Skyfire
Youngster
- Pronouns
- he/they
Summary: Ripley’s Porygon was growing on her, which wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn‘t for the fact that machines weren’t supposed to be trained in the same way Pokemon were.
For her twenty-first birthday, Ripley would've preferred a nice cast iron pan or even a pair of socks, but instead of something useful, or even the luxury of a nice pair of hiking boots, she received a Porygon2. From her Aunt, of course, who was some rich doctor who, apparently, didn’t know that not all computer science students went on to work in cyber security. Or that you weren’t supposed to give Pokemon as gifts, which Ripley had always thought of as a well-known rule. But Porygon2 weren’t exactly Pokemon - more of a computer really, though Ripley was picky about those too.
Maybe she thought it would brighten up Ripley’s mostly empty apartment with its bright blues and pinks. If that was the case, Ripley wished she’d just given her cash, or at least a painting to hang up next to the gaudy one with the mushrooms and fairies, a loving gift from her grandmother. Before she had stopped speaking to her, that is.
Not that she had complained - about her grandmother’s silent treatment or her Aunt’s expensive gifts. She’d never had a Pokemon, having forgone traipsing off into the wilderness for studying hard and having a breakdown. The last time she’d even held a Pokeball it had been her ex-girlfriend's.
*
The Porygon had come in a case like a DVD, Silph Co. logo massive on the cover, with the instructions on how to download it tucked neatly next to the blue-and-pink chip. The instructions hadn’t mentioned the hours of waiting, but Ripley should have expected that. Big downloads, as she knew from bitter experience, always took longer than predicted.
So she took a shower, and finished up her class work, and watched the first ten minutes of what felt like hundreds of terrible movies.
When Ripley finally returned there was a new messaging program on her computer. PoryChat, the easiest way to give commands to a Porygon, was brightly coloured and had come complete with a cheery welcome message.
Ripley didn’t read it. There was something much more interesting at the edge of her screen - her new Porygon2.
It was smaller than she’d thought it would be, pixelated in a way that felt like Silph had tried too hard to be retro and landed in undeniably cute. When she hovered the cursor near it sent out little stars, and a smiley face appeared in PoryChat.
Her new companion acted just like any other program might. Admittedly the little smiley faces and hearts were strange, but the developers who’d made it probably just recognised the need for a little cheer when a program just wouldn’t work.
Ripley just wished they’d made a better way to call Porygons out, but she guessed that was their little joke. That hadn’t made her feel any less ridiculous as she sat in front of her computer, took a deep breath, and shouted, “Come on out!”
She hadn’t been given much time to be embarrassed. Moments later there was a flash of light, and then a weird, sleek bird-thing appeared before her. It beeped at her, harsh and electronic like birdsong filtered through auto tune, and bumped against her cheek. It made her face feel strange and fuzzy, as if she’d just gotten a very small electric shock.
“Hey,” she said softly, a little awestruck at the realisation she had just touched something made only of computer code. “It’s nice to meet you.”
*
Ripley named it Jonesy, after much thought. She had picked Ripley as her name after all, she might as well lean into the theme.
Jonesy was specialised in finding security flaws and bugs in code, and had recently developed an attachment to Ripley’s old stuffed Pidgey, which it liked to rub against with its ‘beak’. It seemed to like the cold better than the heat, not that it got much in the middle of summer, when even the usually energetic Ripley started to feel weighted by the lethargy that came with July.
The third item was the biggest problem - there was nothing in Jonesy’s code that should have allowed for attachment to old stuffed toys. Nor was there anything that could have made it to sing along to Ripley’s old rock records - Ripley had checked and rechecked.
Ripley hadn’t been sure what to do about that. She had never been the type to let go over her initial opinion, but something shifted. When the little heart emoticons appeared on her screen she typed back a smiley face, when it sang the same song over and over she indulged it until neither of them could stand it anymore.
She felt stupid doing it, of course. Even Ripley hadn’t believed something made of code could have a favourite song. She had watched countless videos of how unresponsive the first Porygon models were. They hadn’t reacted to screams or attacks, not doing anything in battles without a command. She knew that Porygon2s weren’t much different.
But she kept its favourite song on anyway.
Even still, Ripley hesitated to call it a Pokemon. It hadn’t acted alive in the same way other Pokemon were - it didn’t eat or sleep, and seemed content inside the digital world of Ripley’s computer.
So Ripley rationalised and ignored and watched as Jonesy cuddled the Pidgey toy, beak tucked over the plushie.
*
“Don’t you think it’s unethical?” Kane, her ex-girlfriend, asked. “I mean, Silph has enough going on without deciding to create life."
