imperfections (lotrips au)
Title: Imperfections
Fandom: Lotrips (AU)
Summary: Dom and Billy are android designers, Elijah's a programmer, and Ian puts up the cash.
Ratings/Warnings: Nothing here but some grown-up swears.
Notes: I think this is kind of a botched effort on my part, but I thought some of the robo-fascinated might like a look at it.
*
"For decades, the effort to create a truly intelligent machine has stalled and disappointed designers and programmers at every turn," says Ian McKellen, his voice carrying with surety and grandeur. "Computer chips grow more complex, mechanisms grow ever smaller and more sophisticated. A processor the size of my thumbnail can now calculate more information in one second than I have been able to amass in my long lifetime.
"Yet in all our advances, the one thing we cannot impart to our creations is the most basic aspect of our own existence: self-awareness."
"I still can't believe you slept with him," Billy puts in during the dramatic pause.
"Tch. There's something to be said for experience," Dom answers placidly, only half-watching as Ian carries on.
"We regard our own consciousness as a simple thing. Cogito ergo sum; I think, therefore I am. And yet it is not merely thinking that tells me that I am, that I exist. I take up space in the world; I affect physical change upon my environment." Ian pounds the podium in emphasis. "I can measure my impact in space and time. By observing the processes of our own physical selves, we learn to think; only then do we understand intelligently: 'I exist!'
"And what about our machines? A machine also exists in the world; it acts and reacts, it consumes resources and throws off waste. But who among us can really understand a creature whose eyes are a hundred cameras, whose nerves are a million sensors, whose brain and body are encased in silicon and plastic? Who could program a consciousness so fundamentally unlike ourselves? If such a machine became self-aware, would we even be able to interpret the signs?
"This, my friends, is the problem. The fault is not in our circuits, but in ourselves. We cannot program a machine with consciousness, because we cannot ourselves conceive what sort of consciousness could exist in the physical form of a machine. Our only experience of true self-awareness is in human form. And we have yet to succeed at creating a consciousness which exists outside the bounds of our experience.
"Therefore, if we wish to create the first intelligent machine, we must make it in our own image. We must build our intelligent machine in the semblance of a human being in order to endow it with self-awareness; to teach it what consciousness is; and to be capable of understanding our creation when it tells us, in a human tongue: I think, therefore I am."
"Ian's really hitting them with the full power of his two-fisted rhetoric, eh?" Billy notes idly, thumbing down the volume at last. "Left! Right! Shakespeare! The Bible! Shakespeare! The Bible!"
"And Descartes, don't forget. Double-barrelled Descartes." Dom saves his work and looks at his to-do list for the next bit of revision. It's still rather a long list, mostly of tiny picky fixes. Since Ian was chuntering on about it, Dom picks 'right thumbnail', punching it up on his screen.
"The UAS won't know what hit 'em," Billy says. "This speech'll pummel them into voting yes."
"You think?" Dominic prefers not to think about the vote, really; he's just encouraging Bill to go on speaking. After all the official bombast from the telly, he'd much rather listen to the lovely slurry of Billy's accent.
"They have to know it's pointless not to," Billy answers. "He's just going to go on and give it a go anyway, isn't he? It's not as though they can really do anything, now that the outpost's self-sufficient."
"They can stop us going back. Turn us away at the borders of any sovereign in the UAS," Dom points out, carefully editing the grooves of the right thumbnail. Some of us would like to go back and visit our families someday, that's the next sentence perched on his tongue, but fortunately he's not so absorbed in his work as to tactlessly say it aloud. Billy only has his sister, and she lives here on Europa as well.
Quite a lot of the colonists are people like Billy and Margaret, people with no strong ties back to anything in the other Sovereigns. And then there are the sods like Dom-- he misses crumpets and Twiglets and his mum like mad, but he was just too restless to stay within the confines of the UAS.
