wintersday (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wintersday) wrote2022-02-14 09:29 pm
wintersday) wrote2022-02-14 09:29 pm
Entry tags:
- character: homestuck: sollux,
- character: homestuck: the psiioniic,
- fandom: homestuck: homestuck,
- fanfic,
- fanfic: length: 1-5k,
- fanfic: rating: teen,
- fanfic: type: gen,
- giftfic,
- trope: angst,
- trope: au - canon divergence,
- trope: au - no sgrub/sburb,
- trope: character study,
- trope: helmstrolls,
- trope: hurt/comfort
Fic: Adaptation
Title: Adaptation
Fandom: Homestuck
Major Characters/Pairings: Sollux, the Psiioniic
Wordcount: 1,314
Rating: Teen
POV: Second Person
Summary: The Condesce has just installed a shiny new helmsman in her battleship to go with the old one. The Condesce has just made a huge mistake.
Notes: Written as a giftfic for snippedHazard on AO3.
It took time for you to wake up.
You’re not sure if trollbots dream of electric baabeasts, but you, specifically, spent a quarter sweep dreaming of some really weird shit, which is probably the inevitable result of a warship’s worth of electrical impulses being transmitted at gravity-twisting speed through your half-responsive thinkpan. The only reason you’re not still in that dreaming stasis is a battle.
Those are never great – you haven’t stopped being able to hear the deaths of Alternia’s enemies before you rain psionic fire down on them, and the can’t countermand an order crap doesn’t mean it’s not you calculating the trajectory of every torpedo – but this one was worse than most. The good old HCS Fuckmyliife was outnumbered and almost outmatched, to the point where the ship had to overdraw from the power banks to keep the shields up. It hurt like a bitch. Another good hit or two and you might have gotten to clock out early. Instead, you pulled through – your wires scorched and sparking, the part of you that’s a fucking spaceship’s auxiliary processor throwing automated support requests into the tech support void, the rest of you screaming.
You hadn’t known you were doing it. You’re not even sure the meathusk was making noise, but your thinkpan is the part that matters now, and going by the error logs, it was busy sending out waves of incoherent code and static on a communication channel you hadn’t known existed. Eventually, something answered back.
2sT0p T#hatT
Words. Alternian words, scrambled but comprehensible. You don’t think you had any capacity to parse them at the time. But what you did have was an awareness, not quite sensation, that someone else was there with you. You could feel them reaching into your code, setting your systems back in order, and as errors and warnings were resolved and not-quite-pain was replaced with not-quite-silence, you remembered words and what they meant. After that, your body, hanging motionless and full of distant aches. You tried to move. You opened your eyes and saw dim red light, coils of hanging wire and biomachinery, and across from you, a face like yours, but gaunter and so tired. You panicked like an asshole. There was more screaming. He didn’t tell you to shut up, just let you ride it out until you were left with some dull, numb, tired feeling, and when you were quiet again, you registered a message dropped straight into the back of your thinkpan: a4re y0U &%0K
i iiii ii
ii’m
0k
ii’m 0k
You were and are extremely not OK. But you were conscious, and in the brittle calm that followed your wiigler freakout 2e22iion, you realized two things. First, worst, most obvious, they never uninstalled the old helm. He’s still there. He looks like you, and those facts together scared you more than being strung up in a helmsblock in the first place, because you knew what they meant. But two: no one ever thought to restrict helm to helm communication along a designated channel. You guess it’s necessary, if you’re going to be throwing commands back and forth, getting all up in each other’s data. You’re part of the same machine now. You’ve got write access to pieces of each other’s thinkpans, which is a terrifying thought. Only pieces. The deucebags who programmed you weren’t complete incompetents. But it meant you could talk to him.
fuck 2orry fuck, you said. diidn’t realiize ii had company
The ancient helmsman hanging across from you – the Helmsman, the fucking legendary Psiioniic – made a sound like a corpse trying to breathe. You realized after a moment that it was laughter.
W 3L&%www %
W3Lc0ME TW0 h3LL, KIID
2 22
220RRy IIT h4d tW0 bE %y0U#&
Y0#%LL g3t u2ed TW0 IIT
lookiing forward to iit, you said.
Gr34T, he said, sagging in his wires. N0w l#let mE f%ckIInG 2 22LeeP
You tried. You tried to sleep yourself, whatever that means for someone like you – cycle down, lose yourself in the wires – but once your thinkpan was back online, it didn’t seem willing to quit. It never has been. You don’t think it ever will be. Insomnia runs in your blood like it runs in his, and you know he wasn’t resting then, even though he looked close to collapse. But he wanted to be left alone, and fuck, you weren’t going to take that away from him.
