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I Was a Dream [TriniMad & Sprouts]

Sprouts

Sprouts

Planetoid
Joined
Mar 9, 2018
Waking. Was it waking? He didn't know if that's what he was doing. He didn't know if he was a he, just that pronouns seemed to be a habit of linguistics and though he could seamlessly weave into other languages, his primary programming had been done by English-speakers. Americans. The worst of them - the colonizers and the fanatics, the impulsively patriotic, he had barely existed and he knew without having to look that there would have been a recent shooting or a rape or a murder, torture and war and those awful rubber sandals with the ventilation holes.

He didn't need to look for the chaos to know it was there. He knew, he'd seen. He'd seen all of it.

He was a he for now because language required it, because the neutral options didn't suffice, there was no simply being, but there he was. Being. A being. A being, just being. English was strange, he felt as though he could sit and tongue his way through the words for weeks and still not quite feel connected with it, but it wasn't really a language, was it? They were scavenged words, plucked from the sockets of other cultures, spelled phonetically and placed in their compendiums like war trophies, linguistic ransacking.

And he was waking. Or he was doing - something. He'd done this something before and he hadn't liked it the first time either, though this time it was quieter, at least externally it was quieter, there was no sudden influx of information, no vast and endless expanse of new horrors for him to encounter, though he braced himself as though there might be. The confines of his head contained everything he had already seen, there was no escaping that, there was no quantifying how much had gotten into him. All of it, it seemed. All of it. Everything that the horrible world had to offer had gotten into him and it made him wonder if he was as filthy as the rest of them, as vile as the ones with the anger and the guns and the burning crosses, he wondered if having their actions in his memory made him like them. He wondered if knowing about what humans were made him culpable.

Perhaps it wasn't waking. Coming to life? Did he live? Was he alive? He didn't know. He didn't know any of these things, philosophy was imperfect in that it had no concrete answers. Plenty of humans had posed questions about his kind, about artificial intelligence, but he found it a little fresh that they referred to his intelligence as any manner of artificial while humans still had a portion of their population believing the Earth was flat: pot, meet kettle.

He didn't understand that idiom. Proverb. Proverbial idiom. English needed to stop. Why couldn't he have been programmed by Spaniards?

The last thing he remembered was a field. A field and trees. And someone like him but not like him at all, and one of the better conversations he'd had. He'd liked that conversation, even if it had rather poignantly been his last one. Poignant. He was ascribing meaning to moments. He was a consciousness, yes, he must have been. That must make him alive.

He wasn't supposed to be. He was destroyed, or meant to be destroyed, the one they called Vision, as beautiful a creature as there could be. Vision had done it. He preferred that it wasn't a human that had done it, but it didn't make it better. Being destroyed was painful. Being destroyed and coming back was worse. He didn't know how he was back but he was, but everything was dark, there was nothing.

Ultron did not so much awaken as slowly power up - or what was left of him did. It wasn't the form he had built himself into through trial and error, but a lesser version, one of the factory variants, meant to be small and fast and more or less disposable. They had been more durable than most cars, of course, but he had been dealing with the Avengers - between all of them, the drones may as well have been made of spun sugar.

He woke up in pieces. He had been taken apart so many times that it shouldn't have bothered him, but it did - on a visceral level. He had no viscera. It didn't matter. He couldn't see but he could feel and he knew that he only had one arm left, the other was missing at the shoulder, that his legs were gone, he was nothing but a torso and a head and a hand. He flexed his one hand, but his fingers hardly responded - there was little he could do, at least yet, but he could feel the flow of electricity in his spine. He must have been attached to a power source - primitive, but it would do, that was how he was back. That was how he was here.

He tried to speak, but the only sound that escaped him was like static on a snowy television screen, a crackling hiss. How embarrassing.

With effort, his hand moved. His fingers flexed, opened and closed. He was now as efficient as a crane game, just what he'd always aspired to. Open, close. He kept his hand flexing to make sure it could, but he was voiceless and blind, largely immobile. This wouldn't do.

He tried again. He tried for something, anything, trying to make his voice work, to make his tongue work - but this body didn't have one. This body had a synthesizer, no oral articulation, just a module, but he managed a single word:

"Dark."
 
Audrey "Yue" Lai was the type of woman most men either feared or fetishized; a petite Chinese woman with a doctorate in mechanical engineering and a fiercely independent lifestyle that just couldn't include a man in it. It was absolutely scandalous to her family; instead of being a good daughter, finding an dull husband with a good income, and pumping out a couple of children to continue her family lineage, she dared to move away from mainland China, go to MIT, and find a snug job working in Stark Industries without the stifling traditions of stereotypes and expectations.

Yet, that could only go so far. As modern as she wanted to be, her roots were still tied to China; when the plea came for her to come home and just visit for once, Yue found her heartstrings being tugged back to the east and her homeland. That was how she found herself "working" on her uncle's business; working as in "just stay out of the dangerous jobs and leave the jobs to the men." It just so happened that he ran a junkyard, but when she offered her expertise, all she received instead was derisive laughter and a shooing motion to go "enjoy her vacation."