"Did you ever work out that servomotor twitch round about the trochlea?" Dom asks, mostly to stave off the danger that Billy might increase the volume of the telly again. If the UAS votes no, he's not at all sure what he'll do. Staying with the project will mean never going back to any Sovereign in the Alliance, but he can't imagine turning his back on the last three years of work, either. In the meantime, the last thing he wants to hear is another speech.
"Fixed it this morning. Smooth as butter now," Billy pronounces with satisfaction.
"Brilliant. Puts me even further behind."
"You never. What, you have to be down to nothing but freckles by now."
"If only," Dom says, tapping his list, but Billy's eyebrows go up and Dom turns to follow his gaze; Elijah's wandering in.
"Hey guys," he chirps in his nasal Yank tones. "What's up?"
"Not much really. Just watching telly," Billy says, all understatement.
"Cool. Hey, Dom... I was wondering if I could get a look at the latest rev."
"Sure, yeah." Dom puts his monitor's image up on the big plasma screen that dominates the room, showing off the thumbnail at 1000x, ten feet across.
"That's great!" Elijah says dubiously.
"Yeah, I'm quite proud."
"It's fantastic," Elijah's tone is so blandly enthused that Dom is certain he has no idea what he's looking at. "I was kinda hoping to see the face...?"
"That is the face! Didn't you see the new creative brief?" Dom laughs as Elijah wrinkles his nose in annoyance. "All right, all right, hang on a tick." He closes down the thumbnail and opens the file for the face.
Even with as much processing power as his workstation is packing, it takes a full fifteen seconds to begin displaying. Sometimes he can hardly believe he really generated this much work at this high a resolution.
The wireframe shows up first, the topography so detailed that it looks like a study in fractals. Then the skin renders over the rigging, each layer of detail filling in.
Ian favored an English rose complexion at the start, but Dom won that particular artistic battle. The coloration is slightly olive, faintly tan; it's a much easier palette to render artificially. The facial structure is calculated to convey, even without expression, both strength and accessibility; from the a fine square jaw, elegant high cheekbones and strong browbone, to the carefully calibrated arch of the cranial vault.
The lashes fill in on the screen, the brows, the lips and chin. Dom can't help but be pleased every time he looks at his handiwork. With each new version, his creation becomes richer and more real. He continually refines the features, adding tiny visual cues to fool the eye: a mole here, a faint spot of scar tissue there, the illusion of the smallest wrinkles at the corners of the tender mouth and rich brown eyes.
The eyeballs themselves have been another, separate development nightmare, but he's seen the latest model; they'll be excellent as well. It's really coming together. Even if the UAS votes no, Dom can't conceive how he could abandon this project after so much effort.
"Wow," Elijah breathes, gazing up rapt at Dominic's work. "He's really something."
Dom smiles, remembering that magic moment a few months ago when he showed a new draft of the face, and suddenly everyone looked and said he instead of it.
"There's just." Elijah hesitates. "You kinda know what we were talking about, with the-- he's just so perfect."
"Cheers."
"I mean... yeah, perfect, great, but... he's still a little too perfect."
He's one to talk; he's sporting a ragged goatee and a bit of razor burn at the moment, but when he's freshly and properly shaven, Elijah looks as if he's made of vinyl. Quite a lot of Dominic's inspiration for the measured beauty of the features he designed had nothing to do with his reams of reference photos; it came from studying Elijah. He's never understood how his collaborators could fret about their project looking "too perfect" to pass as a real human, when Elijah's right there among them, a living example of inhumanly good looks.
Now Elijah turns large imploring blue eyes on Dominic, and Dom's irritated protest dies a swift cerulean death.
"Still too perfect?" he asks, resigned. "I've made all the latest revisions from the last review, they're all there. Look-- darker creases under the eyes. And I put a bit more mottle in the coloring so it's not as flawless."
"It's just too smooth and," dismayed, Elijah makes some unreadable gesture. "Too smooth. You know?"
"Onscreen it is, yeah. But it won't be in the final product," argues Dom. "The surface of the skin's going to have pronounced grain and texture, just like a person. I sent you swatches!"
