Mid-semester lab takeover

[Michelle Wilcox]

Michelle looked at Rena in a way she hoped would translate as "Stick to my story and we'll be fine."

[Less Than Beta East Tundra]

Less Than Beta hopped down from the chair he had been sitting up on in order to type and stood in front of the professor, ready to follow her.

[Ada Turing]

"Yes ma'am," Ada said quickly and quietly. Her little project had gone horribly wrong, but at least the supercomputer was still running. Maybe, just maybe, she'd still get something usable out of it.

[Alaine Kensington]

"I think you can keep this running, Miss Turing. My offer still stands to have this as a project for Archaeology class. Now, please wait for Professor Galontauré-Jones while I take these three to the headmistress. We'll se what happens to them, though I think East Tundra and Miss Thompson will be let off with a very light detention. I will however make sure that you regret this, Miss Wilcox." Professor Kensington started usering the three out of the lab and towards the headmistress' office.
"Oh, I might call for both of you to have the story corroborated, if it doesn't add up. And I think I might need to get East Tundra some clothes so he can explain verbally."

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

Aurora nods absently.

[Rena Thompson]

"Of course, ma'am." rena said, saluting, appearing emotionless. It was a practiced technique. She knew she was a soldier, and the soldier was worried at all the uncontrolled elements that were emerging. Worst of all, she was the only one who seemed to recognise the immediate threat of sentient technology with access to most of the world's knowledge. Maybe she really was paranoid... but then again, the laid-back ones had all died quickly.

Rena saw Michelle's look. She made a small nod back, nearly invisible unless you were looking for it. She would stick With Michelle's story as much as possible, if only to get another soldier out of serious trouble.

[Ada Turing]

Ada turned back to her keyboard and started typing quickly, explaining as much as she could to Tumult. Primarily, she asked Tumult to back off on the network (especially the wireless), and also to start thinking - very hard - about CPU designs.

[Alaine Kensington]

"Don't take that tone with me, Thompson. And thre will be no saluting. I am a teacher, and this is school campus. This is not a military base, and I am not your superior officer. If I find either of you trying to act here like you're on one, I'll have you brought in detention again." She grabbed the two girls by their left and right upper arms repectively and started walking at a brusque pace. It was quite fast for the girls, but actually still slower than her usual walking pace.

[Ada Turing]

"Aurora," Ada said, once Alaine was gone, "Out of curiosity, what did you do before Tumult started talking to you?"

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

"Oh," she tried to recall back. "Well when I came in, it was making lots of noise. Lots of different kinds of noise. It's kind of hard to describe. Anyways, I started moving the sounds around to see if I could make new sounds, and Tumult got curious about what I was doing."

She giggled a bit. "It wasn't really talking, it was more like a... like maybe if a dog coming to sniff at you? Except not quite. Anyways, I asked Tumult what her name was, and she didn't know what a name was, so I just said that name was something that described what something is, and it asked what it was, and I said that I didn't know but that she was very noisy, so she looked up noisy on the internet which was funny, and one of the words was 'Tumult' which I think also means noisy, so I named her Tumult."

She took a breath, and was ready to continue talking.

[Ada Turing]

"Interesting," Ada said. "So Tumult was there before then..."

Ada was distracted by a rather complicated diagram that appeared on the monitor.

"That's an interesting design, Tumult," she said. "I like what you did with the FDIV, but I think you could do better like this..."

She grabbed a piece of paper and started sketching a similar diagram, carefully where one of the lab webcams could see what she was doing.

[Lawrence Galontauré-Jones]

"What is the meaning of this?"

Professor Galontauré-Jones' emotionless voice lay in stark contrast to his face, which was twisted with fury. His brow was damp with sweat, presumably from wheeling himself to the lab as fast as possible.

"The school network is crashing. The computers in my classroom are being overloaded by some outside force. I want an explanation as to why you have made a unauthorized supercomputer and AI program. Now."

[Ada Turing]

"I didn't do it," Ada protested. "Okay, I made the cluster, but it's all running off boot disks. The network wasn't even sweating until the AI appeared, and I was at best the fourth person to find out about that."

((OOC: Come hang out in the chatroom? Please?))

[Lawrence Galontauré-Jones]

"I believe what I wanted was an explanation, not an excuse. Let us try again. Why did you make this?"

[Ada Turing]

"I assembled the cluster for a project I've been researching - it's running a fairly straightforward belief network to try and resolve some oddities I'm seeing in a type of magic that I've been researching. The last accurate estimate I saw put the total run time somewhere around six hours, so I figured I'd come in when people weren't using the lab, run it, and be done."

[Lawrence Galontauré-Jones]

"Magic?"

Lawrence pulled a small, strange-looking device out of the bag of holding strapped to his wheelchair. He waved it over one of the servers. The device gave a shrill wail.

"Blast it. Who was your magic instructor? Weren't you told of the dangers inherent in introducing magic into a technological medium? The power inherent in magical words can have drastically negative effects on any sort of technology, that is why you're supposed to hand write spells instead of typing them!"

