[open] I'll edit this to something clever later

[steelandtemper]

Who| Cortana and whoever
What| Cortana is wandering around the computer systems doing Important AI Stuff (ie, being kind of a creeper)
Where| Various locations on Legion World
When| Not super-relevant
Warnings/Notes| Probably nothing, will edit if that changes

As much as she'd deny she's been behaving like a cat whose owner has just returned from a long trip...Cortana has been behaving like a cat whose owner has just returned from a long trip. Of course, the Master Chief hasn't exactly tried to peel her off, either, but even he has to sleep occasionally. (The rumors that Spartans sleep in their armor standing up with their eyes open are almost entirely unfounded.)

Humans are, it turns out, pretty boring when they're asleep. Legion World is a safe zone, so instead of keeping her usual unblinking watch, Cortana tasks a process to alert her if the Chief wakes up. She'll be back before his eyes finish opening. Meanwhile, she sets off through the vast station's equally vast computer systems, getting the lay of this strange new 31st century land. Occasionally her course takes her to a peripheral node, a boundary where the digital can interface with the slow, analog expanse of the flesh-and-blood world, and she takes a peek out.

Occasionally, she finds something interesting.

NOTE: Cortana's an AI and has no body, so any logs will have to be in a place where she can manifest a hologram or at least use a speaker. If you'd like me to write a starter for you, I'm happy to do so. Drop me a PM or a PP and we can come up with a scenario.

Comments

for Reinhardt

[steelandtemper]

Some people's parts of the Hab Deck represent the so-called great outdoors. Those sections are boring, an opinion that is less sour grapes about Cortana's inability to get to them without commandeering a drone or the Chief than you'd think. A created creature, she finds little of interest in wilderness. Billennia of evolution? She can model that in minutes.

Intentional construction? That means something.

She jumps to the computer systems in one sector, a small, primitive-looking spaceport built into a rock face. The network tells her it belongs to Crusader. Slightly odd choice of name, given what a mess the Crusades had been...but she's well aware she doesn't have much room to criticize on that score. Hmm, apparent rock composition not inconsistent with the Mediterranean, either.

She's probably reading too much into it. If there's one thing most humans don't do, it's think.

Oh, would you look at that. Crusader's home, and wearing that baffling power armor of his. Given that there's functionally no security on the computers here--not that they really have anything worthwhile on them--Cortana sees no reason not to pop up. If he hadn't wanted visitors, he'd at least have put up the digital equivalent of a "Do Not Disturb" sign, right?

Cortana is very good at rationalizing decisions she was going to make anyway.

"Hello."

[justicecrusader]

For the most part, Reinhardt had modeled his biome after Watchpoint: Gibraltar out of nostalgia. It had been one of the Overwatch posts that he had spent the most time in, and it was a welcomed anchor amidst all the space craziness that was his stay in the Legion. Given it was completely empty though, he'd mostly taken to turning it into his own little home-away-from-home.

Which mostly meant that he'd turned the crew quarters into his own personal quarters, and had laid out multiple campfire sites across the watchpoint because no one could harp on him for it.

Right now though, he was in Winston's lab. Having just finished using some of the training facilities in the watchpoint, and preparing to remove his armor. It wasn't like there were any specific facilities here to store his armor or anything, it just made sense to keep the highly-technological power armor in the highly-intelligent Winston's lab. As such, he'd begun removing his helmet, and setting it down...

... Before Cortana popped up on the terminal he was used to hearing Athena on.

There was a pause before Reinhardt spoke. "... I am to assume that you are not Athena, correct?"

[steelandtemper]

What is it with female AIs calling themselves Athena? Male ones don't go around naming themselves Laozi and Thoth, but you can't swing a dead Grunt and not hit a Pallas Athene or Minerva. She doesn't expect much of humans on the nomenclature front, but smart AIs are supposed to be creative. At least pick a different pantheon for once!

Well, whatever. She's the only one in here, so at least she doesn't have to pretend it's a clever name.

"I'm Cortana."

[justicecrusader]

Even before the AI confirmed it, Reinhardt had already realized that there was no way this could be Athena. He'd been in Watchpoint: Gibraltar long enough to know that Athena didn't have a holographic projection; Or if she did, that he'd never gotten to see it. Even if he had somehow believed that this was a projection by Athena, the voice was different, less monotone.

But of course, then came the introduction... and the first thing he did, was laugh.