"It's hard to explain. Let me just..." Elijah starts to shuffle through Dom's folders of reference material.
Billy stifles a laugh, shaking his head. Lucky bastard. No one ever looks at Bill's complex kinetic armature and asks if it couldn't be a bit more rugged and also have a chin-dimple.
Elijah paws through Dom's stacks of inspirational photos. "It just seems like he needs something. Something a little more pronounced than the flaws we've put in so far. Like what about this guy? Look at his nose, that's awesome."
"That's Stephen Fry, you git," Dominic replies in disbelief. "He's not even in with the references! He's just on my bulletin board cos I like him! D'you want me to add on Rowan Atkinson's great bloody eyebrows as well?"
"No, look, just. Do you see what I'm saying? Look at how his nose has a kind of a swerve to it. It's so real."
Dom sighs and picks up a pen. "Do you want me to put a bend in the nose then?"
"Just try it and see what you think. For real, I just feel like we keep giving you this really narrow feedback, you know? Put more freckles, put more lines. But maybe just one or two bigger changes would really put it over the top."
"As you like. You're the genius," Dom says, and writes 'Put bend in nose (bit like Stephen Fry)' on his to-do list.
"That's great... Oh, hey. Ian's giving his speech," Elijah says blankly, glacing up.
"Yeah, Elijah," Dom says in infant-school-teacher tones, "Remember? The vote is today. They're going to decide if what we're doing is legal in the rest of the solar system, that's all. Nothing important. So, anything else I can do for you? Would you like him to have acne, maybe? Cold sores? Those are quite realistic."
"No, I don't think we want that," Elijah says seriously. "Will it take long? The nose thing?"
"Not long."
"Great."
Dom should've known better, really, and he should also know better than to get annoyed when Elijah hangs about, gawking as Dom strips the image down to the wireframe and starts mucking about with the bridge of the nose.
"It won't take long, but it will take a bit, you know," Dom says severely. "Longer if you stand there distracting me."
"Oh! Sorry." Elijah trots over to Billy to bother him instead. "How's the elbow twitch coming?"
"Debugged it. All smoothed out," Billy assures him, ever professional.
"Awesome."
Billy fills his screen with incomprehensible engineering diagrams. At last, after a bit more twitchy hanging about and trying to peer over Dom's shoulder from across the room, Elijah finally meanders out again.
"Just remember," says Billy. "You can't kill him, we need him."
"I could just rough him up a bit."
"You'd never stop yourself in time," Billy's nearly choking himself in mirth, evidently tickled enormously by the look on Dom's face.
Dom imitates Elijah's thin husky drawl. "'Put a bend in the nose, Dom. Give him green hair and eighteen fingers, Dom.' We're lucky he was all of twenty-two when we started. A few years earlier and he would've made me design the poor bloke to look like something out of anime."
"I wouldn't mention the green hair if I were you. You might give him ideas."
"It's not fair!" Dom complains. "I don't get to go to his lab and tell him to make sure the mind can do crosswords! Why does he get to tell me what the face ought to look like?"
"Because he's a spoilt little Yankee prat," Billy consoles him, "and he'd get bored with the project and go swanning off if we didn't let him have his way on everything. Or Ian thinks so, at any rate."
"I don't see Ian worrying that I might jump ship if I have to put up with this," Dom grumbles. "And he should!"
"You and me both, mate," Billy says.
They commiserate as only two highly prized and thoroughly outranked employees can. Perhaps two hundred people in all the Sovereigns have the chemical and biological knowledge as well as the sculptural and artistic ability that Dom brought to this project. And maybe a hundred technicians could create the integrated mobile framework for an organic and mechanical replica of the human body with Billy's dazzling skill and accuracy.
But only one person could design and program the artificially intelligent brain. It would be unfathomably difficult to replace either Dom or Billy, but quite impossible to replace Elijah.