"They haven't created life," Ripley said, "You're not out there saying all artificial intelligence is bad, Porygon is the same thing."
"Yeah, well…” Kane floundered, eyes darting, inevitably, towards where Jonesy had set up a pile of pillows to nap in. “It’s just weird, alright? I don’t like it.”
Riplry gritted her teeth and said nothing. She didn’t want to fall into the same patterns that lead to their breakup - Kane provoking, Ripley screaming her head off. She didn't want Jonesy's life to become the subject of one of their petty, meaningless fights.
*
The day after that conversation, when Jonesy had almost finished running through her program for bugs, Jonesy became agitated. It fluttered around until Ripley let it have the Pidgey toy. As the Porygon pressed itself against the worn fluff of the imitation feathers, it calmed down. It crooned a mid of high beeps and low trills, a melody Ripley had never heard before.
It sang beautifully.
Ridley wasn't sure how to deal with that. Usually her thoughts were slow to change, worn away over time until they became something new. This was not slow though - Ripley had felt her attention being dragged away from her programs faster than it ever had before. It wasn’t her main focus anymore. When Jonesy popped out of her computer and shot towards her bedroom, Ripley followed it instead of working late into the night.
“They made you for space travel, did you know that?” Ripley told it, laptop balanced on the edge of her bed so she could scroll through photos of buzzcuts. Jonesy beeped once from where she was nestled into Ripley’s long hair. “I wonder if you would have liked it. Hopefully you’re tough like your namesake.”
She paused and reached up to hug Jonesy to her chest, ignoring the way it beeped indignantly. “I haven’t shown you Alien yet, have I?”
Jonesy trilled in what Ripley thought might be curiosity, so she went hunting for a good copy on the internet. She would return to work after this, of course, but a good movie always cleared her head.
(Jonesy liked it. Jonesy had trilled loudly at all the jumpscares in a way that made it abundantly clear that it had felt something pretty close to fear, had beeped along to the music in all the suspensful parts. This made it a worse movie-going partner than even Kane, which was a real accomplishment.
Jonesy really loved that soundtrack, loved it enough to splice together its own song, darkly suspenseful and full of odd breaks and bad default sound effects. )
*
“I just don’t get it,” she said, turning her laptop around so she could show Kane the music editing software Jonesy had used. “There’s machine learning, and there’s… this. I’ve been doing some research, almost every Porygon2 owner has reported this same phenomenon, and some of the old models showed signs of-“
“Relax,” Kane told her, fingers buried in the fur of her Meowth, who hated Jonesy almost as much as Jonesy hated him. Not that Jonesy could feel hate - Jonesy couldn’t feel anything, as Ripley kept reminding herself. “You said it yourself, it’s just machine learning. Porygon have occasional glitches, but everyone knows that they’re just another editing software. You remember my cousin’s, right? That thing could barely battle, much less sing, or whatever it is you’re claiming.”
Ripley closed her eyes briefly and pressed her fingertips against her eyelids, waiting until her words came easier, “I guess so. AIs aren’t my area, and… I dunno, maybe they programmed the little guys to make their owners more comfortable? I must have missed it. It’s just… I dunno, there’s the Pidgey and-“
“I preferred it when you only talked about normal code,” Kane told her, voice flat, the Meowth in her lap purring like a broken down motorcycle. Ripley bit back an angry retort and the well-meaning joke, digging her nails into her palms.
Jonesy trilled. It sounded, briefly, like laughter.
*
“I think it likes Purr,” Kane said as she watched Jonesy dart in and out of her Liepard’s range. Jonesy hovered just out of reach of Purr’s lazy swats, and showed its displeasure at any hits that landed loudly and shrilly. Jonesy was an agile creature and enjoyed getting to test out its reflexes, even on an uninterested opponent.
Ripley laughed and spun around on her chair, happy at the break from her self-imposed coding challenge. “Jonesy likes everyone,” she said, “Even you.”
“Likes me more than you, that’s for sure.”
”Hey! You’re the one who says Porygons can’t feel. You don’t get to steal Jonesy from me,” Ripley said, and flashed a smile to take the edge off.
”Yeah, well,” Kane propped herself up on one elbow and waved a hand vaguely in the direction of Jonesy and Purr, “It's not like anyone first thoughy is that… I dunno, their microwave can sing.”
“Hah! So you admit it!”
*
There are things Ripley asked her friends with the awareness that they‘ll laugh at her for it for years to come. Particularly when she approached them with questions such as ‘Do you think AIs can gain sentience?’ and ‘I think my robot has emotions’.
