the radiocomputer using the terms it understands, again and again, until you’re in complete parity.”
A spark, something clicking into place. Of course her father made sense, he always made sense, but using the process of reiterative programming was a good move to get her engaged. She even turned to him and gave him a little smile. A nod. I’m with you.
The “but” was coming, however, the point heralded by the soft, drawn out usage of her name.
“With people, the way they work always varies. You can’t neatly get an output of what a person was thinking when they did something you’re angry about. You can’t make an always-accurate prediction to their reaction for a given input. You can get an idea, through careful observation, but never think it’s immutable. Never think of people as a constant.”
She shot him another look. Out of her own repertoire, in their shared lexicon, this was the one that said “that was another acute and relevant usage of terms I care about and understand, father.” A warm current between them.
A constant. A static piece of information, a state that will always be there.
Her father winced while saying that last part, very slightly, because this line of conversation had a common pitfall. A cold front to replace the warm. As his wince foretold, Soona asked -
“So humans aren’t dependable. Why should I bother?” Her tone much like a careful buyer sorting through memory cores. If your usecase is for an entire lifetime, you better get something that lasts a lifetime and then some, too. Get a warranty if you can, from a company with reputation in professional circles.
Another spark flashed, a logical leap somewhere colder and drier still.
“If your program always suffers from interference during runtime, either minimize your usage of it or get better hardware. Actually, your dependence -”
She raised a finger in front of the widening pained expression, her voice rising slightly.
“Your dependence on the program is your mistake, if you can’t fix it, no?”
Her father laughed. The entry for that laughter included words like “patience” and “discomfort”. Here was a laugh to avoid causing, ideally. There was always a gap, somewhere. Maybe an immutable one.
Her father went on, shifting from his laughter to a more sombre tone.
“Sure. Humans are bad hardware. Somewhere there’s shoddy software to complain about. too, super haphazard. The project manager was just gluing stuff on, right?” He shot her a brief, wry smile this time. He told her all about project managers, of course. Funny. Again, his tone flattened back down. “But it’s the hardware you have, and you can’t really get what you want if you just never use it, you know? You have to learn to work with a constant interference, Soona”,
And this time the “Soona” was less breathy, shorter. This was practical father. Best-practices father. Very effective, usually.
“depend on some things. Work with what you get. Trust yourself to know what to do when the thing you relied on does change, because it can, and it will.”
Karl raising his voice when he didn’t get his way was, largely, dependable.
“You aren’t listening, Sulisław! Listen to me, let me -”
Again, the subroutine, probably hammered into him by experiences with disagreeable siblings or failed romantic endeavors, something of that nature.
Imagine siblings. Being a child is already hard and embarrassing - and having more of that around you? Not just in school, but everywhere? You want to sleep, do some work, get some space to manage your own confused and painful existence, and there’s always someone there you’re obligated to tolerate? They aren’t smart or experienced with anything, either? Even worse, they’re supposedly there forever?
Well, only supposedly. Soona’s mom didn’t follow that directive, the one everybody talks about in regards to family. Maybe Soona’s arrival was a modifier in some way, but from the way her father spoke, it was always inevitable. The stack had to overflow at some point. “You can keep closing the dish cabinet right before they fall on top of you, at least for a while”, he would laugh, expecting her to keep it going. There were a few accepted completions, each relevant in different conversations.
“But at some point, you really need to grab something from in there, and you might just get it - but all around you there’s broken ceramic, isn’t there?”
This was the real one. The best one. Not the funniest, mind. A cold discomfort in the back of your head, sometimes. Something to rely on, for sure.
“I am, in fact, listening.” A solid year of grinding teeth was probably better for Sulisław’s health than listening right now. Sulisław had his own lexicon, too. Another set of attributes and functions Soona passively documented for future reference. This was a commonly accessed entry, though, a combination of terse body language and clipped words. In this case, Sulisław was probably saying: “I am listening, which is surprising. I’m frustrated with you. I have theories and observations regarding your abilities and your motives. I go through them when I’m angry. If I brought all of them up right now, you might be so hurt you would’ve preferred getting elbowed in the nose. Either way, I’m still not sure if it’s a net gain to fire you, and this is the only reason I haven’t”.
That last part Soona heard out loud, even if not from Sulisław himself. Karl puts in the hours. Karl writes everything it says he should write in his imposing pile of tasks, just powering through it even when others in his team are currently sleeping off a hangover or creating one. Karl comes into every meeting, on time and prepared. Karl even asks relevant and professional questions in the meetings, an even more unusual feat. At the same time, Mika had a nervous breakdown after Karl screamed that her concept art had as much to do with what he wrote as a pile of shit has to do with a sandwich. His oh-so careful writing, monuments to immersive tone and atmosphere, as he put it. Firing Karl, when Karl is a solid reason for employee turnover by himself, was certainly enticing. Mika was a good artist, too, maybe the most sufferable among them.