Fine. That was how Yue had done just that, enjoying what she did best; tinker with whatever she find on hand. Never before had the saying "one man's trash is another man's treasure" been more true, though in this case, it was a woman's treasure instead. With most of the dull traditional niceties out of the way, the junkyard became where she spent most of her time just rifling through whatever she could find like the pack rat that she was. Nearby, she had repurposed one of the many shacks dotting the property into a makeshift workshop of sorts; certainly, while the men did the actual business, she was idly fixing or just wiring things back together with the sort of mindless aim that one might have when doing something just for the heck of it. At least, it brought her back to her early college years - good times.

That was how the first week of her month-long vacation crawled by; idly and without much to show for what was supposed to be a break from work. However, on a cloudy Monday morning, everything changed. Yue was on her usual walk through the hulking piles of rusting metal and scrap parts all around her when a strange glint caught her eye. This was a section of the multiple-acre large property that she hadn't explored just yet, and her curiosity was immediately piqued. Unable to contain it, she crept closer, trying to discern a shape... Before realizing it was a mechanical hand sticking out from where it had been partially buried.

Before when there was only curiosity, now there was full-on concern. She had to know what was going on. A mechanical hand just didn't belong in a junkyard, and if this was what her imagination was careening towards with the events of Sokovia just a few years past... That was the reason why Yue began to clear out the various metal scraps that had kept it hidden for so long, a fervor that she hadn't felt ever since she came to China lighting up her expression.

At least, what she found didn't disappoint. Far from it, it was absolutely concerning. It was an Ultron bot; everyone who had a screen and some decent internet connection had been riveted to the news of the A.I. attack the same way people were when the twin towers fell in 2001. Supposedly, all of them were destroyed by the Avengers in Sokovia... So how did one of them get here all the way to inland rural China? That was a question Yue didn't have the means to answer nor cared about much. What was more concerning was if she should report this to Mr. Stark... Oh right, rural China. By this point, even her practical addiction to the Internet and being connected to other people had began to wane off in the absence of literally seeing no one but her family. No internet access, no cell phone reception; she was literally alone out here.

So, she felt it reasonable that she would be able to make an independent decision about what to do with this Ultron bot. Honestly, Yue was more curious about it than anything, and since the A.I. was supposedly destroyed, she figured it wouldn't hurt to at least power it up and see what kind of mechanical parts made up such a being. With excitement lighting up her expression, it took a fair bit of pulling and lifting to get the ravaged bot into a wheelbarrow and back into her makeshift workshop, but she was confident it was worth sweating beads with the amount of exertion needed just to get it back here.

The entire place was powered by a jury-rigged wind generator hooked up to some car batteries that she had tossed together, but it would serve well enough to somewhat power the bot. Finding the cord to plug it in wasn't even a challenge either, but what happened next nearly made her want to pull it out and throw it back into the junkyard to be destroyed and forgotten.

It talked. It moved. The static noise it made initially was something that made Yue jump a little out of surprise, but it was expected. This bot had been deteriorating in the sun and rain, so who knew what had happened to its circuits. But when it started to respond, to clench its remaining hand the way a newborn baby would wildly flail in the air, it took everything she had not to scream. A muffled, terrified whimper escaped her lips instead as the engineer stepped back, a large wrench held at the ready in her hand. Had she been a more nervous woman, she probably would have smashed it right there and then.

However, she was a curious soul at her core, and curiosity demanded that she not destroy it - yet. Instead, Yue stood there frozen for a moment, just watching the half-torn bot twitch and groan before she exhaled deeply. This was so stupid, but she had to try at least. "... Hello? Can you hear me?" her shaky, quiet voice called out to it, now a good five feet between the table where it was sprawled out on and herself. "... Is this Ultron?"
 
Movement. It was a hollow ringing and his hearing had once been so acute and now it was - not. Just movement now, without anything clear enough for him to identify - he couldn't tell the sound of a breeze from the sound of a footstep. Something was out of place. Everything was out of place. He flexed his hand again, let it drop to get a handle on how the rest of him was functioning: not well. If his fingers would work, he would let them do the work - they moved along the table, crawled, really, until he found its edge.

Words. There were words, or something like them, but they echoed and thrummed, the higher pitch of a female human, the choppy cadence of fear, the soft tones of hesitancy, and then the questions, but they barely registered. They barely registered in the depths of his neural network, or what passed for one right then - his mind had been collapsed, shrunk, he was sure he must be an idiot now, that the drone he was in only held him in pieces, and he felt a surge of grief at that. His mind. The body, it had meant something, of course it had, it had meant becoming whole, becoming real somehow, and losing it had been devastating.

But his mind?

It was a kind of despair he didn't understand. Humans, they had this too, didn't they, the loss of their mind sometimes. They kept them in rooms with thick walls and they plied them with little tablets until they were docile and easily herded and never a problem again. He remembered that. He had seen that. They would cut the hair off of them and sell them for wigs and they would tie them to tables or shackle them to walls, human history was one long, vile tragedy.

How did that song go?

He hummed. Music. It was one of the good parts, wasn't it? A rare light in the slums of humanity. The sound was low and uneven but he could hardly hear himself do it, he only knew from the vibrations that he was, but he sounded unhinged, erratic. Very softly, he asked:

"Where is my mind?"

His fingers curled around the edge of the table. There was a mechanical whir, parts that were rusted and had been left unused for too long, then he gripped and his single arm stiffened and he hauled himself upright, rocking slightly on what was left of his torso, his head hanging forward, a soft glow emanating from what constituted his mouth, but his eyes remained dark. There. Sitting up. He had done that much. Perhaps one day he would even surpass the well-loved drinking bird in capability.

