Reporting for detention...

[Ada Turing]

Ada arrived promptly at three on Tuesday afternoon, right after Biology class.

"Good afternoon," she said. "If you don't have any blackboards for me to erase or disks for me to reimage, I have a question for you. How much do you know about ASIC design? I've been reading over some notes that Tumult left me, and I think that we can shift a lot of her load over to dedicated coprocessors, reducing her size from sixty-ish boxes down to a half-dozen or so."

[Lawrence Galontauré-Jones]

"I am actually in the process of arranging that as we speak, Miss Turning," the professor said. He looked rather haggard, as if he had not slept for several days. He was bearing a most un-elvish five o'clock shadow. "What would help me the most at this moment is if you could take care of these."

He gestured over to a table where about two dozen laptops, all with the academy logo on them, have been laid out. "The loner laptops are all in need of their weekly defragmentation. I would be most appreciative if you could start working on those."

[Ada Turing]

"Certainly," Ada said, a little bit disappointed. She checked that all the laptops were plugged in (powering off mid-defragment being a bad thing), and started them all up. After logging in (assuming she knew or had been given a login with the appropriate permissions), she started them all into their defrag routines. While she waited for them to complete, she pulled a pad of graph paper out of her backpack and resumed working on a high-level schematic for a neural net processor. (Coprocessor, technically - not a complete computer, but it makes running big neural nets such as the one that was a significant fraction of Tumult's load significantly faster.)

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

Arriving half an hour late (she had not been in Biology and had actually been wandering the grounds), Aurora entered the classroom in a more or less neutral mood. She still didn't understand why she was being punished, so her discontent was balancing out her natural cheeriness.

"Hi, is this where I'm supposed to go for detention?"

[Ada Turing]

Ada sighed and dropped the pad of paper to the table.

"Look," she said towards prof. Galontaure-Jones. "We're working on the same problem, and to judge by how you look, you aren't making much more progress than I am. It's obviously a nontrivial problem, so pardon me for suggesting that we could probably get further faster if we collaborated a bit."

[Lawrence Galontauré-Jones]

Galontauré-Jones glared daggers at Ada. "The AI is not the cause of my appearance, Miss Turning," he growled. "And I will thank you not to impugn my knowledge of constructed intelligences. My appearance is due to my efforts to obtain an artificial body for your creation."

He waved a sheaf of letters around. "This type of robotics is hard to obtain. Even my connections are being strained by this demand."

He looked up as Aurora arrived. "Yes it is," he said. "You and Miss Turing were about to clean the monitors of all of the computers in this classroom. Monitor cleaning fluid and wipes can be found inside the third cabinet on the right."

It should be noted that there are quite a few computers in the classroom.

[Ada Turing]

Ada muttered something about "if you're going to hold me responsible, I might as well take responsibility..." and turned to the cleaner.

((PC: Ada is a roboticist and considers Tumult a friend. She is Not Happy about being forcibly excluded from this, and I as a player am Not Happy that you haven't discussed this with me. We need to talk.))

[Lawrence Galontauré-Jones]

Galontauré-Jones sighed and rolled away from the podium. "I can no longer proceed any further with the process today. Miss Turing, I leave the AI in your hands until I return."

He then leaves.

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

Aurora puts down the bottle of monitor-cleaning fluid. It smelled funny.

She came up behind Ada, pushing a loose lock of red hair behind her ear. "That was odd."