Without Elijah, what they're building would be nothing but a glorified Disneyland animatron. Originally, Ian codenamed the project 'Orlando' because that was all they were trying to accomplish. When they began, they were just designing the mechanism, the outer shell, getting it ready, gambling that someone would create an intelligent machine to put inside it. Then Ian found Elijah.
"You know why he wants it to look real," Billy says. "I think Elijah has a crush on it. I mean, he's been snugged up in that lab with the mind, 'developing the personality', pfhf. If you make the face too perfect, make it look too much an android, he'll never be able to pretend he isn't just snogging his own hand in the end. Metaphorically, or otherwise."
"Ugh." Dom saves his work and rolls his chair closer to Billy's station. "You really think? It's awful. Bad enough Ian's such a fucking lunatic. I mean, I appreciate that it's cos he's mad that we're getting to do such interesting work, but still. He is mad. I think he's half in love with the thing himself. That's just what we need, the two of them fighting over our bucket of bolts soon as it's done."
"My money's on Ian," says Billy. "He's a wily old fox."
Dom's computer chimes an email alert.
"Oh, he hasn't..."
"Of course he's emailed you already," Billy chortles. "You've had three minutes since he's gone, Dom, aren't you finished yet?"
Dom rolls back to his own machine and answers the email from Elijah without reading it, typing NO and sizing it up to fill the screen.
"I dunno how Ian reckons his boy wonder's going to make this thing conscious," he says. "Sometimes I think Elijah's barely human himself."
"Because any real human would fall for the Monaghan charm?" Billy grins.
That cuts a bit close to the bone, but Dom doesn't like to say so; not even Billy knows the full scope of Dom's unwilling fascination. He shrugs and answers lightly, "Too right, mate. Ought to be part of the Turing Test, really."
"Suppose we'll know we've done our jobs right if our Orlando goes starry-eyed for you, then," Billy says, and turns to focus on his work again.
"With a brain that Elijah designed? Not likely," Dom says ruefully, and goes back to swerving the nose.
***
Fandom: Lotrips (AU)
Summary: Dom and Billy are android designers, Elijah's a programmer, and Ian puts up the cash.
Ratings/Warnings: Nothing here but some grown-up swears.
Notes: I think this is kind of a botched effort on my part, but I thought some of the robo-fascinated might like a look at it.
*
"For decades, the effort to create a truly intelligent machine has stalled and disappointed designers and programmers at every turn," says Ian McKellen, his voice carrying with surety and grandeur. "Computer chips grow more complex, mechanisms grow ever smaller and more sophisticated. A processor the size of my thumbnail can now calculate more information in one second than I have been able to amass in my long lifetime.
"Yet in all our advances, the one thing we cannot impart to our creations is the most basic aspect of our own existence: self-awareness."
"I still can't believe you slept with him," Billy puts in during the dramatic pause.
"Tch. There's something to be said for experience," Dom answers placidly, only half-watching as Ian carries on.
"We regard our own consciousness as a simple thing. Cogito ergo sum; I think, therefore I am. And yet it is not merely thinking that tells me that I am, that I exist. I take up space in the world; I affect physical change upon my environment." Ian pounds the podium in emphasis. "I can measure my impact in space and time. By observing the processes of our own physical selves, we learn to think; only then do we understand intelligently: 'I exist!'
"And what about our machines? A machine also exists in the world; it acts and reacts, it consumes resources and throws off waste. But who among us can really understand a creature whose eyes are a hundred cameras, whose nerves are a million sensors, whose brain and body are encased in silicon and plastic? Who could program a consciousness so fundamentally unlike ourselves? If such a machine became self-aware, would we even be able to interpret the signs?
"This, my friends, is the problem. The fault is not in our circuits, but in ourselves. We cannot program a machine with consciousness, because we cannot ourselves conceive what sort of consciousness could exist in the physical form of a machine. Our only experience of true self-awareness is in human form. And we have yet to succeed at creating a consciousness which exists outside the bounds of our experience.