And there’s the arguing.
Soona felt a tremor in her left eye. Magnesium deficiency, somebody told her once. Deficiency in blessed silence was a more likely diagnosis. There he goes again.
“If you listened in the last roadmap meeting, this wouldn’t be a surprise to you. You nodded along, too!”
Accusation. If there’s something that works really well with Sulisław, it’s insinuating he doesn’t take the project seriously. Soona did that once, much earlier. She had no plans to repeat that particular experience.
“I explained Wirrâl has to have political bodies. Players can’t operate in a vast wasteland with only bandits and monsters to encounter. And no!” there he goes with the hand raising, to make sure nobody interrupts. Karl makes no connection between the gesture and its inherent violence, probably, but it’s there. “A local warlord or some kind of survivor camp leader aren’t enough. Political systems can be primitive, and rely on strength and resources, sure, but they have to be there. Quests with actual intrigue, choices that shape civilization!”
The table murmured assent at this, even as Karl’s voice broke petulantly towards the end. A common design concern was making sure players feel like they matter, that the world is alive with them. This was a card so easy to play it could be compared to saying “what we need to find is the middleground” in a reasonable tone of voice. Soona rolled her eyes, but only very slightly - Sulisław’s concerns were correct. In this case, however, Karl’s were as well, and Karl did bring this up before. Sulisław probably took it as part of a specific quest or storyline, not an overall motif affecting all of Wirrâl.
Maybe that’s when things really went beyond saving. Karl got his way, so Sulisław had to get his. The crunch rose and rose like a horrible beast from the swamp, devouring muddy footpaths in its ascent.
A blink, and Soona was out of her reverie. Tears - dry eyes, due to staring into a screen full of code, were there. She blinked some more, feeling her feet regain some blood pressure as she shifted her pose. The marker on the screen, blinking on the function she only started writing, did not move in what must have been 10 minutes.
She stretched, a slightly painful crack in her shoulder blades. “Tendons we mistreat so regularly, you can rate them for spring tension” her father once said lightly, rubbing her back. He was tender, the way people do things nobody did for them. The pain of uncoiling tissue was very light, and the increasing flexibility was a welcome comfort when he did it. He would explain the interplay of muscles and acids and proteins and why mom always criticized the way he sits. He was never a very good role model for proper posture, her father. Excellent programming instructor for a child, though, she yawned quietly. For a lot of things.
Black dots were swimming across her vision, black and white checkerboards undulating and retreating. She tilted her head slightly, breathing deeply, letting her body readjust to proper wakefulness. The basement slowly came into focus. It was dark - she must have been at this for what, six, eight hours? The sun was at a very definite noon, earlier. Probably.
She groaned slightly and looked at her code again. A simple dataset was given the task of pretending to be the breathaking, interlocking work of art titled Wirrâl Untethered. Once on-air, various instructions and functions would play with this dataset. Get some data, modify it, write new data, save some changes. Add more actors to the dataset, more things to keep track of at once. Soona was trying to write instructions similar in principle to the ones that existed in the real codebase, the real framework, to find where it went wrong. A more desperate theory involved simulating a runaway process - constantly reading and overwriting data, right up to when the transmission times out and stops the computation by force. Orbis has built-in protections against runaway computations like that, and even so - what should return is a corrupted dataset at most, a bad entry, incorrect memory addresses, not...
not nothing. There’s nothing that should be causing a complete wipe. Nothing that would cause the very foundations of the program to just be gone.
Still, it has to be here.
“The computer always does what you told it to do.” Her father said another time, in an early lecture. “You could have meant any number of things, but the computer speaks a very specific language that you don’t, so you instruct a very good translator with what you need. If you tell the translator something wrong, by accident, he won’t ask you if you’re sure - he’s happy to relay what you said exactly as it is. This is how bugs come to be, and what you should keep in mind when investigating one.”
Here, as far Soona could tell, nobody instructed the program to destroy everything. There’s no such thing, either - Orbis will happily help compute your instructions to delete parts of your program, your data, any entry you want - but to destroy its own logic? Wipe the memory core completely, return a blank slate where Orbis itself doesn’t exist? Nobody made a programming language that can do that on-air. Why would you? It’s a ridiculous concept. Some things are, in fact, a constant, even if humans aren’t.