She did, in fact, get laughed at. Her old school friend told her brightly that he didn’t think his fridge could think, and that he was busy right now, and to go bother Kane. He ignored the articles she had gathered on Klink and Klefki, where scholars suggested that maybe the Pokemon hadn’t inspired human progression but resulted from it. That the essence that powered Water Pulses could gift objects with a kind of sentience.
Kane, when she bugged her at length about it, told Ripley she was right, though to be fair she’d already admitted as much earlier. Still, Ripley bragged about this obnoxiously, pleased at any chance to win one of her many arguments with Kane. She’d never been one for good sportsmanship, which Kane claimed was what they’d broken up. Kane said that about a lot of things, which Ripley had taken as a good thing. It could joke about it now, instead of awkwardly avoiding every touch.
Ripley had always loved Kane, just like she loved monster movies and computers and Jonesy. A failed try at romance hadn’t changed that.
“Well, what are you going to do about it?” Kane asked her, watching as Ripley leant back against the fuzzy green back of her favourite dingy armchair, one hand resting on Jonesy’s head.
“Dunno yet.” Ripley ran her fingers over the smooth, glassy material that made up Jonesy’s body, pleased at how it matched the blue and pink of her nails. “Complain about it, make it all academic so people don’t call me a conspiracy theorist, try to make something change.”
“I’m pretty sure you’ve made the discovery of a lifetime,” Kane said, “Concrete evidence that essence can animate inanimate objects, or that AIs really are going to take over the world.”
“Maybe I’ll win a prize,” Ripley said, a little more hopeful than she’d have liked, “Now come on, I want to see if Jonesy can play video games.”
*
Kane helped buzz Ripley’s hair in her bathroom, sat on the edge of her bathtub with her feet planted firmly on her bath mat, sturdy brown work boots against yellow-ish plastic. She had sung in time to Jonesy’s beeping, voice cracking at the high notes until she stopped in favour of telling her about some customer or another. Her voice was deep and familiar, and Ripley closed her eyes as her head started to feel lighter and lighter.
It was one of the last days where it was still hot in that thick, sticky kind of way. Kane had joked she would regret this in winter, but Ripley hadn’t thought of cold nights with sweat staining the armpits of her shirt.
Jonesy had been halfway through a song when Ripley got her first look at the new her. The tune was simple, loud and rhythmical even in Jonesy’s electronic voice, and Ripley knew that she loved it.
For her twenty-first birthday, Ripley would've preferred a nice cast iron pan or even a pair of socks, but instead of something useful, or even the luxury of a nice pair of hiking boots, she received a Porygon2. From her Aunt, of course, who was some rich doctor who, apparently, didn’t know that not all computer science students went on to work in cyber security. Or that you weren’t supposed to give Pokemon as gifts, which Ripley had always thought of as a well-known rule. But Porygon2 weren’t exactly Pokemon - more of a computer really, though Ripley was picky about those too.
Maybe she thought it would brighten up Ripley’s mostly empty apartment with its bright blues and pinks. If that was the case, Ripley wished she’d just given her cash, or at least a painting to hang up next to the gaudy one with the mushrooms and fairies, a loving gift from her grandmother. Before she had stopped speaking to her, that is.
Not that she had complained - about her grandmother’s silent treatment or her Aunt’s expensive gifts. She’d never had a Pokemon, having forgone traipsing off into the wilderness for studying hard and having a breakdown. The last time she’d even held a Pokeball it had been her ex-girlfriend's.
*
The Porygon had come in a case like a DVD, Silph Co. logo massive on the cover, with the instructions on how to download it tucked neatly next to the blue-and-pink chip. The instructions hadn’t mentioned the hours of waiting, but Ripley should have expected that. Big downloads, as she knew from bitter experience, always took longer than predicted.
So she took a shower, and finished up her class work, and watched the first ten minutes of what felt like hundreds of terrible movies.
When Ripley finally returned there was a new messaging program on her computer. PoryChat, the easiest way to give commands to a Porygon, was brightly coloured and had come complete with a cheery welcome message.
Ripley didn’t read it. There was something much more interesting at the edge of her screen - her new Porygon2.
It was smaller than she’d thought it would be, pixelated in a way that felt like Silph had tried too hard to be retro and landed in undeniably cute. When she hovered the cursor near it sent out little stars, and a smiley face appeared in PoryChat.
Her new companion acted just like any other program might. Admittedly the little smiley faces and hearts were strange, but the developers who’d made it probably just recognised the need for a little cheer when a program just wouldn’t work.