"Therefore, if we wish to create the first intelligent machine, we must make it in our own image. We must build our intelligent machine in the semblance of a human being in order to endow it with self-awareness; to teach it what consciousness is; and to be capable of understanding our creation when it tells us, in a human tongue: I think, therefore I am."
"Ian's really hitting them with the full power of his two-fisted rhetoric, eh?" Billy notes idly, thumbing down the volume at last. "Left! Right! Shakespeare! The Bible! Shakespeare! The Bible!"
"And Descartes, don't forget. Double-barrelled Descartes." Dom saves his work and looks at his to-do list for the next bit of revision. It's still rather a long list, mostly of tiny picky fixes. Since Ian was chuntering on about it, Dom picks 'right thumbnail', punching it up on his screen.
"The UAS won't know what hit 'em," Billy says. "This speech'll pummel them into voting yes."
"You think?" Dominic prefers not to think about the vote, really; he's just encouraging Bill to go on speaking. After all the official bombast from the telly, he'd much rather listen to the lovely slurry of Billy's accent.
"They have to know it's pointless not to," Billy answers. "He's just going to go on and give it a go anyway, isn't he? It's not as though they can really do anything, now that the outpost's self-sufficient."
"They can stop us going back. Turn us away at the borders of any sovereign in the UAS," Dom points out, carefully editing the grooves of the right thumbnail. Some of us would like to go back and visit our families someday, that's the next sentence perched on his tongue, but fortunately he's not so absorbed in his work as to tactlessly say it aloud. Billy only has his sister, and she lives here on Europa as well.
Quite a lot of the colonists are people like Billy and Margaret, people with no strong ties back to anything in the other Sovereigns. And then there are the sods like Dom-- he misses crumpets and Twiglets and his mum like mad, but he was just too restless to stay within the confines of the UAS.
"Did you ever work out that servomotor twitch round about the trochlea?" Dom asks, mostly to stave off the danger that Billy might increase the volume of the telly again. If the UAS votes no, he's not at all sure what he'll do. Staying with the project will mean never going back to any Sovereign in the Alliance, but he can't imagine turning his back on the last three years of work, either. In the meantime, the last thing he wants to hear is another speech.
"Fixed it this morning. Smooth as butter now," Billy pronounces with satisfaction.
"Brilliant. Puts me even further behind."
"You never. What, you have to be down to nothing but freckles by now."
"If only," Dom says, tapping his list, but Billy's eyebrows go up and Dom turns to follow his gaze; Elijah's wandering in.
"Hey guys," he chirps in his nasal Yank tones. "What's up?"
"Not much really. Just watching telly," Billy says, all understatement.
"Cool. Hey, Dom... I was wondering if I could get a look at the latest rev."
"Sure, yeah." Dom puts his monitor's image up on the big plasma screen that dominates the room, showing off the thumbnail at 1000x, ten feet across.
"That's great!" Elijah says dubiously.
"Yeah, I'm quite proud."
"It's fantastic," Elijah's tone is so blandly enthused that Dom is certain he has no idea what he's looking at. "I was kinda hoping to see the face...?"
"That is the face! Didn't you see the new creative brief?" Dom laughs as Elijah wrinkles his nose in annoyance. "All right, all right, hang on a tick." He closes down the thumbnail and opens the file for the face.
Even with as much processing power as his workstation is packing, it takes a full fifteen seconds to begin displaying. Sometimes he can hardly believe he really generated this much work at this high a resolution.
The wireframe shows up first, the topography so detailed that it looks like a study in fractals. Then the skin renders over the rigging, each layer of detail filling in.
Ian favored an English rose complexion at the start, but Dom won that particular artistic battle. The coloration is slightly olive, faintly tan; it's a much easier palette to render artificially. The facial structure is calculated to convey, even without expression, both strength and accessibility; from the a fine square jaw, elegant high cheekbones and strong browbone, to the carefully calibrated arch of the cranial vault.