He replaced the device back into his bag and rubbed his sinuses wearily.

"It's not an AI. Not a true AI, anyway. To put it simply... the computer system is possessed."

[Ada Turing]

"It's not writing a spell," Ada said. "My notes are all right here - it's running purely logical induction on a rather large set of first-order predicates. Some of those predicates are a little bit unusual, certainly, but I'm using none of the original symbols, none of the original constructs, and most importantly, none of the original context. It's magical in the same way that the string E=MC² is an atom bomb."

((And seriously, come join the chatroom. There is much conversation over how we want to play this out going on.))

[Lawrence Galontauré-Jones]

"Unlike nuclear fission, the power in magic comes from words, no matter how indirect those words might seem. In this case, the magic your research was investigated still had enough power to create an unreal error within the database. From that error came this pseudo-AI."

There was a pause.

"Anyway, my device went beep. That means magic."

[Ada Turing]

Ada was less than happy about his simplistic explanation of his device's behavior, and her perception of the condescending attitude behind it.

"Very well, then," she said, giving up on the debate. "What do we do about it?"

[Tzu Mei]

Tzu Mei carefully slid in the room, all senses on high alert. After being woken up by a gunshot, he had carefully waited long enough that any hostiles would have let their guard down and only then made his way to the source of the sound. The voices were telling him to be cautious, that there could be anyone in there, but to relief there were only a couple of students and a teacher. "Galontaure-Jones. What has happened here? Your report, please," he said, shouldering his rifle (loaded with real bullets this time!) but noticeably not sheathing the blue-bladed sword in his right hand.

[Lawrence Galontauré-Jones]

"There is not much that can be done right away. It can not be simply deleted at this point, as that would be murder."

Lawrence arranged himself at a computer and began typing away.

"I can drop in some refined firewalls around it to stop it from spreading any further into the network. After that... I am not sure. I have a few contacts in the robotics industry when I was a freelancer. They may have a spare chassis we can dump the AI into."

After a few minutes, he maneuvers his wheelchair away from the keyboard.

"Done. The only thing that remains is your punishment. Your little experiment has damaged thousands of dollars worth of equipment. That is not even mentioning the lost productivity or any damaged files being held on the network. You and Miss Robinson will accompany me to the Headmistress's office to work it out."

He gestures for the two girls to follow him as he moves to leave.

[Lawrence Galontauré-Jones]

Lawrence stops as the heavily armed Tzu Mei enters.

"I can not tell you anything about the gun shot, as that Professor Kensington resolved that before I arrived. These two, however--" he indicates Ada and Aurora, "--mixed magic and technology and made a new life form. I was just about to take them to the office."

[Tzu Mei]

Tzu Mei shifted his rifle higher up on his shoulder before saying, "I will follow you then. No doubt someone has told the headmistress." He didn't sound like he would take no for an answer.

[Alaine Kensington]

Almost as soon as the grou steps out of the room, they bump into Alaine Kensington. She had just come rushing up the stairs and down the corridor to get the two girls.

"Ah, Galontauré-Jones. I hope you've managed to cntrol this a little. And... Mei?" She raised an eyebrow. What was the elusive marksmanship teacher doing here, of all places? Then she saw his gun and sheathed sword. The gunshot, of course. "Anyway. I'd just returned to get these two to the headmistress. I think Wilcox is trying to spin a story and lay blame for her shooting East Tundra on the boy. Says he attacked Rena. I assume you were also heading there?"

[Lawrence Galontauré-Jones]

Professor Galontauré-Jones entered the computer lab with Ada and Aurora presumably in tow.

"Now, the guidelines for your detention are as follows," he said. "You are not to use this computer lab - or indeed, even be in the lab at all - without a professor being present. Any time you wish to run an experiment, you must ask me and me alone for permission to do so. You are not allowed to remove anything physical from the lab. If either of you violate these rules, you will never see the inside of this room again. Do we have an understanding?"

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

(For clarification, this is after the events in marysueacademy.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=headoffice&action=display&thread=239&page=1)

Aurora nodded somberly.

[Ada Turing]

"Yessir," Ada said.

[Lawrence Galontauré-Jones]

"Good. You two can start in on the server while I attend to the school network."

He pulled a blank card out of his bag before wheeling over to an otherwise unremarkable patch of wall. He swiped the card across the wall. There was a click, followed by part of the wall sliding back. Inside were all manner of wires and electronics.

The professor rolls up his sleeves and gets to work.

[Ada Turing]

Ada sat down at a computer and logged back in to the supercomputer. A few typed comments to Tumult later, and she spoke up.

"Professor, Tumult is asking what disks she should save herself to? My box has almost enough capacity, but there would be a few gigabytes of blob files extra that would need stowing somewhere."

[Aurora Lumina Robinson]

Aurora sidled up next to Ada. "What are we supposed to do be doing?"