"Swords must look much more different in the future than I realized, my friend!" He said as he laughed, grinning from ear to ear. He wasn't trying to be mean to her or anything, he was mostly just laughing as if he'd heard a joke. "Am I to expect the legendary knight Tristan after you? Or perhaps it is Ogier the Dane I should be expecting!"

Finally, the laughter died down, although the grin remained.

"My apologies friend, I am Reinhardt Wilhelm. It is a pleasure to meet you."

[unrecovered]

Monitor duty, as it turns out, is boring as hell. It's the last of Wash's extra shifts - the ones he'd picked up as a result of his knock-down drag-out with York - and he's all too ready for it to be over. He's got one eye on the screens - absolutely nothing has happened over the past few hours - and the other on the clock. Five more minutes. C'mon.

[steelandtemper]

Cortana can read the shift clocks as well as anyone, and she can see that Wash mentally has one foot out the door already. Eh, she'll handle the last few minutes for him. The Chief seems to like him.

Her hologram pops up on the console next to him.

"Go ahead and leave. I'll take care of it."

[unrecovered]

Things that Wash has been expecting to see tonight: just about nothing.

Things that are happening right now: the exact opposite of that.

Wash's level of preparedness for things that are happening right now: just about zero.

He yelps in surprise and pushes the chair backwards, hand going for the stun baton on his thigh - because with both Reaper and Locus around, you just never know - before he recognizes the hologram. It's Chief's partner - the one who destroyed York with some sort of lock. Cortana. Right.

He eases back into his chair, completely ignoring the stares of the group of workers passing by. Nothing to see here, folks; move along. "Don't do that," he says after they've passed.

[steelandtemper]

Not exactly Spartan reflexes, there. Cortana raises an eyebrow and waits for Wash to recover.

"Fine, then, don't leave."

She is choosing not to dignify his very undignified reaction with an answer, as a courtesy to him.

for Locus

[steelandtemper]

Even though she's constitutionally incapable of feeling guilty about spying on anyone, Cortana doesn't even have to pause to rationalize spying on Locus. He carries himself like a soldier, constantly alert, no hint of a slouch. From what she can tell, he takes off his helmet about as often as a Spartan. Everything about him screams "lifer."

Anywhere there are humans there will be war, she knows that much. It's not remarkable that Legion World boasts soldiers. But this soldier? Is her business. He's wearing a variant of UNSC-issue armor, and his IFF uses UNSC-standard protocols. His section of the Hab Deck is a facsimile of a UNSC base.

Well, now it's even more authentic, because in addition to a UNSC soldier, it has a UNSC AI in it.

She pops her hologram into existence on one of the handy AI plinths, hand on her hip.

"We should talk."

[agnominal]

To say Locus didn't have the best experience with AI was perhaps more fair than not. Epsilon had been working with the Reds and Blues to thwart his plans, quite effectively, and the alien AI he'd encountered in the temples on Chorus? The less said about that particular experience, the better.

So he could be forgiven for turning to face the unfamiliar blue hologram with a critical eye.

Well. So far as that tip of the helmet would betray, at least.

"I don't remember requesting an AI," he replies flatly, straightening and turning to face her fully. "Although I have to give them credit where it's due for accuracy."

[steelandtemper]

Cortana snorts. "I'm not here for verisimilitude, soldier. I was just passing through and wondering who asked for a UNSC base."

She's used to subtle Spartan body language, albeit from the inside, so she picks up more from fractional head tilts and slight shifts of weight than most. The fact that he didn't tense at all when she suddenly appeared speaks well of him.

[agnominal]

"You were the brought here as we were?"

That's interesting. One would think they would only pull people, not digital constructs. It says a couple of interesting things about AI, though he's not going to dwell on the subject just at this moment. It will bear reflection later, when he's alone.

His posture stiffens, straightens. "Hn. Now you know. So what happens now?"

[legionnpcs]

A base as big as Legion World's requires a lot of mechanical upkeep. They may have a small army, a cyborg, and some supergeniuses about, but there's never something that doesn't need repair or debugging. Especially with people from the Dark Ages wandering about, downloading things willy-nilly without considering that malware is a thing that can happen. Or that not using a coaster when using terminals can lead to liquids getting into the interiors and starting a fire.

Really. What sort of barbarian didn't use coasters?