You spent some time hanging around. Eheh. You know exactly how much of it, too. The computer, it is you. Your processing speed and capacity are astronomical, and you can multitask like a god. It’s infuriating. You could do so much with this system, if you only had a little thing called autonomy, instead of your primary function being to act as a relay system for some highblood engineer’s profoundly shitty code. Back then, you weren’t thinking like that. You were still fixating on your creepy dripping tentacle prison and the fact that your proprioception had been hijacked for astronav, but he was right: you got used to it.
But you weren’t used to anything yet. You couldn’t sleep. You couldn’t stop thinking. When you forced your lookstubs open and your mind to parse the data they were giving you, you could see your Ancestor sparking, twitching, and you remembered that he’d been through that battle too. You’ve always been shit at doing nothing, so you pinged him: access requested; access granted, after a second of delay. Half an eternity, at your processing speed, but he trusted you to do what he’d done for you, or he knew it couldn’t get worse. You sifted through the staggering complexity of his weird fucking code, adjusting, repairing – and as you did, you began to comprehend how old he is, and what exactly that means.
It shouldn’t be possible, with no external input, for a machine not built for the task to spontaneously rewrite its own code – but he’s not a machine, or if he is, it’s one more complex than anyone else in the Empire realizes. His entire thinkpan is self-adjusting programs built on self-adjusting programs. More than that, he’s damaged: a mess of dropped references, errors that make no sense and programs that run anyway, insane branching loops and redundancies. It looks organic, almost, like something that’s deteriorated over the centuries, or evolved. You’d say it’s brilliant, and it is, except you know now how it happened. Every time Fiishbiitch ever pushed him too hard, every time she tore him back from death, or burned the engines until even he was a wreck, it left another tiny little fuckup or two, a few pieces of corrupted data that nobody ever comes back to restore. He’s got a lot of them, a millennia worth or more; his firewalls are fraying, and behind them lies the core of the entire ship – and even that’s not enough to change anything. Not for him. Not yet. But no ever thought to restrict helm to helm communication.
You didn’t send that thought along. You still haven’t. You’re putting together your plan of attack, working out his system’s defenses and vulnerabilities, and he doesn’t need any useless hope. You patched the pieces of his mind that were hurting, or at least the ones you could reach through code alone, without getting him out of those fucking nightmare wires. You didn’t think about pain, or how long a life can last, or freedom. You did what you could, and then you sent a message, just like he had, with an answer both of you already knew.
you 0k?
He wasn’t. He’s not. But if there’s anyone who’s got the time and the thinkpan and the globes to pull off the most legendary hack this whole shit universe has ever seen, it’s you. And what that means is that maybe, eventually, he will be.
Fandom: Homestuck
Major Characters/Pairings: Sollux, the Psiioniic
Wordcount: 1,314
Rating: Teen
POV: Second Person
Summary: The Condesce has just installed a shiny new helmsman in her battleship to go with the old one. The Condesce has just made a huge mistake.
Notes: Written as a giftfic for snippedHazard on AO3.
It took time for you to wake up.
You’re not sure if trollbots dream of electric baabeasts, but you, specifically, spent a quarter sweep dreaming of some really weird shit, which is probably the inevitable result of a warship’s worth of electrical impulses being transmitted at gravity-twisting speed through your half-responsive thinkpan. The only reason you’re not still in that dreaming stasis is a battle.
Those are never great – you haven’t stopped being able to hear the deaths of Alternia’s enemies before you rain psionic fire down on them, and the can’t countermand an order crap doesn’t mean it’s not you calculating the trajectory of every torpedo – but this one was worse than most. The good old HCS Fuckmyliife was outnumbered and almost outmatched, to the point where the ship had to overdraw from the power banks to keep the shields up. It hurt like a bitch. Another good hit or two and you might have gotten to clock out early. Instead, you pulled through – your wires scorched and sparking, the part of you that’s a fucking spaceship’s auxiliary processor throwing automated support requests into the tech support void, the rest of you screaming.
You hadn’t known you were doing it. You’re not even sure the meathusk was making noise, but your thinkpan is the part that matters now, and going by the error logs, it was busy sending out waves of incoherent code and static on a communication channel you hadn’t known existed. Eventually, something answered back.
