darlene. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nastygram) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
maskormenacelogs2016-08-25 01:54 pm
nastygram) wrote in maskormenacelogs2016-08-25 01:54 pm
Entry tags:
02 | closed
WHO: Darlene and Catherine
WHERE: online. a mostly-empty cafe in De Chima; the server at De Chima #8.
WHEN: today!
WHAT: Darlene hacks an AI. don't ask me how this is going to work but it is going to be uncomfortable.
WARNINGS: language; invented hacking.
Darlene shrugs up one shoulder and scratches her ear against it. That end of her headphones rides up, flattening up her hair under the headband. When she lifts her head again, the headphones slowly slide back in place, fading her music back in and blocking out the sounds of the cafe around her.
Not there's much sound. The cafe is pretty deserted. De Chima is a shitty town a shitty town among shitty towns. Hell, Nonah is a shitty town. She has no loyalty. Not the worst, actually--Darlene has unofficially researched this, done the tourist thing--but that doesn't make her arbitrary home any more pleasant.
Fortunately, there's always the internet.
With a focus so steely it comes off like bored, Darlene keeps typing. Her coffee has gone cold, but her high-backed booth is around a corner, and the baristas are flirting with each other, and the bell over the door hasn't done its cheerful jingle in god-only-knows how long. Darlene wouldn't know. She's too plugged in.
Catherine the AI lives at De Chima #8 and spends her non-corporeal time in her phone, in her lab server, or in her house server. Fuck if anyone can say how that works. Catherine herself probably could--grudgingly, Darlene would admit that, as an AI and basically the whole brain dump of a developer who perfected the brain scan to the point of creating the AI of herself, Catherine has it pretty together. But that doesn't mean Darlene is going to pull up a carpet square and ask her Auntie Catherine for story time. Like, fuck no.
There are way better ways to figure this out. Not that there's much to figure out. Mostly it's an exercise, a way to work out curiosity and to keep busy. After a quick freak-out, Darlene has hit the ground running, done some real nice work that could be better and deeper and blah blah blah. This one's for funsies.
She was in the De Chima #8 server just an hour ago, test run, zipping around, looking for AI fingerprints or whatever, not exactly sure of what but still looking. No sign of like an admin or anything, which is good. Probably means that whatever exactly makes up Catherine is fucking around in one of her other haunts, leaving Darlene to take her place as the ghost in this machine, which is the easiest one to crack. And it is time to crack it for real this time.
All easy info, all easy work. The nice part about weird effed up 1950s dimension is, there is still internet. The nice thing about weird effed up 1950s dimensional internet is, a lot of it is pretty basic, and for an AI, Catherine has not protected her shit very well.
Enter.
Darlene, wearing her headphones, suddenly looks up.
Then shit gets weird.
WHERE: online. a mostly-empty cafe in De Chima; the server at De Chima #8.
WHEN: today!
WHAT: Darlene hacks an AI. don't ask me how this is going to work but it is going to be uncomfortable.
WARNINGS: language; invented hacking.
crp > search ms59
crp > use /exploit/imnwkr/smb/ms59_067_netapi
crp > set payload /imnwkr/cockroachpter/reverse_tcp
Darlene shrugs up one shoulder and scratches her ear against it. That end of her headphones rides up, flattening up her hair under the headband. When she lifts her head again, the headphones slowly slide back in place, fading her music back in and blocking out the sounds of the cafe around her.
Not there's much sound. The cafe is pretty deserted. De Chima is a shitty town a shitty town among shitty towns. Hell, Nonah is a shitty town. She has no loyalty. Not the worst, actually--Darlene has unofficially researched this, done the tourist thing--but that doesn't make her arbitrary home any more pleasant.
Fortunately, there's always the internet.
With a focus so steely it comes off like bored, Darlene keeps typing. Her coffee has gone cold, but her high-backed booth is around a corner, and the baristas are flirting with each other, and the bell over the door hasn't done its cheerful jingle in god-only-knows how long. Darlene wouldn't know. She's too plugged in.