Ripley just wished they’d made a better way to call Porygons out, but she guessed that was their little joke. That hadn’t made her feel any less ridiculous as she sat in front of her computer, took a deep breath, and shouted, “Come on out!”
She hadn’t been given much time to be embarrassed. Moments later there was a flash of light, and then a weird, sleek bird-thing appeared before her. It beeped at her, harsh and electronic like birdsong filtered through auto tune, and bumped against her cheek. It made her face feel strange and fuzzy, as if she’d just gotten a very small electric shock.
“Hey,” she said softly, a little awestruck at the realisation she had just touched something made only of computer code. “It’s nice to meet you.”
*
Ripley named it Jonesy, after much thought. She had picked Ripley as her name after all, she might as well lean into the theme.
Jonesy was specialised in finding security flaws and bugs in code, and had recently developed an attachment to Ripley’s old stuffed Pidgey, which it liked to rub against with its ‘beak’. It seemed to like the cold better than the heat, not that it got much in the middle of summer, when even the usually energetic Ripley started to feel weighted by the lethargy that came with July.
The third item was the biggest problem - there was nothing in Jonesy’s code that should have allowed for attachment to old stuffed toys. Nor was there anything that could have made it to sing along to Ripley’s old rock records - Ripley had checked and rechecked.
Ripley hadn’t been sure what to do about that. She had never been the type to let go over her initial opinion, but something shifted. When the little heart emoticons appeared on her screen she typed back a smiley face, when it sang the same song over and over she indulged it until neither of them could stand it anymore.
She felt stupid doing it, of course. Even Ripley hadn’t believed something made of code could have a favourite song. She had watched countless videos of how unresponsive the first Porygon models were. They hadn’t reacted to screams or attacks, not doing anything in battles without a command. She knew that Porygon2s weren’t much different.
But she kept its favourite song on anyway.
Even still, Ripley hesitated to call it a Pokemon. It hadn’t acted alive in the same way other Pokemon were - it didn’t eat or sleep, and seemed content inside the digital world of Ripley’s computer.
So Ripley rationalised and ignored and watched as Jonesy cuddled the Pidgey toy, beak tucked over the plushie.
*
“Don’t you think it’s unethical?” Kane, her ex-girlfriend, asked. “I mean, Silph has enough going on without deciding to create life."
"They haven't created life," Ripley said, "You're not out there saying all artificial intelligence is bad, Porygon is the same thing."
"Yeah, well…” Kane floundered, eyes darting, inevitably, towards where Jonesy had set up a pile of pillows to nap in. “It’s just weird, alright? I don’t like it.”
Riplry gritted her teeth and said nothing. She didn’t want to fall into the same patterns that lead to their breakup - Kane provoking, Ripley screaming her head off. She didn't want Jonesy's life to become the subject of one of their petty, meaningless fights.
*
The day after that conversation, when Jonesy had almost finished running through her program for bugs, Jonesy became agitated. It fluttered around until Ripley let it have the Pidgey toy. As the Porygon pressed itself against the worn fluff of the imitation feathers, it calmed down. It crooned a mid of high beeps and low trills, a melody Ripley had never heard before.
It sang beautifully.
Ridley wasn't sure how to deal with that. Usually her thoughts were slow to change, worn away over time until they became something new. This was not slow though - Ripley had felt her attention being dragged away from her programs faster than it ever had before. It wasn’t her main focus anymore. When Jonesy popped out of her computer and shot towards her bedroom, Ripley followed it instead of working late into the night.
“They made you for space travel, did you know that?” Ripley told it, laptop balanced on the edge of her bed so she could scroll through photos of buzzcuts. Jonesy beeped once from where she was nestled into Ripley’s long hair. “I wonder if you would have liked it. Hopefully you’re tough like your namesake.”
She paused and reached up to hug Jonesy to her chest, ignoring the way it beeped indignantly. “I haven’t shown you Alien yet, have I?”
Jonesy trilled in what Ripley thought might be curiosity, so she went hunting for a good copy on the internet. She would return to work after this, of course, but a good movie always cleared her head.
(Jonesy liked it. Jonesy had trilled loudly at all the jumpscares in a way that made it abundantly clear that it had felt something pretty close to fear, had beeped along to the music in all the suspensful parts. This made it a worse movie-going partner than even Kane, which was a real accomplishment.
