[STORY/short bit] The benefits and perils of being metal...

[KJ]

It had never really been her intent to try this, Dee reflected. As much as it might make the history books if she pulled it off, attempting to be the first person (though that was fuzzy, given her status as an AI who created a body) to successfully survive an unshielded, unsuited atmospheric reentry wasn't on her list of things to try.
The problem was, the area she was falling in was kinda... too busy for extraction. There was rather a lot of debris; she suspected that the ship her boarding barge had been approaching was nearly filled with potential shrapnel. So when it blew up... well, it'd be impolite at best to ask someone to navigate through that. It was irritating, it suggested that there was a leak somewhere, but nothing much to do from there.
At least there were some advantages to being an AI crammed into a robot body. She'd already finished backing up her software to a remote server she kept in the event stuff like this happened, so it's not like she was really afraid of dying. Okay, this thread of her existence might stop and it would be inconvenient; the body had taken a lot of work to produce and there wasn't another one ready. But really, just a setback.
There was a faint tingling as the first brushes against the atmosphere ran across her limbs at ridiculously high velocities. She adjusted her posture to try to create more drag before hitting the thick soup of lower atmosphere. Actually, in theory, it might just be possible. The full human size body had been made almost entirely out of nickel-based alloys, fortified with tinkered versions of the handwavium strains used in Battle Steel. So it was basically Battle Inconel, albeit an alloy of inconel tinkered with even before being 'waved. And normal inconel had incredibly high heat resistance, so would it cope with reentry? She guessed she'd find out.
In a way it was vaguely anticlimactic. The outer shell of her body was glowing white hot by the time she reached sea level, and some of the handwavium circulating inside had boiled off, carrying a lot of heat with it, but there was no serious damage. It brought up a whole new problem though, that proved even more intellectually stimulating.
"Now, how can I most easily get off the bottom of the damned ocean," the signifigantly-denser-than-water android muttered to herself as she sank.

[classicdrogn]

Hmm, sounds like a job for a flight capable (and pressure resistant) metal person... If she got a signal out to say "I'm still here but there's hella lots of water underneath, soon to be overhead!" Wave Convoy's main OGJ 'thing' is rescue & repar/medical. That's assuming she's too heavy and sinks into the muck too much to make meaningful progress walking, or is off of a continental shelf - and that the Blazers can't get someone there sooner in a sub or with deep sea diving gear.
- CDSERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[robkelk]

---

and that the Blazers can't get someone there sooner in a sub or with deep sea diving gear.

---

"Mr. Tracey, this is Buckaroo, and you're on the Global Frequency."
"Hello, Buckaroo. Where do you need our help this time?"
(five minutes later)
"Thunderbird 4 is go!"
... or not.

-Rob Kelk
"Read Or Die: not so much a title as a way of life." - Justin Palmer, 6 June 2007
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Kokuten]

If she's using a Battle Steel subvariant, she's got my card..

---

I never thought about it, but all that pressure isn't going to be much of a problem for a conventional vehicle.. if you just open the windows. It made a lot of sense as the suburban settled to the muck in front of me. Sparks flickered across the shattered remains of its headlamps, I could swear it looked depressed.. I eeled in through the open driver's window and tapped the driverless rig on the dash, and we began the long, slow slog back to the surface.

---

Aside from the road wheels and the odd alternatoring bits, my boys drive systems are _solid state_. I guesstimate about a day's worth of work to slam together a multi-layer charged pressure vessel big enough to contain enough batteries to power one of the Boys down and back up again, unless, of course, you make the tactical error of falling into a Deep Chasm...
Yah, I'd expect all sorts of unexpected damage to unexpected things, to be honest.. but the ECM and the batteries, the Rotor.. all easy enough to shield in short order, and to be honest - the 'dogbrain' AI in one of the Boys would be a riskable unit to bring back a one-off full-up AI. Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

[Ebony]

---

"Thunderbird 4 is go!"

---

Yes, well, I won't say I had that planned, but now that you've stuck the bug in my ear, there's a possibility that International Rescue, Ltd. could be a legal entity in which the Banzai Institute has invested some capital.Ebony the Black Dragon
Senior Editor, Living Room Games
http://www.lrgames.com
Ebony the Black Dragon
http://ebony14.livejournal.com

"Good night, and may the Good Lord take a Viking to you."

[robkelk]

My work here is done.
(Oh, yes... "Mr. Tracey" is as real a name as "John Steed", in case anyone was wondering.)

-Rob Kelk
"Read Or Die: not so much a title as a way of life." - Justin Palmer, 6 June 2007
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[CattyNebulart]

hmm potential complication. lets say dee is assumed 'dead' for a few days, so that the backup AI takes over.
Do they diverge and become sisters? (Then who is the evil twin? ^_^) Or can dee re-merge with her otherself?
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[KJ]

"Ah, the evil twin question. Frankly, it shouldn't work that way... there's already basically a couple sets of hardware, but it's more like a server setup running a common operating system but distributing the load. Connection between one of them and the others gets interrupted, but each continue on their merry way and when the connection comes back up discrepencies in data get compared and all the nodes get filled back up to date. So sorta on the re-merge thing, except that the 'backup' concept is a little off. I know I said backup, but that was a shortcut on the re-merge in case I did just lose the fullsize body."
"It's not like the full size body is *all* of me... it's a bigass, expensive, high-priority process, but it's not an irreplaceable one. That said, replacing it would be a bitch... I should be able to walk it up to surface level, but might take a while."
"... I swear, after this SOP for this kind of thing includes a thrust pack..."
-D

[Star Ranger4]

Ebony wrote:

---

Quote:

---

"Thunderbird 4 is go!"

---

Yes, well, I won't say I had that planned, but now that you've stuck the bug in my ear, there's a possibility that International Rescue, Ltd.
could be a legal entity in which the Banzai Institute has invested some capital.


Ebony the Black Dragon


Senior Editor, Living Room Games


http://www.lrgames.com

Which, I must admit was something I'd had rolling around in the same mixer that popped out the MAD scientist; but I wasnt even going to start
thinking about something THAT big till I got a bit more research (read and excuse to sit around and read) about fenspace under my belt.
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children

[Black Aeronaut]

KJ wrote:

---

"Ah, the evil twin question. Frankly, it shouldn't work that way... there's already basically a couple sets of hardware, but
it's more like a server setup running a common operating system but distributing the load. Connection between one of them and the others gets
interrupted, but each continue on their merry way and when the connection comes back up discrepencies in data get compared and all the nodes get filled back
up to date. So sorta on the re-merge thing, except that the 'backup' concept is a little off. I know I said backup, but that was a shortcut on the
re-merge in case I did just lose the fullsize body."

"Ah, sort of like me, only without the support of a centralized server. Working with straight-up wetware is a pain like that,
but I get by. I just have to be careful enough not to let one of me get killed before I can re-synch."

-JA