The lashes fill in on the screen, the brows, the lips and chin. Dom can't help but be pleased every time he looks at his handiwork. With each new version, his creation becomes richer and more real. He continually refines the features, adding tiny visual cues to fool the eye: a mole here, a faint spot of scar tissue there, the illusion of the smallest wrinkles at the corners of the tender mouth and rich brown eyes.
The eyeballs themselves have been another, separate development nightmare, but he's seen the latest model; they'll be excellent as well. It's really coming together. Even if the UAS votes no, Dom can't conceive how he could abandon this project after so much effort.
"Wow," Elijah breathes, gazing up rapt at Dominic's work. "He's really something."
Dom smiles, remembering that magic moment a few months ago when he showed a new draft of the face, and suddenly everyone looked and said he instead of it.
"There's just." Elijah hesitates. "You kinda know what we were talking about, with the-- he's just so perfect."
"Cheers."
"I mean... yeah, perfect, great, but... he's still a little too perfect."
He's one to talk; he's sporting a ragged goatee and a bit of razor burn at the moment, but when he's freshly and properly shaven, Elijah looks as if he's made of vinyl. Quite a lot of Dominic's inspiration for the measured beauty of the features he designed had nothing to do with his reams of reference photos; it came from studying Elijah. He's never understood how his collaborators could fret about their project looking "too perfect" to pass as a real human, when Elijah's right there among them, a living example of inhumanly good looks.
Now Elijah turns large imploring blue eyes on Dominic, and Dom's irritated protest dies a swift cerulean death.
"Still too perfect?" he asks, resigned. "I've made all the latest revisions from the last review, they're all there. Look-- darker creases under the eyes. And I put a bit more mottle in the coloring so it's not as flawless."
"It's just too smooth and," dismayed, Elijah makes some unreadable gesture. "Too smooth. You know?"
"Onscreen it is, yeah. But it won't be in the final product," argues Dom. "The surface of the skin's going to have pronounced grain and texture, just like a person. I sent you swatches!"
"It's hard to explain. Let me just..." Elijah starts to shuffle through Dom's folders of reference material.
Billy stifles a laugh, shaking his head. Lucky bastard. No one ever looks at Bill's complex kinetic armature and asks if it couldn't be a bit more rugged and also have a chin-dimple.
Elijah paws through Dom's stacks of inspirational photos. "It just seems like he needs something. Something a little more pronounced than the flaws we've put in so far. Like what about this guy? Look at his nose, that's awesome."
"That's Stephen Fry, you git," Dominic replies in disbelief. "He's not even in with the references! He's just on my bulletin board cos I like him! D'you want me to add on Rowan Atkinson's great bloody eyebrows as well?"
"No, look, just. Do you see what I'm saying? Look at how his nose has a kind of a swerve to it. It's so real."
Dom sighs and picks up a pen. "Do you want me to put a bend in the nose then?"
"Just try it and see what you think. For real, I just feel like we keep giving you this really narrow feedback, you know? Put more freckles, put more lines. But maybe just one or two bigger changes would really put it over the top."
"As you like. You're the genius," Dom says, and writes 'Put bend in nose (bit like Stephen Fry)' on his to-do list.
"That's great... Oh, hey. Ian's giving his speech," Elijah says blankly, glacing up.
"Yeah, Elijah," Dom says in infant-school-teacher tones, "Remember? The vote is today. They're going to decide if what we're doing is legal in the rest of the solar system, that's all. Nothing important. So, anything else I can do for you? Would you like him to have acne, maybe? Cold sores? Those are quite realistic."
"No, I don't think we want that," Elijah says seriously. "Will it take long? The nose thing?"
"Not long."
"Great."
Dom should've known better, really, and he should also know better than to get annoyed when Elijah hangs about, gawking as Dom strips the image down to the wireframe and starts mucking about with the bridge of the nose.
"It won't take long, but it will take a bit, you know," Dom says severely. "Longer if you stand there distracting me."