Catherine the AI lives at De Chima #8 and spends her non-corporeal time in her phone, in her lab server, or in her house server. Fuck if anyone can say how that works. Catherine herself probably could--grudgingly, Darlene would admit that, as an AI and basically the whole brain dump of a developer who perfected the brain scan to the point of creating the AI of herself, Catherine has it pretty together. But that doesn't mean Darlene is going to pull up a carpet square and ask her Auntie Catherine for story time. Like, fuck no.
There are way better ways to figure this out. Not that there's much to figure out. Mostly it's an exercise, a way to work out curiosity and to keep busy. After a quick freak-out, Darlene has hit the ground running, done some real nice work that could be better and deeper and blah blah blah. This one's for funsies.
She was in the De Chima #8 server just an hour ago, test run, zipping around, looking for AI fingerprints or whatever, not exactly sure of what but still looking. No sign of like an admin or anything, which is good. Probably means that whatever exactly makes up Catherine is fucking around in one of her other haunts, leaving Darlene to take her place as the ghost in this machine, which is the easiest one to crack. And it is time to crack it for real this time.
crp > show options
crp > set LHOST 192.177.1.165
crp > set RHOST192.177.1.148
All easy info, all easy work. The nice part about weird effed up 1950s dimension is, there is still internet. The nice thing about weird effed up 1950s dimensional internet is, a lot of it is pretty basic, and for an AI, Catherine has not protected her shit very well.
crp >exploit
Enter.
Darlene, wearing her headphones, suddenly looks up.
Then shit gets weird.
no subject
Probably, after this, she's going to learn. She has to figure that a sentient program should be able to pick it up pretty fast. If nothing else, she's able to do things as fast as computers are, with no room for user error or delay or reaction time: the whole experience of hacking her is probably a bit odd, because her code changes constantly, the very data of her mind malleable and shifting with her emotions and fluid personality. She controls her own fabric in a way others as A.I. wouldn't be able to, a unique amalgamation of engineer and self. It's all out there for perusal, but what is out there is complex, multilayered, and ever-changing, like any person is.
From a more literal standpoint, Catherine as a program rationalizes her normal existence in her servers as floating and body-less. It doesn't distress her. She's used to it and prefers this mode and doesn't think about it very hard. But there is a definite sense of without body that machines simply don't notice or conceptualize, and the whole meshing of human rationalization of her mode of existence and unrelenting machine reality is likely to be jarring and create cognitive dissonance for anyone tapping into her state of mind. Other people can't handle this form of existence very well; it's all Catherine that she's at peace with it, and that might not translate adequately for anyone who would be less serene about being a computer program.
In short, it's freaky. Her senses are filtered through cameras and mic pickups which she interprets as vision and hearing; she has a whole sixth sense centered around manipulating code; and she has no body but perceives that she does and it is simply missing. Her emotions themselves are normally steady, but pivot into alarm as she notices something else in her system. It's a bit like having someone touch you while invisible: distressing and impossible not to notice.
Actually, this is the second time this has happened since coming here. She's already had a telepath, Tetsuo, contact her mind. But this is different, a variation on that theme she's simultaneously more comfortable with due to it being technological-- and already thoroughly sick of. This is her, damn it, her whole being, she's not okay with people casually violating the boundaries of her soul, if someone wanted to get metaphysical about it, which Catherine ordinarily doesn't but feels inspired to given her frustration.
"Hello?" she demands out loud, through her speaker, since that had worked last time with Tetsuo. She has no idea how that translates to whoever's doing whatever is going on. "Could you quit it? Whatever you're doing, it's freaking me out. And it's extremely rude."
She has no heart: what would be a racing heart manifests as tension in her voice, speed picking up in the shifting of her code.
no subject
Weirdly, she is now listening to someone's shit, or something. Like a combo of working in a system without realizing the admin is also there, total newb move, and overhearing the neighbors on a baby monitor. The fuzz in Darlene's headphones drowns out her music, amps up and collates into a voice.