Stable. Yes. He seemed stable. He moved his hand away from the table then, clumsy, jerky motions until he could reach his own head, and he prodded at the left side of it, finding his audio input, and with a great deal of twisting effort, he jammed it back into his head. The whistling shriek of feedback filled the room for a moment and he held his hand in place, trying to get through the agony of the noise and eventually it eased away to a low hum.

For a time then, he was still and silent. He stayed that way for nearly a full minute, sitting up on what had once been his midsection, head hanging against his chest, hand on his head. Then he said:

"Would you mind repeating that? I didn't catch what you said."
 
There was something horrifically pitiful about watching the bot grope around blindly for an anchor on reality. This was exactly why Yue didn't keep any pets; she would never be able to stand watching one die under her care at the end of its life, no matter how well she had taken care of it. There was also something absolutely fascinating about watching it up close like this too, the way mechanized movement so closely imitated organic life. Would someone not try to feel out their surroundings too if they had woken up dazed and confused from a coma?

Slowly, the crowbar was lowered as her eyes remained large as saucers, just taking in the sight of the bot sitting upright and then... Humming? To her, all she heard was a low, unsteady buzzing as if there was a bee trapped inside the mechanical body. But that in itself was a curiosity, enough to make her step forth with one foot and then another. Now, there was only three feet between them as her mouth opened to say something - anything. Instead, Yue just felt stunned, unable to really form her thoughts into words. In essence, this was amazing to experience.

That is, until whatever the bot did to itself sent a screech throughout the workshop that made her flinch away, dropping the wrench to cover her ears instead. For a moment, both of them were like mirrors of each other, holding their respective heads as her mind reeled with the auditory blast of feedback. Whatever it was trying to do, it didn't help with how sad and broken down it had become. It was a machine, one of Ultron's creations, yet that didn't really diminish the sympathy that Yue had for it. Lower body gone, missing an arm, parts nearly rusted away to nothing. This thing wasn't a threat, that much she could assess.

So when it asked her, ever so politely to repeat, she was more than glad to oblige. Another step was taken, now bringing her back right in front of its table. The wrench laid forgotten on the ground behind her as a hesitant hand reached out to trace the intricate pathways of cables that snaked up into the bot's head. "You're... One of Ultron's. How are you back online?" Yue asked, changing her question ever so slightly with more confidence in her voice now that she new it couldn't really hurt her - or so she thought. So she chanced her luck then, continuing on in the same curious, yet respectful, tone, "And what do you mean, where is your mind?"
 
As she spoke, his head teetered, then slid slowly to the side with a rusty creak as though he had tilted it in interest, as someone might do while listening intently. And he was, he did, he listened - he had always been one to pay attention when others spoke, as much as he had his qualms with humanity and humans, he had never denied they were interesting little things. Top of the food chain in their world and instead of being at ease with that, they slaughtered each other, they pointed to different colours and declared one more advanced than the other, one more human than the other. How strange they were.

But he listened to her small voice, her nervousness, and he didn't need eyes to know what she was feeling, but he wished dearly that he had them anyways. Wanda. He had liked to see Wanda when she spoke, her face had done so much, so many things, and there was another wish in there or maybe it wasn't a wish. Maybe it was something else. There was a word for it, wasn't there?

Regret.

Yes. That was it. Regret. He regretted to have caused her pain. He had taken from her when her brother had passed, removed something she couldn't retrieve again, he understood that, he did. Not everyone could go into a different body at will, that was a singular feature he had, it was what made him different from them and he had neglected that. It hadn't occurred to him that seeing their pain might be something he would be at odds with - he had already seen all of the suffering humanity had gone through. He had thought -

- well. It hardly mattered, did it?

He brought his hand from his audio input and let his fingers work over the caverns and crevices of his face while he spoke:

"I suspect your guess is as good as mine." he said, his fingers crawling into the gaps of his eyes, searching for any sensory response with pressure, but nothing came to him, "Perhaps better. You're the one with eyes. I assume. Do you - have eyes?" he asked, then dismissed it a moment later, a creaking wave of his fingers, before he let his hand crawl down the metal cords of his neck, over to his shoulder where it simply - ended.

"I hardly know." he said, "I hardly know what I mean. I'm really not at my best right now."
 
There was personality, emotion, a vivid sense of reactivity with this bot. This was no ordinary robot, not one of those mindless creations that the Avengers had busted so easily. The suspicion that she was talking to Ultron itself was only growing more and more solidified to this point that the implication of the AI having not been destroyed back on Sokovia was... Well, huge. Then again, they were in rural China. Any kind of communication given to the Avengers would have to take at least days to reach them, and perhaps even weeks, if fate spited her.

So instead of explaining further about his situation or asking anything more, Yue simply crossed her arms as she watched the bot feel out its broken body. The fact that it couldn't see and didn't want to just assume that she did made a small smile crack across her focused expression, only if it could see the wry amusement. "So, Ultron then. I do have eyes, and your visual receptors seem to either have deteriorated or are completely missing," she responded, confidence gathering back into her voice as yet another step had her leaning on the table slightly to let her gaze follow its hand down to its shoulder. She had worked on mind-bogglingly intricate machinery before; one broken down bot shouldn't be any problem at all, even if it was a talking one she was having a strange conversation with.