"Oh! Sorry." Elijah trots over to Billy to bother him instead. "How's the elbow twitch coming?"
"Debugged it. All smoothed out," Billy assures him, ever professional.
"Awesome."
Billy fills his screen with incomprehensible engineering diagrams. At last, after a bit more twitchy hanging about and trying to peer over Dom's shoulder from across the room, Elijah finally meanders out again.
"Just remember," says Billy. "You can't kill him, we need him."
"I could just rough him up a bit."
"You'd never stop yourself in time," Billy's nearly choking himself in mirth, evidently tickled enormously by the look on Dom's face.
Dom imitates Elijah's thin husky drawl. "'Put a bend in the nose, Dom. Give him green hair and eighteen fingers, Dom.' We're lucky he was all of twenty-two when we started. A few years earlier and he would've made me design the poor bloke to look like something out of anime."
"I wouldn't mention the green hair if I were you. You might give him ideas."
"It's not fair!" Dom complains. "I don't get to go to his lab and tell him to make sure the mind can do crosswords! Why does he get to tell me what the face ought to look like?"
"Because he's a spoilt little Yankee prat," Billy consoles him, "and he'd get bored with the project and go swanning off if we didn't let him have his way on everything. Or Ian thinks so, at any rate."
"I don't see Ian worrying that I might jump ship if I have to put up with this," Dom grumbles. "And he should!"
"You and me both, mate," Billy says.
They commiserate as only two highly prized and thoroughly outranked employees can. Perhaps two hundred people in all the Sovereigns have the chemical and biological knowledge as well as the sculptural and artistic ability that Dom brought to this project. And maybe a hundred technicians could create the integrated mobile framework for an organic and mechanical replica of the human body with Billy's dazzling skill and accuracy.
But only one person could design and program the artificially intelligent brain. It would be unfathomably difficult to replace either Dom or Billy, but quite impossible to replace Elijah.
Without Elijah, what they're building would be nothing but a glorified Disneyland animatron. Originally, Ian codenamed the project 'Orlando' because that was all they were trying to accomplish. When they began, they were just designing the mechanism, the outer shell, getting it ready, gambling that someone would create an intelligent machine to put inside it. Then Ian found Elijah.
"You know why he wants it to look real," Billy says. "I think Elijah has a crush on it. I mean, he's been snugged up in that lab with the mind, 'developing the personality', pfhf. If you make the face too perfect, make it look too much an android, he'll never be able to pretend he isn't just snogging his own hand in the end. Metaphorically, or otherwise."
"Ugh." Dom saves his work and rolls his chair closer to Billy's station. "You really think? It's awful. Bad enough Ian's such a fucking lunatic. I mean, I appreciate that it's cos he's mad that we're getting to do such interesting work, but still. He is mad. I think he's half in love with the thing himself. That's just what we need, the two of them fighting over our bucket of bolts soon as it's done."
"My money's on Ian," says Billy. "He's a wily old fox."
Dom's computer chimes an email alert.
"Oh, he hasn't..."
"Of course he's emailed you already," Billy chortles. "You've had three minutes since he's gone, Dom, aren't you finished yet?"
Dom rolls back to his own machine and answers the email from Elijah without reading it, typing NO and sizing it up to fill the screen.
"I dunno how Ian reckons his boy wonder's going to make this thing conscious," he says. "Sometimes I think Elijah's barely human himself."
"Because any real human would fall for the Monaghan charm?" Billy grins.
That cuts a bit close to the bone, but Dom doesn't like to say so; not even Billy knows the full scope of Dom's unwilling fascination. He shrugs and answers lightly, "Too right, mate. Ought to be part of the Turing Test, really."
"Suppose we'll know we've done our jobs right if our Orlando goes starry-eyed for you, then," Billy says, and turns to focus on his work again.
"With a brain that Elijah designed? Not likely," Dom says ruefully, and goes back to swerving the nose.
***