The Labs: Oh, God She's Back

[Nina Madaraki]

"Alright, 'cold'. 'Wet'," Nina says, "Anything else?"

[Will Stanton]

"I remember... a drill? Or something? Cutting me free...and then removing..." Will2 struggled.

[Nina Madaraki]

"Very interesting," Nina says, scribbling more notes, "Hold on a moment."

Nina goes to the other side of the screen.

"Alright, how are you doing Will?"

[Will Stanton]

"I'm bored. My head's a bit fuzzy, though...do you have an aspirin?"

[Nina Madaraki]

"Drugs would interfere with the results," Nina says, making a note, "Could you tell me your earliest memory, Will?"

[Will Stanton]

"Oh, boy. Earliest memory? Riding the Subway. I think it's to see...Sesame Street Live? Something like that.

I've always like the muppets."

[Nina Madaraki]

"Alright," Nina says, "Who was the 12th president of the United States?"

[Will Stanton]

"...Capaldi?"

[Nina Madaraki]

"Alright, thank you very much."

Nina goes around and shuts off the broadcast and removes the screen so that Will can return to his normal state.

[Will Stanton]

Will2 quickly became the Adonis he was known as.

"Woo. I...think I preferred being the camera, if I'm at all honest with you. Something was OFF about that."

[Nina Madaraki]

"It is pretty incredible though," Nina says, "Only using half your mass, you held an entire person's worth of data. Sort of."

[Will Stanton]

"Is that a lot of bits?"

[Nina Madaraki]

"It is all of the bits, Will. All of them."

[Will Stanton]

Will whistled. "That's a lot of bits."

[Nina Madaraki]

"Which makes me curious about your upper limits," Nina says, "You okay to go again? Or do you need a minute to recover?"

[Will Stanton]

"We're good," they said. "Just...maybe not a dead body this time? Pretty please with Sugar on top?"

[Nina Madaraki]

"Fritz isn't dead. He's in a hellish state between life and death," Nina says, "But I got you. Besides, I wasn't planning on trying to repeat that experience. I have something much more interesting planned."

[Will Stanton]

"Oh? I DO like interesting things."

[Nina Madaraki]

"Let me just calibrate...." Nina says, setting the broadcast to new settings.

"Ready? Too bad!" Nina says, hitting the button and broadcasting the signal for Will to turn into a hard drive.

[Will Stanton]

"What?" the Wills said, simultaneously and then both fell down with a loud clattering sound, as two...well, let's be honest, in computer terms ANCIENT looking hard drives hit the floor.

[Nina Madaraki]

Nina groans, crouching over the hard drives, "You are a constant source of exhilaration and disappointment, Will."

[Will Stanton]

Beep beep.

Hard drives don't talk.

[Nina Madaraki]

Nina picked them up and started getting to work.

The first thing they needed was an upgrade. She started swapping out as much as she could to increase the capacity of the hard drives.

[Will Stanton]

The parts were all strange ones -- things that looked VAGUELY like classic electronics, but not quite.

Still, they were fairly modular, and Nina could mess around in Will's box all she wanted, upgrading them to her heart's content.

[Nina Madaraki]

Once she was satisfied that she had increased the capacity as far as she could, she started hooking up them up to her laptop.

[Will Stanton]

Beep! Whirrrrrrr....

Two new drives, D:Will and E:Stanton were accessible!

Each of them were about 40% full, out of a capacity of...

2.5 petabytes?

[Nina Madaraki]

First things first, go through what was in the drives and copy over anything fun or incriminating!

[ASHLIE]

As she's copying things a message alert flashes on her laptop.

[Will Stanton]

Basic breakdown was like this.

There was one file: Will.wil. Not really clear what the hell that was.

Then there was a big settings.bat

There was a huge folder full of videos called "Memories", and one full of a bunch of text files called "Knowledge". Another similar one was labeled "Opinions", and yet one more was labeled "Shifting". Another was labeled "Dreams and Fantasies", and so forth -- 10 or 15 folders in all.

A password prompt came up, but after a minute, it filled itself out.

[Nina Madaraki]

Nina clicks on the alert!

Action click!

She also started exploring Will's folders. Starting with 'Memories'.

[Will Stanton]

Thank god they were sorted by year, in chronological order!

They also had a quite extensive tagging system, allowing Nina to access pretty much anything she wanted. They all seemed to be .avis, too, so there shouldn't be any compatibility issues. A quick search, and she could find whatever she wanted, from the very beginning -- a video that started dark, emerging in bright light with a doctor and some other people standing in a delivery room -- to a video of Will falling to the floor as a hard drive.

[ASHLIE]

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>> "You seem to have connected a strange network drive."

[Nina Madaraki]

Nina started downloading anything that caught her interest.

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>> lol somthing like that
>> who is this???

[Will Stanton]

Knowing Nina, "her interests" involved things not fit for publication. And Will watching episodes of Star Trek -- cheaper than a torrent!

[ASHLIE]

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>> "The resident AI."

[Nina Madaraki]

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>> cool
>> you wnt anithing from hear b4 i start screwing with him?

Nina started going through "Shifting" next.

[ASHLIE]

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>> "Him? Is that a consciousness you connected?"

[Will Stanton]

The shifting folder contained, essentially, detailed diagrams and schematics of everything Will had ever shifted into. There was even a folder full of pictures of Nina, photographed from nearly every conceivable angle. It was, apparently, a memory bank of what Will could shift into. External pictures only, unlike some of the others -- there were cross-sections and complicated diagrams of, say, the bed he had been once or the pillows that Mel had used him as.

The most recent folder was, of course, the hard drive in question. Interestingly, it included both the original parts Will had had, as well as the new ones Nina had installed -- multiple versions of the same thing.

The early stuff would all be quite embarassing to Will, most likely -- towels embroidered with the logo of the high school he went to, a piece of women's underwear, etc. He had, judging from these stats, been quite the little pervert as a 15 year old discovering his abilities.

There were a couple sections that were different from the other ones -- the aforementioned Mel-forced shifting areas were shaded differently from the other folders, as were quite a few things McDohl had done -- everything from her fake 6-year old sister, complete with biography, through the air-head, bimbo Willow.

And then there was a VERY large section, sectioned off in it's own folder, labeled "Black Air". It was encrypted.

[Nina Madaraki]

There we are.

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>> its will stanton

Nina tried accessing the "Black Air" folder.

[Will Stanton]

She got slapped back. Well, metaphorically -- it asked for a password, and this time, it wasn't filling itself out.