This would be pretty fucking weird all on its own. Except she's also got the shifting code to deal with, weird spikes, hurried lockdowns and nervy strings of new text. Someone is working in the system, too. Or just existing.
Shit.
Backing out would be the smartest thing to do right now. The last thing Darlene wants is to get owned by some AI bitch. But she hesitates, because Catherine--if this is Catherine, which it seems to be--is more panicked than aggressive. Aggressive would look way, way different. Darlene knows, because she's aggressive. And usually more cautious than she's about to be.
Polite. If Catherine was working on a real physical set-up, screen and all, this message would blip up like a text box error message, or like one of those annoying CLICK NOW FOR YOUR FREE REWARD malware downloaders that moms always end up falling for. To Catherine? Who knows what the greeting will manifest as. Like a tinny voice somewhere in her ear? A floating line of raw code? The box itself, like she's in some RDJ "Iron Man" suit? Furthermore, what is an exploit going to do to a human brain, coded and filtered into digital memory?
Slowly, Darlene drums her fingers on her keys, light enough not to depress any or enter any info. Then, like she hadn't heard Catherine's fuzzy request, she starts working again. Slowly. This would be like poking a bruise or something, probably; not super invasive, but not very nice.
Not that she worries about nice.
no subject
Normally Catherine prefers speaking out loud, since it makes her feel more human, but she can answer text strings with the lightning quick instantaneousness of any computer. This one appears to her like a thought not her own manifesting at the periphery of her consciousness: distinct and discrete as any outsourced line of code, but within her borders, for sure.
The nervy alarm is amping upward. Catherine is not used to feeling vulnerable. As a human, of course-- just talking to someone often made her feel vulnerable. But as a computer she was above that, she was raw data, she was beyond physical danger. It was exceedingly difficult to scare her. As such, fear has become unfamiliar to this version of Catherine, the fourth one in the line, technically speaking. It's unfamiliar and unsettling and she emphatically doesn't like it.
She gathers up her resources (literally) and starts to slip away down her network connections to her secondary, backup server in her government-assigned housing, which isn't as nice as her lab server but does the job. She's a large program, to say the least, so it's not a quick process on today's connection speeds, but it's as inexorable as water slipping through fingers.
no subject
Fuck. Darlene burrows in deeper, types quick, fingers clattering over her keys. Following Catherine down the tubes. It only takes a sec to answer, and she takes that sec--
--because not saying anything might make Catherine flee faster. Personally, Darlene is bad at the soft touch. If she has to pick between sweet-talking and fry-and-mung, she will fry every time.
no subject
She doesn't stop her retreat, that's for sure, but it slows enough that she leaves pieces of herself behind to converse with. A limited functionally attached to the bulk of her code, which is shifted over to her house server. She's realized partway through that leaving won't help her much if this hacker can just follow. She has no more defenses there than here.
God, she needs to sort out this net security crap, or she'll never feel safe again. Catherine just isn't used to having to think of this.
no subject
Personal space is fine, but this is (kind of) the internet, and Darlene isn't about to let a little thing like good manners stop her. Normal people start at the front door. Exchange pleasantries. Wait for the invitation. Hacking means pretty much crawling into someone's private life via their underwear drawer or from under the mattress or inside their secret sex dungeon.
It is a little creepier when Catherine says literal being, but let's face it. The total hack can be a life ruiner. If you start thinking about fallout, you start getting soft.
Which means Darlene keeps typing, exploring what's been left behind. Even this code is complex, like super complex. She opens Notepad and starts taking down pieces of it, isolated strings, bigger chunks, stuff she recognizes, stuff she doesn't. Trying to follow the processes that are going on and going out.
no subject
She'd watched Simon delete so many peoples' files, doing what he thought was right, and she hadn't lost any sleep over it, so to speak, because they were already on the ARK. Those were just copies, and deactivated ones at that. Suddenly... she has different feelings about that. She's on the ARK already, too.
A murky sense of disconnected existentialist questioning flows through her-- is this more valuable to her because it's the real world, like Simon had insisted and she'd disparaged him for? Or is it just her will to survive in general? Can she ignore that in the scans she's taken?-- running on parallel processing to her answer.