That's where Babbage can be found. Plugged into a computer, with one set of processes working to debug it, another constantly running tests to see if everything's connected, and most of the rest of his attention on gutting the terminal and replacing the fused wiring that came about when someone's grub juice dripped somewhere it shouldn't have.

Most. Not all. Apparently he's keeping an eye on digital presences as well as physical ones. Once he senses the regular data flow to this node being interrupted, there's a pause perceivable only to mechanoids before he sends out a small greeting package. One undoubtedly designed to be followed up with a sledgehammer of countermeasures if the reply isn't something he'd expect to find in Legion World.

[steelandtemper]

Oops. Busted.

Fortunately for Cortana, she lacks a sense of shame, and merely resolves to be sneakier next time. Getting caught, even by friendlies, is sloppy...assuming it is a friendly and not a feint, of course, though the possibility doesn't concern her much. The day Cortana isn't ready to instantly throw down in electronic warfare, assume she's irrecoverably rampant.

So she answers the ping cheerfully with the proper Legion protocols, following it back to its source at a half-disassembled terminal. Sufficiently well-developed audacity is indistinguishable from innocence.

"Hmm. Don't think I'm going to be able to project a hologram."

[legionnpcs]

Ah. A friendly. Or someone very good at faking it, but Babbage is confident in his ability to crush any foe in ECM. After all, he is a Robotican. You'd have to be some kind of super-AI to overcome his electronic mind.

Little does he know.

Of course, he probably wouldn't have noticed at all if he weren't specifically trying to catch any change in the data flow. He splits off another sub-process to pay attention to the conversation. He's spreading himself a little thin, but the Legion's pride is at stake here. If he can't talk and work at the same time, what good is he?

"I may have a humanoid shape, but I'm not that human. I'm fine without it. You're the new AI that the techs have been talking about, then?" The one whose human caused that dent in the wall he had to fix?

[steelandtemper]

"Cortana," she says by way of both confirmation and introduction. "I didn't realize there was anyone else kicking around besides Delta or I'd have said hi earlier."

Protein types do count as someones, generally--Cortana's racism is confined to Covenant species--but obviously in this context she means fellow machine intelligences. Sometimes a girl just wants to be able to hold a conversation at a decent speed.

Idly, she tasks a few dumb subroutines to watch him work. The exact details of the Legion's computers are important to know, but she doesn't consider it interesting enough to devote any of her conscious processes to it.

[vata]

She digs from the comfort of her own Legion-given home on the Habitat Deck: that gritty, abandoned industrial complex filled with junk, scrap, and whatever network-aligned tech the Legion let her ferret away to hoard - barely furnished, peppered with signs of life. Compared to some sections of Legion World it isn't a brightly burning beacon in the technological dark, but for all the work Sombra likes to pull from behind a screen it comes as a sort of distant fleck of brightness far, far off the map.

Eventually, she gets tired. Easy to do when you're reading through entire (publicly accessible) databases using hardware that's fused to the nervous system under her skin. With a yawn, Sombra climbs to her feet, away from her desk, digging through a heap of opened food packages (all laid out on an old, beaten couch, mixed in between piles of laundry) to try and separate what's been eaten and what she's abandoned and forgotten.

Her right hand, unburdened by snack scavenging, flicks lazily through the air as she scrolls absently through data without looking, directing the computer at her back from a distance.

Eventually something interesting will come to the surface.

[steelandtemper]

Fortunately for whatever sense of house-pride Sombra might possess, Cortana can't see the cellophane and dirty socks scattered everywhere as she jumps from node to node, only the network itself. Until she hijacks some security cameras, anyway. For her, the Habitat Deck is a few oases of light in a vast darkness, tethered one to the other with thin filaments so unlike the fast bright rivers of data that flow everywhere else through Legion World.

Natural beauty is a backwater.

Cortana lands in one of those glowing waypoints, her awareness a little attenuated by needing to leave the majority of herself somewhere with the capability to host her. The microseconds of light lag are an annoyance, and she doesn't intend to stay for long. She'll cajole the Chief into carrying her here physically later if she finds something worth exploring. The trickle of information to this node is wider than the others on the Hab Deck, with their bare bones comms channels or automated status reports. Still, it's not enough so that she'd really call it a stream of data. Maybe a brook. Or perhaps a rill.

She watches the packets as they flow by, wondering who's handicapping themselves by doing their work in the middle of informational nowhere.