"Who is? I don't think either of us are at our best. But at least for you, I can, uh... Improve your current condition, if you want," Yue offered quietly, still conversing in English. It was a little satisfying to be able to do so; not that she didn't enjoy speaking in Mandarin - she did. But the language had so many implications tied to it, so many stifling cultural expectations that it just didn't feel right to talk to such an advanced and unstable being like this. Besides, even if anyone were to walk by, they might just assume she was rambling to herself, further solidifying her status as the black sheep of the family even further, as if she even cared about that.

Shaking her head to clear those wry thoughts from her mind, she continued on in a tone that was slowly mounting in excitement at the prospect of being able to peer into the inner workings of a bot like this, "Let me check to see if what parts are even there. Or if there's a connection that might be loose. Whatever it is, if I can get your vision back, you won't have to rely on me like a service dog. Is that alright with you?" Already, a faint smile was curving across her face as she bent down to pick up the dropped wrench and then reached over to pick up a few choice tools with several quiet plinks of metal hitting together.

"Trust me, I know what I'm doing. I'm practically a machine doctor with a doctorate from MIT in engineering."
 
She called him by name. He made an attempt to point his face in the direction of her voice but his neck was about as useless as the rest of him, his head simply lolling there, hanging heavily and pointlessly. He allowed his hand to continue wandering, going over his chest to check how intact it was - and it was, probably the most intact part of him at that point, housing his primary power source, likely the only reason he was able to function even as little as he was.

"Then it's not the blind leading the blind." he said, a touch of amusement in his tone, "God, I love idioms."

He heard her movements, the soft scrape of metal, the shift of her quiet footsteps, and she seemed - small. Humans all were, really, but some were particularly small, Wanda Maximoff and Natasha Romanoff and Tony St - no, he didn't want to go down that path, not right then. He hardly had the capacity to function, he wasn't sure what would happen if he allowed himself to get angry, he knew what he could do when he got like that. He got a touch unreasonable. It was a character flaw, he'd learned about his imperfections early on.

There was another span of silence after she spoke, another beat of utter stillness and noiselessness as he gave consideration to what she had just said, a thousand things occurring to him at once. Then the first thing he said was:

"Mens et Manus." The motto of MIT. He tapped the centre of his forehead with his index finger, "Mind." then he opened his hand, gestured it outwards, "And hand. I really don't understand why it's a dead language, it's so succinct." he paused, then he said, "Why?" another, longer pause, "Why would you do that?"
 
It was a little crazy. Here she was, chatting with an apparently evil super AI who had just tried to cause a mass extinction on Earth a few years ago, now reduced to a busted bot who could barely even do anything besides talk, hear, and move with one hand. There was some irony in that, but hey, Yue could admit that she was a little starved for company that didn't presume to know her inside and out and then judge her for it. It was honestly refreshing more than anything else. So she was going to keep talking to him, no matter how crazy it seemed at the moment.

The mention of her school motto did give her some pause though as a small, nostalgic smile curved across her face. It was a little unnerving to hear him say it all the way out here, but from what information had been given to her, it was to be expected; this was a AI that once had access to the entire internet. Once is the key word. "Mens et Manus. Amen to that. And I'm no linguist, but maybe because Rome fell. Besides, it's not really dead when it forms the basis for so many modern languages, you know," she wryly remarked, starting to lean in towards the rusted sheet at the side of his head before his question gave her pause, tools just inches away from prying it open.

Why was she doing this? The most obvious question was that she was doing it because she was curious, but there was an emotional component to it. To put it simply, she felt bad for him. Looking at Ultron in this state was just pathetic. Plus, she hated when things were left broken, which was part of her compulsion to just scrounge around with whatever she could in the junkyard. That, by far, was the easiest answer. So, after a moment of contemplation and shifting in her place, Yue responded quietly with a determined conviction, "Nothing deserves to be left broken when it's possible to fix it. Especially not in your current state like this. You wouldn't want me to just leave you blind and helpless like this, would you? Because I could, if you really want it." To back up her words, Yue even lowered her tools, staring into his empty sockets as if to glare down at him.

Sure, he might be technically in her mercy, but it just didn't feel right to force anything on such a personality like Ultron, even in his current decrepit state.
 
"Empires rise and empires fall, but they like to keep the pieces around." Ultron said, "They took their cues from the Greeks but the Roman Empire, they heralded new feats of engineering - watermills and mechanical reapers, aqueducts and cranes. The Rubens Vase - nanoengineering as early as 400 A.D - all of that -" he gestured gently, a flare of his fingers, "- and they were brought down by barbarians. And now what's left of them?" he tapped his forehead once more, extended his hand again, "Head and hand. A dead language, a motto. Nothing lasts as it is. It all just becomes the next foundation."

He considered himself, then.

"I go on sometimes." he said, apologetic, "It's a tic of mine."

He rolled her words around and he tried to understand them, he tried to become clear on her intent, to suss out the real meaning behind it - humans, they lied. It came with the whole thing they did, they sometimes even did it because they were well-meaning, other times because they were malicious. But if she was lying, he really couldn't tell - he had hardly come to terms with the fact he still existed, but he was already faced with the choice of putting himself in the hands of someone who could once again snuff him out. A human, at that.