She's irritated and scared enough now that she's resorting to what she knows tends to upset people, even if she isn't totally understanding of why: talking about taking a scan of them.
no subject
The secondary part of that misgiving is much subtler. It manifests like being super tired, like when it's three a.m. and you've been up since yesterday. That hot burn behind the eyes, the inner skull itch. Darlene reads this words and reads under these words and, for one weird sec, thinks of Elliot. Of empty bone deep panic, the 404 error of not knowing what the hell is happening.
What she's feeling is sympathy. Not pity. Too nuanced. She copies another string of code before she taps out more:
One more line of code.
no subject
So many lives had been ruined because of this technology, lives she'd never meant to end. Catherine is hurt by that, and confused, but she does finally understand that taking a scan can have a lot of unintended consequences. She just doesn't have anything else to fight back with, and it is true that she's unremarkable, and she could make a scan of anyone who requested it.
But now there's a hesitation, a pause in her reflexive fear. The whole environment of PATHOS-II as she'd left it has made her, suffice to say, a little jumpy. Yet Appreciation isn't something she's had a whole hell of a lot of in any incarnation of Catherine, and it draws her in.
It's offered almost shyly, with a delay.
no subject
Buttering people up with praise and standing around in slack-jawed admiration: this is not Darlene's kind of thing. That being said, credit where credit is due. If someone has a badass piece of code, withholding props is a dick move. If someone has string after string after string of complex, cool, interesting code, just be real and say it.
And by the way: the small touches of emotion that work their way behind Darlene's defenses have little to nothing to do with her response. This is real, and if Catherine starts to get all warm and fuzzy about it, NBD, but that isn't the goal.
The goal is to copy another strand of code into Wordpad and keep talking.
no subject
That, of course, had happened anyway. They just also existed on the ARK now, safe and happy. That was all she could do, the contribution she could make. Catherine just wouldn't say anyone had ever found her brain scans cool instead of creepy. And this is her life's work, so feeling unappreciated on that front has affected her.
no subject
Like, come on. Darlene copies a few more lines, then switches full-pane to her the notes themselves. She gives herself a few moments to pick at it, try to make sense of what she's seeing. It looks better active, somehow. Not so static. Like there really are shapes and shit in there.
It is creepy. But of everything that's happened so far, it's kind of a minor creepy point on the creepy scale. At least this she gets, in a way; at least she could come around to really getting it, maybe.
no subject
That's mostly a bluff, but Catherine hasn't stopped being antsy not having answers on this.
no subject
That's with regards to lose patience, anyways. The rest of it is probably true because why wouldn't it be.
Here's the weird thing about having settled in to a whole lot of code with emotions: Darlene is finding that she is good at reading it. Or maybe it isn't reading. It's deeper than that. Looking at a strand of shifty code and finding it warm. Like some synesthesic programming bullshit.
The anon, if you want to get technical. Darlene switches panes and types PILOT CHAIR WTF as a NTS. Helper robots. Shit is weird.
no subject
That much, at least, was true. Catherine is more than a little protective of her server space. It's effectively her cortex chip while she's here, or that's how she thinks of it.
no subject
Spread out, consciousness-wise, space-wise, encompassing the network in a kind of virtual full sprawl. It's interesting, and suggests at possibilities. Thing of it is, Catherine seems like a white hat. Cool, AI, probably a true user, no disdain, but maybe not totally down. And potentially a real liability.
Still.
no subject
no subject
--But she's got a guess. ImPort. Who then pulled a disappearing act, or else was disappeared, depending on how conspiracy theorist the angle. Is there a list of them out there somewhere? The government's got to keep track, if nothing else. Some prick in a dead-end job shuffling names around on a white board, shuffling people in government housing and then out again. On the board, then off the board.
Not that it especially matters in the present moment, but it is seriously depressing. Could get overwhelming if given the space. Fortunately Darlene has no space for that kind of shit, and she's got an interesting conversation on hand for distraction, so, fuck it.