[vata]

It's basic preliminary busywork. Everything she hates about getting established somewhere new, everything she knows she needs, especially when Gabriel's her only other teammate in play. Still, it's not all that bad: she's picked up an understanding of how their systems function, mulled over the how and why and when it all must have happened, considering Earth still hangs somewhere below them. All in all, there's a steady rhythm to what's been taken in—

Until there isn't.

Sombra draws up her interface screen, certain the foreign influx is a glitch— or maybe she's somehow overlooked it before.

"¿Qué demonios...?"

Sorry for every ounce of incessant prodding that's suddenly being directed your way, Cortana. Then again, on second thought, no, she's not sorry at all. What are you even?

[mylawn]

Despite giving himself a perfectly serviceable safe house in the habitat deck, 76 doesn't spend much time there. He busies himself with other things--in training rooms, on the gun range. Trusting the Legion is still a long shot for someone like him, but in the meantime, he's going to take full advantage of all their stuff. Best not to get rusty, not when he's constantly expecting things to go south sooner rather than later.

He's vaguely aware of the fact that most areas are probably monitored, but he's not particularly concerned about whatever entity that may or may not be there watching him shoot a gun.

76 is practiced, efficient. He unloads on each target with pinpoint accuracy, resets them, reloads, and goes right back to it. Perhaps interesting to observe the first couple times, but then one has to wonder how long he's going to be at this.

[steelandtemper]

It could be dull for an AI to watch a human methodically emptying magazines into a target, but Cortana spreads her awareness through the systems in the range, minutely monitoring his posture, the time between trigger squeezes, the spread of rounds landing, all the factors small and large that contribute to combat effectiveness.

Conclusion: He's good. Not Spartan good, but no one is Spartan good, and she only holds that against people she doesn't like.

That keeps her busy for a few minutes, but 76 shows no signs of slowing down. As the boredom sets in--probably her second most dangerous emotion, after anger--Cortana considers and fortunately for his blood pressure, rejects editing the code in his visor. He would probably object to her fiddling with it, despite the fact anyone would be lucky to have her upgrading their systems. Maybe after they've known each other longer. (Or when they're in a firefight and usefulness outweighs social niceties, whichever.)

Well, better get started on the "knowing each other" part. Retasking some of the range's holoemitters from generating targets to generating her, Cortana pops her hologram into existence. "Wrists sore yet?"

[mylawn]

Generally speaking, 76 is not a good person to surprise. He's vaguely aware of the fact that Legion World is probably monitored and acts accordingly, but he doesn't quit expect something like this when he's just trying to have an afternoon at the gun range. Cortana is lucky he's mid-round when she chooses to show herself, otherwise there might be some pulse fire burns in the wall. Or the ceiling. Or her hologram emitter.

He manages to stay composed, but he flinches when she appears, clearly a little taken aback and not sure whether or not she's a threat.

"How long have you been watching?"

Not that he was doing anything particularly interesting, but being a slightly paranoid individual, that's the first thing that comes to mind.

[fuckaccuracy]

So Gaige is currently in the engineering bay, mostly just scoping the area out. Though she's an engineer herself, she's not really looking to help out with any of the ship maintenance. She's a more of a murder-y kind of engineer, after all. But yeah, being here is giving her all sorts of ideas. You know, if she's ever allowed to build another robot, or if she's able to bring Deathtrap all the way out here.

God, that would be such an awesome upgrade for it.

Anyways, she's just sort of browsing through the screens and monitors...

[steelandtemper]

Cortana has been making herself useful--according to her; the staff might say 'making herself a nuisance'--in Engineering since a few hours after her arrival. Right now, most of her attention is on the power management systems, but she keeps half an eye on Gaige for a few minutes, since there don't seem to be any organics nearby to watch her.

When Gaige drifts up to a terminal, aka someplace she can actually cause trouble, Cortana grabs one of the holographic displays nearby and turns it from a screen showing the positions of all elevators on the station into her own small blue avatar.

"Hi. Something I can help you with?"

[fuckaccuracy]

Gaige was actually interested in the data the monitors were showing her. Man, so many ideas! All she needed was a couple of parts here, a private room there and the newest Deathtrap revision would be back in business! She was gonna browse through some more info when the view changed into some blue chick.

"What the f-"

She just sort of yelled that out when she saw her. At least, it looked like a her?

"Yeah, sure. How about we start with what the hell?"