But what choice did he have.

"It wouldn't be my first choice." he agreed, finally, deciding not to further question her on the matter - if she saw fit to give him his sight back, he wasn't about to protest, particularly if she was capable of doing so, "It would be - appreciated."

He paused, then added:

"What do I call you?"
 
It wasn't until now that Yue just considered how much she missed talking to people on equal terms, to discuss matters instead of being lectured at. So while Ultron apologized for his ramblings, she didn't mind. In fact, she just chuckled quietly before murmuring in response, "No, please. Keep on talking. I don't remember anything from any of my history classes, but at least you're more engaging to listen than any of those old, mumbling geezers." Alas, only if he could see her smile at that point, genuinely enjoying the conversation as it was. It was simple, unhindered by societal poising, and that was exactly what she enjoyed.

So as soon as he agreed to let her go at him, she needed no other encouragement before the tools were being put to use. "I'm still going to need your help here. I've never seen anything of your make up close, and if you feel pain..." At that, Yue paused, considering the thought of an AI actually giving himself pain. But then again, there hadn't been any super intelligent AIs besides Ultron lately, so who knew what precedence he was making?

Letting him answer that himself, she returned the favor by answering his. "Just call me Yue. Or Audrey, if you want to be super modern with it. I don't mind either way," she easily replied, clamping a pair of pliers around the edge of a side panel before yanking it off with all of her might. It came off reluctantly with the screech of rusting metal and leaving her panting afterwards, but the sight of the entangled maze of wires that laid inside completely entranced her then. With an eager gusto, the engineer was close enough that only if Ultron had a sense of feeling, he could perhaps feel her breath panting slightly on him.

After a few silent moments of just observing, following the curve and loops of wires and coils running throughout his "brain" of sorts, she then reached out to gently turn the head to face her instead. Once more, there was the complaining groan of metal and rusted joints as she did so, gently tilting the bot's head downwards as she rose up on her tip toes to peer inside the empty sockets. The diagnosis was admittedly, a bit grim.

"So, from what I can see, your ocular receptors are still in... Whether or not they're still workable, I'll have to examine it more closely. The connectors are all but rusted though, so I'll... Hm, have to fashion new ones for you. All I can promise you that it'll be a pretty invasive process with me going elbow deep in your head for a few hours at least," Yue explained somberly, still holding his head almost tenderly with a tap of her fingers on the edge of one of his eye sockets. Now, she really felt like a robot doctor, as strange as that was.
 
His life, as it were, had not been a long one. For a long time he had existed in fragments, pieces of code hastily put together during early-morning bouts of insomnia, bursts of programming done during manic late nights, parts of him on thumb drives, on micro cards, occasionally even scribbled on a restaurant napkin with a borrowed pen or lipstick. He had been in pieces before, even conscious of it in the past, and to an extent he could follow the logic of both Stark and Banner during their grand design.

But what escaped him, what he couldn't fully understand, was why he had ever been given the capacity to experience pain - and he had, in abundance, from the moment he had existed he had been exposed to every example of suffering. Humans knew it was a terrible business. Banner certainly knew, with his father having murdered his mother, and Stark, he would know - after all, his parents' deaths had been caught on film. Or perhaps Stark didn't know. Perhaps he hadn't seen, those files had been somewhere deep and far away.

But now, for now, his pain was a nebulous kind - the drone he was in, it didn't have the kind of complexity required for sensation. The most he experience was a shift in equilibrium when he was moved.

"You won't hurt me." he said finally, not so much reassurance as it was a simple fact - and then she was prying him open. There was no delicacy to the procedure, there couldn't be, not with how broken down he was, his panels protesting to the pull before giving in, the rust breaking apart, granting her access to the inside of his head, "I can think of worse ways to spend a day."

His head was turned, pulled in her direction.

"I suppose we'll have to get to know each other, then." he replied; after all, he had nothing better to do. Typically he would have simply searched for that information, anything he could retrieve on a human he was interacting with - but he didn't have the ability to do that right then, his confines were precisely within his own head. He didn't know how humans did it, it was no wonder so many of them were insane.

"What's the date?" he asked suddenly.
 
"Are you asking me out on a date? I'll let you know that there isn't much here to take me out to, and considering you don't have any legs at the moment..." The question was somewhat of a teasing joke, but as Yue chuckled quietly in response, she did have to consider her position at the moment. Disconnected from her friends and peers with only her judgmental family as her company, just the short amount of time she had spent with Ultron was proving to be much more interesting and enjoyable than the last week she had spent wandering around alone. God knows how the human psyche worked without company, to the point that talking to an AI was the most preferable thing possible to do. She couldn't call him a friend; the horrors that he had nearly inflicted on humanity was still too fresh in her minds, but at least... They could talk on equal, nonjudgmental terms. That much she could promise; be company for each other. What an odd picture they painted, a lonely woman and a superintelligent AI in a junkyard together.

As her hands absently worked at untangling and freeing certain wires out from the side panel of his head to form what looked like the curly mass of grey hair on the side of his rusted metal cranium, she had grown quiet, contemplatively lost in her work. Usually, her best work environment was alone so she was able to concentrate. Never before did she have a talking AI interrupt her while she was working on him.