2sT0p T#hatT
Words. Alternian words, scrambled but comprehensible. You don’t think you had any capacity to parse them at the time. But what you did have was an awareness, not quite sensation, that someone else was there with you. You could feel them reaching into your code, setting your systems back in order, and as errors and warnings were resolved and not-quite-pain was replaced with not-quite-silence, you remembered words and what they meant. After that, your body, hanging motionless and full of distant aches. You tried to move. You opened your eyes and saw dim red light, coils of hanging wire and biomachinery, and across from you, a face like yours, but gaunter and so tired. You panicked like an asshole. There was more screaming. He didn’t tell you to shut up, just let you ride it out until you were left with some dull, numb, tired feeling, and when you were quiet again, you registered a message dropped straight into the back of your thinkpan: a4re y0U &%0K
i iiii ii
ii’m
0k
ii’m 0k
You were and are extremely not OK. But you were conscious, and in the brittle calm that followed your wiigler freakout 2e22iion, you realized two things. First, worst, most obvious, they never uninstalled the old helm. He’s still there. He looks like you, and those facts together scared you more than being strung up in a helmsblock in the first place, because you knew what they meant. But two: no one ever thought to restrict helm to helm communication along a designated channel. You guess it’s necessary, if you’re going to be throwing commands back and forth, getting all up in each other’s data. You’re part of the same machine now. You’ve got write access to pieces of each other’s thinkpans, which is a terrifying thought. Only pieces. The deucebags who programmed you weren’t complete incompetents. But it meant you could talk to him.
fuck 2orry fuck, you said. diidn’t realiize ii had company
The ancient helmsman hanging across from you – the Helmsman, the fucking legendary Psiioniic – made a sound like a corpse trying to breathe. You realized after a moment that it was laughter.
W 3L&%www %
W3Lc0ME TW0 h3LL, KIID
2 22
220RRy IIT h4d tW0 bE %y0U#&
Y0#%LL g3t u2ed TW0 IIT
lookiing forward to iit, you said.
Gr34T, he said, sagging in his wires. N0w l#let mE f%ckIInG 2 22LeeP
You tried. You tried to sleep yourself, whatever that means for someone like you – cycle down, lose yourself in the wires – but once your thinkpan was back online, it didn’t seem willing to quit. It never has been. You don’t think it ever will be. Insomnia runs in your blood like it runs in his, and you know he wasn’t resting then, even though he looked close to collapse. But he wanted to be left alone, and fuck, you weren’t going to take that away from him.
You spent some time hanging around. Eheh. You know exactly how much of it, too. The computer, it is you. Your processing speed and capacity are astronomical, and you can multitask like a god. It’s infuriating. You could do so much with this system, if you only had a little thing called autonomy, instead of your primary function being to act as a relay system for some highblood engineer’s profoundly shitty code. Back then, you weren’t thinking like that. You were still fixating on your creepy dripping tentacle prison and the fact that your proprioception had been hijacked for astronav, but he was right: you got used to it.
But you weren’t used to anything yet. You couldn’t sleep. You couldn’t stop thinking. When you forced your lookstubs open and your mind to parse the data they were giving you, you could see your Ancestor sparking, twitching, and you remembered that he’d been through that battle too. You’ve always been shit at doing nothing, so you pinged him: access requested; access granted, after a second of delay. Half an eternity, at your processing speed, but he trusted you to do what he’d done for you, or he knew it couldn’t get worse. You sifted through the staggering complexity of his weird fucking code, adjusting, repairing – and as you did, you began to comprehend how old he is, and what exactly that means.
It shouldn’t be possible, with no external input, for a machine not built for the task to spontaneously rewrite its own code – but he’s not a machine, or if he is, it’s one more complex than anyone else in the Empire realizes. His entire thinkpan is self-adjusting programs built on self-adjusting programs. More than that, he’s damaged: a mess of dropped references, errors that make no sense and programs that run anyway, insane branching loops and redundancies. It looks organic, almost, like something that’s deteriorated over the centuries, or evolved. You’d say it’s brilliant, and it is, except you know now how it happened. Every time Fiishbiitch ever pushed him too hard, every time she tore him back from death, or burned the engines until even he was a wreck, it left another tiny little fuckup or two, a few pieces of corrupted data that nobody ever comes back to restore. He’s got a lot of them, a millennia worth or more; his firewalls are fraying, and behind them lies the core of the entire ship – and even that’s not enough to change anything. Not for him. Not yet. But no ever thought to restrict helm to helm communication.
You didn’t send that thought along. You still haven’t. You’re putting together your plan of attack, working out his system’s defenses and vulnerabilities, and he doesn’t need any useless hope. You patched the pieces of his mind that were hurting, or at least the ones you could reach through code alone, without getting him out of those fucking nightmare wires. You didn’t think about pain, or how long a life can last, or freedom. You did what you could, and then you sent a message, just like he had, with an answer both of you already knew.
you 0k?
He wasn’t. He’s not. But if there’s anyone who’s got the time and the thinkpan and the globes to pull off the most legendary hack this whole shit universe has ever seen, it’s you. And what that means is that maybe, eventually, he will be.