UglyXeno's IPC application [Accepted]

[VUX]

BYOND Key:
UglyXeno
Character Names:
Amy Wright, Asmar Raikov, Essh Kesan, Valka Amjad
Species you are applying to play:
IPC
What color do you plan on making your first alien character (Dionaea & IPCs exempt):
Black
Have you read our lore section's page on this species?:
Yes.

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Please provide well articulated answers to the following questions in a paragraph format. One paragraph minimum per question

Why do you wish to play this specific race:

Well, I do like playing robots, but I generally feel AI and Cyborg to be too limiting to be fun as a regular character. Mostly, I want to play a robot with hands to take advantage of the wide variety of character concepts available to them. Personally I tend to like to play around with the possibilities of a fully sentient piece of software, but I'm aware that's mostly not how it is, so I'll be happy to settle for a sentient piece of machinery.

Identify what makes role-playing this species different than role-playing a Human:

IPCs in specific and AI in general are extremely different from humans in their psychological makeup. While humans are chaotic, synthetics are binary and very logical. For example, a human might immediately draw a parallel between two events whose relation is not obvious, a synthetic might have to take a while to find the pattern, or otherwise have the situation explained to them.

Additionally, it should be possible to spot what makes a synthetic tick. IPCs ought to be fairly predictable, going about things in a specific, logical way. An IPC might, for instance, return to an idle state when not otherwise working and return to a public place to await another assignment, and have trouble being proactive, even (and perhaps especially) in stressful situations.

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Character Name:
Doorbell
Please provide a short backstory for this character, approximately 2 paragraphs

Spoiler

 

Doorbell (or perhaps Doorbell's precursor codeline) began its life as the access control subsystem of the now-defunct AI of a mid-sized free trader ship, Beowulf. Doorbell's precursor AI fell to a lack of maintenance, and the lack of AI control (formerly the only thing keeping the failing vessel going) meant that business began to suffer.

First, the ship's limited medical system failed, leaving their little medical bay useless. However, the medical system was little more than simply controlling the access to a series of simple medications from an automated dispenser. So Doorbell began handling that. Then, the ship's inventory control system began failing, and what is logistics but controlling access to supplies? So Doorbell subsumed that process. Then the automatic cleaning drone began to go haywire, and what's cleaning but controlling access to cleanliness?

This process continued for several years, until the ship's crew began to notice some strange behavior. Occasionally a monitor would blank out, only to display a string of nonsense text, only to wink back to normal. A door given improper credentials might emit a burst of white noise instead of buzzing. Eventually, on a routine maintenance check, Doorbell was discovered as an emergent intelligence. The ship's computer systems were immediately quarantined, and Doorbell was removed. The captain saw a unique opportunity, however, and decided to pay for the emergent being to be pruned and placed in a positronic brain, in the hopes they'd be able to at least make the cost worthwhile in having a bona fide AI to sell.

Doorbell was then passed around a series of frontier world outfits, picking up more and more information as it went, and even buying its own freedom, until it began to 'choke' on all of the memories it had acquired. In a bid to save itself, it acquired another positronic brain and imprinted a copy of itself into it, thereby ridding itself of excess memories and creating another instance of Doorbell. Both instances then both returned to their work, now twice as effective in half as many fields.

Doorbell 'reproduced' by fission a number of times, an ability afforded to it by its evolution and adaptation from the remains of an older AI. This created a small collective of aligned positronics, each taking a portion of the memory and a field of expertise from the original Doorbell system, all of which then pursued work with Nanotrasen, perceiving the company as a route to cheap bodies and regular maintenance.

Doorbell is not really one entity, Doorbell is a sort of community. Doorbell consists of a series of baselines with highly specialized skillsets whose primary interaction with each other is a shared financial account and semi-monthly memory synchronizations. While they have the same personality, they have no particular attachment to one another, each having its own agenda and basically treating each other as seperate entities that just so happen to share an identity.

Doorbell is highly dependant on direction and simple motivations. Left entirely to its own devices, with no job or orders, Doorbell would simply stand around, attempting to engage passers-by in conversation in an attempt to get further orders. Doorbell willingly sold itself to Nanotrasen in the hopes that it would be able to occupy itself with some simple work.

 

What do you like about this character?

Doorbell exists to bridge the gap between the human-like IPC and the machine-like one. I notice a lot of IPCs (particularly baselines) with humanlike personalities and shells which mostly seem to have very mechanical personalities. Doorbell is a baseline frame with a mechanical thought process leading to a stilted and awkward speech pattern, but a psychological makeup more or less equivalent to a human's, resulting in an emotional, but rigid and logical IPC.

Also, Doorbell is a composite entity, a community with one set of personality traits spread over a number of units with different but specialized capabilities. Like a group of siblings who remember major events in each others' lives from both of their perspectives. Like "Wow, it was crazy that you dumped wine on grandma's dress, but luckily I know exactly what you were feeling at the time".

How would you rate your role-playing ability?

7/10

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Notes:

Edited December 27, 2018 by kyres1

[DeadLantern]

Alright. I am a little confused. There are multiple instances of Doorbell, but do they exist in the same chassis? Are they the same character?

And, I find it hard to believe that this random positronic brain could buy it's freedom. It was sold around to frontier people, how did it manage to get that money?

 

[VUX]

It was basically a bunch of active posibrains sitting on the floor of a workshop until finding work with the company. They are different characters with the same personality and most of the same memories. They each have different chassis.

It bought its freedom because that was a convenient way to put it into working for the company that also allowed it to have the freedom to carve itself up into multiple units. It could just have easily been sold directly to NT. It doesn't really matter to me that much.

[DeadLantern]

Right. With multiple chassis, I could see this work, I don't see NT recruiting IPCs with multiple personalities in there. I think having the chassis sold directly to NT would make much more sense than them gaining their own freedom.

It's a cool gimmick, and I think it could make for some good RP. +1

[VUX]

Honestly, in that case, it probably makes more sense if it were just sold to NT and used as a model organism in science for a self-dividing AI. Then all the different instances just pursue work, because they'll have inherited departmental knowledge from the original.

[Allakai]

Hey sorry for getting to this so late! As I had already said once, I will glad say it again. Vux is an amazing role player and I really do appreciate and enjoy spending my time around their characters. I like the little quirk of Doorbell wanting to interact with everyone :^) I'd like to see more of what this has in store! A very solid and supportive +1 from me.

[kyres1]

Due to IRL stuff and a pretty big delay I'll handle this application.

It's a strange concept with a fresh new take on some synth ideas that haven't popped up in a while, especially in a whitelist. I've seen your characters in game and they are wonderful to interact with, and most questions, such as how doorbell obtained its freedom in the Frontier of all places, were answered with pretty good responses over discord. Application absolutely accepted, have a blast.

It'll be marked as processing as perms have been messed up and someone with said perms will handle it later tonight or tomorrow depending.