“You’re being ridiculous.”
Here was an unknown tone of voice, as well as accusatory language Soona never heard from Damien. It was a rare choice of words, too - who ever called her ridiculous? The clothes she wore could have been out of style, or occasionally described as “lived-in”. Sometimes people incorrectly assumed she had a terrible desire to know what they think about her hair. Sometimes she was short with her colleagues, or even difficult with her father.
But ridiculous?
“How am I ridiculous?” her tone was flat. She could have asked if it’s raining outside.
“You’re going to act like nothing happened? We’re supposed to sit here and talk about your tasks, how our day was, and that’s it?”
“Yes.” A question mark was supposed to be there, maybe, a tonal indicator of confusion and worry. The single, sharp syllable failed to contain either. On another person, maybe an eyebrow would have quirked. It is raining, the answer could have meant. More uncharted territory in Damien’s tone - why?
Of course that’s what they were supposed to do, they made plans to spend time together after work. This time, specifically, Damien happened to phrase it with “if they can talk”, but isn’t that what they usually did? Sit around, talk, listen to the radio. Damien sometimes read poetry, and laugh lightly, or breathe in and open his eyes a particular way, ask her to take a look at the piece he just read. He was zeroing in on what kind she liked, he explained one time, smiling. It’s going pretty well, he mentioned another time, and she smiled back - mapping expected interactions and deriving joy from it made perfect sense. She would flip through her notes in the meantime, make plans for tomorrow. Pain points in requested features, proposed changes, time estimates, open questions to the design team.
And so her pen was in her hand, her notebook open. Damien wasn’t holding a book this time, and there was a strained look to his face. Both happened, sometimes, sure, but why did he look at her notebook like that?
Like nothing happened, he said. What’s missing here?
Oh, wait -
“Do you mean when you kissed me?”
The delivery is flat. A query. There is no incredulity, only a scramble to gather the facts.
“Yes! Yes, obviously!”
Now there’s some familiar territory, because Damien made at least partial usage of a relieved exhalation. Soona nodded slowly - yes, relief. From what?
“When you aren’t sure what’s going on, check the last correct computation before things went haywire.” Her father said, to avoid giving her the answer and still set her in the right direction.
“You said to forget it happened. I told you I will.”
Another person might have trailed this questioningly, drawn out the delivery to make sure they’re on the same page, but this was fact. This is a thing that happened. A long time after - perhaps it was 100 milliseconds - an unsaid question formed.
Did you expect me to do otherwise?
But before the question finished articulating she shot out another statement. It cut in line.
“You said you appreciate our time together, always. You said you’re good with things as they are.”
Immediately she saw his reaction. There’s an entry for when Damien bunches up his shoulders like that.
Soona shook her head again, opening her eyes abruptly. Her statement hung in the air for a second longer. Again? She touched a hand to her face. Tired, her hand told her tersely. She shushed a rude rumbling from her stomach, taking another swig from her water bottle. The weight of the bottle informed her that she did not drink very much today at all, and her throat concurred timidly. Hurried, messy code, the voice of her father said over them. He was looking through her eyes at the terminal. Go rest, Soona. The tone is understanding and bereft of judgment. The “Soona” is of the soothing variety.
How many times did her father find her, bent over her small terminal in the dark? How many times did something massive and warm sit next to her, causing the small mattress to squeal against the frame? looking over her shoulder, lightly playing with her hair? Explain to me what you’re doing. Ah, but why not do it like that? You forgot you could? No matter. Do you understand why it should be so? Okay, let’s talk about this tomorrow after dinner. We’re making a deal - you dry and put away the dishes tomorrow, then we tackle this together. For now, sleep.
And everything her father said was factual. Constant. He took great pains to explain he will always do so, but others might not. Others might not even understand the problem.
Her eyes lingered over a pallet in the dark basement, broken planks extending into darkness. There used to be a red sofa there. It was there, ostensibly, to take breaks from “deep focus”. In reality, the writers frequently retreated here to deeply focus on other things. Deeply inhale foreign substances, maybe. They roped along the artists, some of the programmers. Even Karl, usually so set apart from the other writers, sometimes joined them. Karl-affected arguments would go down by a noticeable 0.7 multiplier in the office when he did.
Damien laid on that sofa, sometimes. With his shoes on, smiling at her or the book he was reading or at nothing in particular, a finger at his lips signaling he’s working something out. Listening to the chatter around them during the day, the humdrum of the street in the evening.
He was the first to leave, by some margin. Even before Mika.