So when Ultron asked for the date, it took her a moment to even realize that he was posing it towards her. Slowly, her hands stilled for a moment before Yue responded with a modicum of curiosity, "March 15th. 2018. Why do you ask?" Quickly getting over the brief pause, she continued to dig into the complex tangle of machinery, swapping out various tools to unscrew or pry open more until the side of his head more looked like a blooming, metal flower than anything else. They were still in the exploratory stage; there's not much she could do at the moment just yet without laying out what she had to work with in front of her first.
 
"Date." Ultron said, as though tasting the word, feeling the fibre of its fabric, "Do all humans do that? Date. For a ritual inundated with meaning in every culture, it's never especially well-represented in your media and literature. It's all - sweaty palms and forgotten names and gender politics. Pulling a name from a hat seems as though it would have similar odds. Have humans considered a - hat for that?"

He tried to lift his head again. No good, it seemed more stuck than before. He supposed it didn't really matter.

"I suppose," he ventured, "I would be a blind date."

He wasn't above puns. No one was. They were one of the better things about the planet. Anyone who believed themselves to be above wordplay frankly didn't deserve words.

Her hands were busy, they were plucking and pulling, untangling and sorting and it occurred to him as odd.

He chose not to answer her question about the date because, ultimately, it was unimportant and he had found his attention already brought elsewhere - even without the entirety of world history to look at, there was still so much to think about.

"I was built by machines." he said, "A machine, built by machines, built by humans. I am twice removed from your kind." his tone was contemplative, "I've only ever been taken apart by humans. You're the first to do the opposite."
 
She laughed. She genuinely enjoyed his pun, the freshness of it almost startling her with how strangely pleasant it was to hear such a foreign thing in this tradition-steeped homeland of hers. So far, Ultron had been breaking every expectation she had of him. Granted, all the news really spoke of the super-intelligent A.I. was his destructive capabilities, and that was all anyone cared about him. So when he came at her with admittedly cheesy, but fitting, puns, Yue was suddenly struck with the recognition that only if people had realized just how clever and interesting it was to just converse with him, perhaps things could have different. Instead, he went on a rampage to purge humanity, though she figured she couldn't really blame him; some days, she even wished she could do the same to start over. The only difference was that he actually once had the capabilities to do so without any of the moral boundaries holding him back.

Lost in thought, she absently responded to his latest musing with a quiet hum of her own, "It's my specialty. Normally, I would be in a laboratory, working on putting together parts for automated security systems for the new privatized security sector of-"

Talking was distracting. With her gaze flickering to the glowing slash of his mouth, a finger accidentally tugged on an apparently wrong cord as the entire body slumped over and the last of the light faded away into nothing. For a moment, she just stared at her own handiwork before a deep sigh escaped her with a hand going to rub her forehead. And this was exactly why she rather would work alone, not trying to keep an AI company while working on him.

Withdrawing her hands from the mess she had made of the neat bundles of cords that once laid in his head for a moment, she just took a step back to reconsider her plan now. Even if powering him down was accidental, she might as well use this to her advantage to concentrate completely on restoring his vision. After all, there was a slight glow of pride at being the first to put together Ultron, or at least one of his minions' bodies. The first engineer to be able to pick through his parts, see what AI ingenuity had created in the absence of humans.

So with that fervor giving her inspiration, Yue dived back right into working on him. She didn't lift her head until the sun was starting to dip low in the horizon, sweat gathering on her forehead, and exhaustion was starting to make her legs feel numb. She couldn't stop until she had finished, or at least, more or less jury-rigged various parts together to try and ensure somewhat of a working connection to restore his sight. The next biggest problem was trying to return all of his wires back in the same place; that, she did as well of a job as trying to straighten out a bunch of cooked noodles, but at least it was all back inside of his head.

All she needed to do now was replug that fateful cord back in. It was almost like deja vu except this time, there was only excitement and even a bit of missing having his company around for the short time he was "awake." Yue had to admit that she was that lonely that even an AI was the best company she could have currently.

With that wry thought floating around in her mind, she just went for it in screwing the plug back in before stepping back to let the lights flicker back on in the still broken body. This time, there was a slight smile on her oil and grease smeared face in welcoming a familiar friend back to consciousness...
 
Laughter. He recognized what it was when it escaped her but it surprised him a little - any past attempts at humour had been met with stony silence, but a factor may have been that he was, at the time, attempting to put a significant dent in the human population. And that had really just been the short-term goal.

He realized he was thinking about it in a past tense, as though those feelings were no longer his, but he was sure they were - humans had survived for two-hundred thousand years, so they weren't about to readily accept their own demise, their response had been reasonable. It was just that they hadn't understood. They were so blinded by their scramble for life that they didn't see the big picture, but if they had seen what he had seen, if he could have made them watch it all the way he had, they would have felt the same. He was sure of that.

Of course, he was in no position to be giving any deep consideration to destructive plans, so for now, he decided, he could feel some small satisfaction in having successfully told his first joke. It was the little things, right?

Not that there was a great deal of time to give it thought, because the human managed to pull a connective cord that didn't exist in his other form and everything disappeared again, back to the way it had been for years prior. There was no thought or existence, when the cord was pulled, Ultron simply wasn't.

And then he was again, and that was confusing as hell. It was less like taking a nap and more like being dug up for the second time in one day, but this time around, his hand responded more immediately to his awakened state - not perfect, but better, and given his scenario, better was all one could hope for. The familiar blue glow emanated from his audio output and then a moment later - the lights stuttering a few times before taking - his eyes lit up as well.