Jonesy really loved that soundtrack, loved it enough to splice together its own song, darkly suspenseful and full of odd breaks and bad default sound effects. )
*
“I just don’t get it,” she said, turning her laptop around so she could show Kane the music editing software Jonesy had used. “There’s machine learning, and there’s… this. I’ve been doing some research, almost every Porygon2 owner has reported this same phenomenon, and some of the old models showed signs of-“
“Relax,” Kane told her, fingers buried in the fur of her Meowth, who hated Jonesy almost as much as Jonesy hated him. Not that Jonesy could feel hate - Jonesy couldn’t feel anything, as Ripley kept reminding herself. “You said it yourself, it’s just machine learning. Porygon have occasional glitches, but everyone knows that they’re just another editing software. You remember my cousin’s, right? That thing could barely battle, much less sing, or whatever it is you’re claiming.”
Ripley closed her eyes briefly and pressed her fingertips against her eyelids, waiting until her words came easier, “I guess so. AIs aren’t my area, and… I dunno, maybe they programmed the little guys to make their owners more comfortable? I must have missed it. It’s just… I dunno, there’s the Pidgey and-“
“I preferred it when you only talked about normal code,” Kane told her, voice flat, the Meowth in her lap purring like a broken down motorcycle. Ripley bit back an angry retort and the well-meaning joke, digging her nails into her palms.
Jonesy trilled. It sounded, briefly, like laughter.
*
“I think it likes Purr,” Kane said as she watched Jonesy dart in and out of her Liepard’s range. Jonesy hovered just out of reach of Purr’s lazy swats, and showed its displeasure at any hits that landed loudly and shrilly. Jonesy was an agile creature and enjoyed getting to test out its reflexes, even on an uninterested opponent.
Ripley laughed and spun around on her chair, happy at the break from her self-imposed coding challenge. “Jonesy likes everyone,” she said, “Even you.”
“Likes me more than you, that’s for sure.”
”Hey! You’re the one who says Porygons can’t feel. You don’t get to steal Jonesy from me,” Ripley said, and flashed a smile to take the edge off.
”Yeah, well,” Kane propped herself up on one elbow and waved a hand vaguely in the direction of Jonesy and Purr, “It's not like anyone first thoughy is that… I dunno, their microwave can sing.”
“Hah! So you admit it!”
*
There are things Ripley asked her friends with the awareness that they‘ll laugh at her for it for years to come. Particularly when she approached them with questions such as ‘Do you think AIs can gain sentience?’ and ‘I think my robot has emotions’.
She did, in fact, get laughed at. Her old school friend told her brightly that he didn’t think his fridge could think, and that he was busy right now, and to go bother Kane. He ignored the articles she had gathered on Klink and Klefki, where scholars suggested that maybe the Pokemon hadn’t inspired human progression but resulted from it. That the essence that powered Water Pulses could gift objects with a kind of sentience.
Kane, when she bugged her at length about it, told Ripley she was right, though to be fair she’d already admitted as much earlier. Still, Ripley bragged about this obnoxiously, pleased at any chance to win one of her many arguments with Kane. She’d never been one for good sportsmanship, which Kane claimed was what they’d broken up. Kane said that about a lot of things, which Ripley had taken as a good thing. It could joke about it now, instead of awkwardly avoiding every touch.
Ripley had always loved Kane, just like she loved monster movies and computers and Jonesy. A failed try at romance hadn’t changed that.
“Well, what are you going to do about it?” Kane asked her, watching as Ripley leant back against the fuzzy green back of her favourite dingy armchair, one hand resting on Jonesy’s head.
“Dunno yet.” Ripley ran her fingers over the smooth, glassy material that made up Jonesy’s body, pleased at how it matched the blue and pink of her nails. “Complain about it, make it all academic so people don’t call me a conspiracy theorist, try to make something change.”
“I’m pretty sure you’ve made the discovery of a lifetime,” Kane said, “Concrete evidence that essence can animate inanimate objects, or that AIs really are going to take over the world.”
“Maybe I’ll win a prize,” Ripley said, a little more hopeful than she’d have liked, “Now come on, I want to see if Jonesy can play video games.”
*
Kane helped buzz Ripley’s hair in her bathroom, sat on the edge of her bathtub with her feet planted firmly on her bath mat, sturdy brown work boots against yellow-ish plastic. She had sung in time to Jonesy’s beeping, voice cracking at the high notes until she stopped in favour of telling her about some customer or another. Her voice was deep and familiar, and Ripley closed her eyes as her head started to feel lighter and lighter.
It was one of the last days where it was still hot in that thick, sticky kind of way. Kane had joked she would regret this in winter, but Ripley hadn’t thought of cold nights with sweat staining the armpits of her shirt.
Jonesy had been halfway through a song when Ripley got her first look at the new her. The tune was simple, loud and rhythmical even in Jonesy’s electronic voice, and Ripley knew that she loved it.
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