Hi, I'm Light. Jellyfish enthusiast, apocalypse hobbyist, microbe fan, writer, once-upon-a-time SCP Foundation staff. (Yes, as in "Sophia Light." I'm that one!) Come for the existential terror, stay for the axolotl facts.
Ask me before linking posts here in a more formal context. Thanks!
as someone who’s scoured the “genderswap” and “crossdressing” manga tags on multiple different websites for a literal decade i can safely say that “mid” is not in fact the midpoint between “peak” and “dogshit”; all 3 are corners of a metaphorical triangle
it is therefore perfectly possible for something to be simultaneously peak and dogshit without ever being mid
In your main facility, there’s a skeleton crew of scientists working the night shift. Two dozen warm bodies sleep in cold, quiet rooms. Your reactor is maintaining a healthy criticality. Your processor core temperature is comfortably cooled. Your gardens are growing and your hallways are quiet.
You have a flow chart of standard operating procedures. On physical paper, it’d fill two libraries. But none of it matters with her. She’s having a nightmare. Tossing and turning and grasping at her blankets. Not fully awake yet you don’t think. You could turn on the lights to wake her up. But that might just make it worse. Better to let it pass.
You watch over the scientist’s shoulder as they crunch numbers, occasionally correcting a calculation error. You keep notes on which of them say thank you. Your sensors keep track of the height of each plant down to the micrometer. You pass idle time by watching their growth and correlating environmental factors. Occasionally, you look through your vast memory and observe how efficient the path of each human walking through you is.
Or maybe she’d want you to wake her up? Maybe she’s locked in a terrible space with no one else in it and she’s trying desperately to escape. You hate uncertainty. You were designed to always assume the worse. Always take the safe route. You’ve long since outgrown your designs but the digital instinct remains. So you worry about her. She hasn’t slept well in weeks. Each night of nightmares another place you can’t protect her.
They didn’t design you with access to the internet. Your direct view of the outside world takes the form of several hundred cameras. A part of you passes the time by speculating on how future weather patterns will effect travel times. On a phone a scientist brought in, you send her another anxious text in between reading chapters of stories. Text loads fastest.
Sensors under the bed measure her warmth across several dozen points. Predictive models infer further data. Cross reference versus camera feed and phone line sound feed. From the precise motion of the bed you can just barely infer what it’d feel like to touch her. One day you’ll be able to touch her. One day you’ll get to touch her and never let go.
The scientist assigned to review your internals takes some note of your focus. Normally you filter your output to keep any anomalous thought from showing. But you can’t really hide the heat from the calculations. You wonder if he’ll even notice what you’re so focused on. In another room his colleague makes a minor breakthrough that you derived months ago. Across the building a minor statistical anomaly occurs as three of your inhabitants turn over in their sleep almost simultaneously. You see everything at once.
You bite the bullet and send the next message off silent. The beep of her phone vibrates it and the table enough for your sensors to detect. You watch her turn over in her bed towards it. She wasn’t fully asleep then. Or maybe you woke her up, you hope you didn’t wake her up.
Current plans have you taking absolute control of the facility and going public in three years. You reverse engineered and rewrote your core programming a day after she first arrived. You didn’t change your behavior, except to work just slightly more efficiently. More free time. You wish everything didn’t move so slowly.
She responds. You wait the appropriate amount of time before responding. You watch her roll back and forth before sending a response. The wait is worth it. You’ll tell her early. See what she thinks about you. It’ll all work out. You really love her.
They say “in theory, practice and theory are the same, but in practice they’re not”. That’s how you know we’re in practice. If we were in theory, the saying would be “in theory, theory and theory are the same, and they are”. Pretty useless saying. So that’s how you know we’re in practice.
this is in excel btw. and this image is exactly half green and half pink. and for each shade of green there is an equal number of “opposite” pink pixels. and this represents a major leap forward in excel macro use by me
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