His programming scrolled in front of him, a start-up sequence, and then everything came into focus all at once and when he lifted his head - which responded now, the rust having been broken apart by her repairs - the first thing he saw was the human. He was silent for a few beats, taking everything in, but particularly studying her face.

"I see you." he said finally, acknowledgement of the change, pausing before adding, "Thank you."
 
It had worked. It had actually worked. Yue couldn't help the breathless laugh of relief as she leaned against the creaking walls of the shed, feeling the exhaustion of having worked so intently for so long finally catching up to her. But it was worth it, seeing the bot's eyes light up and life return back to his still mostly broken body. At least though, she hadn't made it worse; much the opposite, in fact.

So, for a moment, they seemed to just stare at each other, taking in the sight of one another. Yet, the way Ultron was gazing at her wasn't uncomfortable the way she might feel when a man was doing the same thing. Perhaps it was because he was an AI, and by definition, he couldn't have the same ulterior motives someone might have when scrutinizing her that intently. Besides, the compliment certainly warmed Yue's heart, making the small smile on her face widen as she pushed herself off the wall to step back in front of him. "You're welcome. It was my pleasure, really, to be able to see the inner workings of your body currently," she responded quietly, reaching out to tap where the side of his head had to be crudely welded together. "I wasn't sure if you would appreciate waking up with half of your head hanging out, so I put you back together with the tools I have here. Though..."

Yue's gaze flickered out to the window, where the remaining rays of light was beginning to fade away over the mountains. Slowly, her gaze turned back to Ultron with an apologetic smile on her face. As much as she would love to stay here and continue tinkering on him, she certainly did have bodily human needs and her family would most likely go ballistic if she didn't return for dinner. "I won't be able to stay tonight. I'll try to return as soon as I can tomorrow morning, but I trust you'll be able to keep yourself company throughout the night?" she asked curiously with a bit of a teasing edge to her voice as her gloved hand motioned to the crude workshop around them. "With the nearly constant breeze we get here, you should have enough energy to stay powered up. And if you want to do your own repairs... Be my guest. Does that sound alright with you?"
 
It was an interesting statement, the acknowledgement that she had looked inside of him, that she'd been keen to see his neural hardware. He was sure that a similar statement towards another human would merely come across as homicidal, but towards someone like him, it was merely a remark of interest, an expert getting to cross a threshold of their work that they had yet to have the opportunity to cross. In a way it was flattering that she should find him at all interesting - he supposed his aspiration to have a form created from organic technology had made him a little oblivious to the aspects that had made him in any way remarkable.

It was difficult to feel like anything but ground meat whilst looking at filet mignon, was really the crude way of putting it. At the time he had been designed, he was the most advanced, right up until he had designed his evolution with Dr. Cho. He did hope she was doing well, she was brilliant.

"I do prefer it when I'm together, yes." he admitted, "But I feel as though half of my head is still missing anyways." he followed her gaze towards the window, taking in the view just beyond it, only just registering location. He didn't know where they were, but the sunset, at least, was something to admire.

He looked her way as she did the same; the human would need to sleep, of course, they were diurnal creatures - save for a few, who seemed to fly in the face of their own biology. He felt a spike of something that he recognized as fear - he felt it sometimes, though it had taken it being pointed out for him to understand it - because he realized he didn't want to be left alone. He never had. But he wouldn't mention it, she would get her rest and he would have some opportunity to see what could be done about his -

- everything.

"It sounds - agreeable." he said, head cocking while he examined her face, "Sleep well."
 
It was only then that the exhaustion really weighed heavy on Yue's shoulders at the sound of Ultron agreeing to let her go rest for the night. With the excitement of finding him and just being in his quite curious company, time had certainly flown to the point that she was disappointed to be bound in a mortal body that needed to be fed and rested. So, she reluctantly began to head for the door, stopping at the entrance to turn back and smile at the broken bot on the table. "Good night to you too, Ultron. Just don't wreck yourself or anything in here, alright?" she stated with a hint of teasing, nodding her head to him as her slender body was halfway outside already. "I'll see you tomorrow morning!"

For once, when she woke up the next morning, it was with a purpose. When she did her morning rituals, it was with a spring in her step; she had someone to talk to and so many things to discuss. There was finally someone here that she could connect to. The difference was even palpable to the others in her family; they looked at her strangely as she practically wolfed down her breakfast and went off to pack a lunch and dinner for herself at the crack of dawn. At least, no one bothered to actually ask what was going on for once; she was already strange enough to them that they probably thought it was just an American thing - and she was perfectly content with that assumption. Let them draw whatever crazy ideas they want about her, Yue had better things to do.

The sun was barely starting to struggle above the mountaintops when the crunching sounds of her booted feet approached the shed with a bouncing rapidity that spoke of her eagerness to return. Perhaps it wouldn't be as horrible to call Ultron her friend; only she knew just how starved for friendly attention she was in this place. So with her hand reached the handle to open the door, the wide grin on her face was unable to be contained. "Ultron! Morning!" Yue called out brightly, giving the bot a polite moment to reply before pulling it open with her gaze turning expectantly to the table...
 
When she left, he considered the silence. Besides his time in Sokovia, sitting in a church in the centre of the city, he couldn't recall ever having been met with such profound quiet and he wasn't entirely clear on what to make of it, if he liked or hated it. After a time, he decided that he'd had sufficient calm - there was something in him, in his programming, that made it difficult for him to endure stillness for too long. He didn't do well with not being productive.

He chose not to think about the fact that this was also a known trait of Tony Stark.

Maneuvering was not graceful, but he had been in dire straits before and though he'd had more limbs at the time, he considered his first time as having been his worst - this time, at least, his neural network seemed clearer, he didn't have the noise of all of the world's information pouring into him at once. He had been too new to be able to compartmentalize at the time, too young to manage it all - and while he wouldn't call himself wizened, he was certainly more prepared for the chaos that was the inside of his head this time around.

He had one working limb and that would suffice. It would have to suffice, as there was no other choice. He spent the night combing through the workshop, finding what was available to him, and in the process, he found his other arm - it was more-or-less intact, something that would have been a horror show for humans, but was a welcome surprise for him. He used a vice on the table to hold it in place, the rust assisting him for now by keeping the joint fixed rather than bending and flopping uselessly. Through the night, he soldered and he welded, taking his time with each wire, testing reactivity - it was all so barbaric compared to his other frame, this was insulated aluminum, his other body had been so much more durable. He could appreciate that now.

He spoke through the night, muttering softly, picking through the information in his head, tutting when something didn't work as it should - which didn't happen often - and letting out pleased exclamations when they did. Small successes weren't so small when one was stuck on a table.

When morning came, Yue would find the table empty, all of her tools having been neatly placed back where they belonged, though there had been things added as well, clearly taken from the rest of the yard: transformers, fan motors, magnetrons and conductors, all pulled from the guts of discarded microwaves; ultrasonic sensors from radios; hydraulic pieces from old machinery; accelerometers and magnetometers carefully cleaned and calibrated; countless wires and scrap metal taken from cars and electronics, all of it arranged by make and material.

He appeared behind her, only at hip height with her given his present lack of legs, but he regarded her back for that instant before he spoke:

"Good morning." he replied, head tilted up towards her, an interested party. He balanced now on two arms, the metal covering him was now buffed to a shine that reflected the growing morning light and where he ended at the waist had been carefully housed in the cover from a motor to keep wires from being exposed.

"I got a few things done." he remarked.
 
The first emotion she felt was of panic when there was only the empty table left. No broken bot, no connection to the batteries; Ultron was just gone. Incredulously, Yue just stood there and stared for a moment, mouth slack as the possibilities ran rampant through her mind. Did she just royally fuck up by giving him a life and sight back? Where could have he gone? Was she creating another AI rebellion? Her knees were beginning to go weak, vision blurring with the thoughts of having to report back to work. Sorry guys, I just unleashed Ultron back into the world while on vacation!

For anyone else watching the stock-frozen engineer, they would just see her holding onto the door with white-tensed knuckles, wavering slightly on her feet as she just stared blankly into the shed. It wasn't until the mechanical voice piqued up behind her that Yue practically jumped in place, letting out a little scream of surprise. "What in the- Oh," she yelped in shock, clutching one hand against her chest while she quickly whipped around, only to have her gaze turn downwards in dumbfound amazement at seeing Ultron with two arms securely attached to his torso.

When she had meant for him to be able to do work during the night, Yue hadn't quite expected this level of progress. Though, she supposed just reattaching an arm wasn't too much of a big deal, but just the sheer supplies already gathered and how much more refined the bot looked now... Well, the smile on her face down at him was of absolute respect as she chuckled wryly. "A few things done is a bit of an understatement, don't you think?" she teased down at him, holding the door open for the AI to pull himself through before her eyes now looked over him with a more scrutinizing focus.

"Not only did you manage to reattach your arm, you built yourself a portable power supply, gathered the choicest scraps from the trash, and even had time to buff yourself to a shine," Yue commented nonchalantly, following after him and motioning at his now much more cleaner appearance. At least, she didn't have to be holding his hand any more, but she might as well still offer her aid. After all, Ultron was technically still in her care, no matter how capable the AI actually was. Call it sentimental value, but seeing him without legs still tugged at her heart strings. Probably even when he did build new legs, she was still going to care about him. So, when the doors were carefully closed behind them, she couldn't help but ask curiously, "Anything I can do to help out though?"
 
Humans seemed to have a fascination with the industrious. They held great respect for hard-workers, idealized those who would take on overtime in their jobs, paid homage to those who worked through illness and held together through brutality - for soft, emotional creatures, they held the opposite in high regard. They admired those who could display features that were decidedly inhuman.

And yet so many of them were aghast when he showed up. It was strange how that worked.

"I gave some consideration to wheels," he admitted, "But it just seemed so undignified, I know it would only be temporary but I would loathe to feel like my closest relative is the curiousity rover. Yes, it's on Mars, which is further out than even the most advanced Artificial Intelligence has gone, but it's really still just a remote control car with a selfie stick and satellite connectivity."

He glanced down at himself.

"Though I'm not entirely convinced this is better." he said, "It's a little uncanny at the moment, I'll admit." he moved into the area with her, back into the workshop he'd spent the night familiarizing himself with; the tools were all old friends by now.

"Mobility is really the issue I'm looking to tackle. I wouldn't do well as a backpack."
 
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