Who Told You You Could Eat My Cookie? [Open]

[clock_chime]

Miranda, admittedly, wasn't familiar with the media library at all. For one thing, it wasn't her idea of a library. Where were all the books? Why were there screens everywhere? (How was she even supposed to find anything

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[haruno]

She'd thought of a few other texts to look up on her own, which led to Sakura's entering the media library in search of even more information. The sounds of screams startled her into trying to find a source, knowing that it couldn't be an immediate danger (the ship itself would have reacted, right?) but with kids running around and goodness knows what else, she's on high alert as it is.

When she finds the source, she's surprised to see Miranda huddling behind a -- what? And no obvious other around. Just an activated screen, which was currently...

Sakura darted over, looking for something that worked as an off switch. Who records themselves yelling about cookies? "Miranda! What's going on?"

[clock_chime]

"Oh God, Miss Sakura! It's horrible, it's so horrible..." Miranda said, rambling incessantly as she tried to cover her ears in vain to try and block out the noise.

[haruno]

Button mashing eventually produced the desired result of sudden, blessed silence. "It was pretty horrible," she grit out, shaking her head like it'd dislodge the immediate memory of whatever that screeching had been called. Voice clips? Who got so upset over cookies that they hit objects while telling you to let the cookie go?

[clock_chime]

"It's gone!" Miranda cried, joyous. "Oh thank you, I don't know what I would have done without you! But I swear, I didn't take any cookies, I don't know why I kept accusing me of stealing one..."

[haruno]

Sakura wanted to say Miranda would have been fine, but right now she wasn't entirely sure. It might have taken her longer to overcome the soundfile. "Cookies? In here? I'd be surprised if there were any. You'd think someone picking them up from XaXing would probably keep them out of any of the public access areas."

Furthermore... "I don't think there were any cookies to begin with, just some sound file loaded on the terminal."

[clock_chime]

"I don't know where the cookies are!" Miranda protested. She probably wouldn't even be able to look a cookies without fearing that a demonic voice would start screeching at her for while, after this. "But...um...what's a sound file?"

[haruno]

"Like I said, I don't think there are any." She frowned at the screen again, then looked back over her shoulder at Miranda. "Aah, so you've never heard about sound files? It's pretty straight forward. We didn't have a lot back home, mostly because we didn't keep records of things like this. They're recordings of things, like conversations, or music, or any other sound someone wanted to have saved for future reference."

She'd spent some casual time exploring the idea behind them, but without a driving need, Sakura hadn't made herself all that familiar. It'd been nice when trying to identify some species from out in Hydroponics -- wait.

Would they have Hispanic sound files? Spanish. The language is Spanish. "Whatever file was loaded must have started playing when you touched the screen. Or brought it up on screen, it could really go either way."

[clock_chime]

"Like a phonograph record?" Miranda said, trying to relate this to something she understood. "But how it that a 'file'? Or is that where they keep the records - in files?" It did make some sense, at least. After all, if they had lots of records, they'd have to organise them somehow, wouldn't they?

She blinked, and turned to look at the screen. "And this was able to find the record?"

[haruno]

A phonographic record? Sakura was puzzled, largely because back home, music wasn't often listened to when not preformed live. She had no good idea what Miranda was talking about. "Well, it's kind of..." she trailed off, looking at the screen. "You're familiar with a library, right? Books on shelves, scrolls maybe, things like that?"

[clock_chime]

"Yes, of course," Miranda said, nodding. "That's why this place is so confused! I kept looking and looking and looking, but I couldn't find any books anywhere..."

[haruno]

"I did the same thing at first," she admitted, smiling a little. "It may help if you think about the Media Library this way. All those books? The ones we think they should have? Someone took those words and images and put them into these things, so that the machines remember them all for us. When we want to find something, it's like talking to the one screen doctor in Medical Bay, or like bringing up patient records on our data pads. I hear file as the word to describe this, like in a filing system, so yeah, I do think that's where they keep them. Books, or these sounds recordings. Even if I don't know why anyone would want to file away someone yelling about cookies."

She looked at the screen, not entirely sold on the prospect of file-keepers who found screaming rants to be part of their desired information files.

[clock_chime]

"The books are in the machines?" Miranda gasped. "Oh my...that's amazing! But how do they fit them inside? Surely with so many words, it would be practically impossible to have all that in such a small space..."

[haruno]

Sakura laughs, just a little, shaking her head. "The way a computer files things away is different than what we think. Data takes up space, but the mechanics of it work differently than what we're used to. I'm not great for explaining, the computers we had on my world weren't capable of things like this, but..."

She taps her fingers on the media screen, thinking. "From what I know, files on a computer, or computer like things, can be really big in word count and still not take up a lot of the memory storing space a computer has. A little like our brains, you know?" She taps her forehead. "We can store a lot more information here than you'd think. Books on books of information. All in this relatively small space!"

[clock_chime]

"Oh, I get it!" Miranda said, brightening up. She certainly wasn't an expert, but she did understand a little about how the brain worked - the idea that a machine could work like a brain was still amazing, but it was nonetheless an analogy she could understand. "I wonder how they were able to create something like that? It must be incredibly difficult, to make something that is like a brain."

[haruno]

"It must be, and by now as some kind of art-form. Considering this ship, and how it's Artificial Intelligence works." She sounded unsure of the word, another new one she'd picked up since waking up from podsleep. There'd been an unending litany of new words in her vocabulary, half which still didn't make concrete sense. "When you want to find something in the Media Library, it's a lot like the kind of index card system I had at home. What was the filing system like for your libraries?"

[clock_chime]

"I hardly understand anything about the ship," Miranda admitted. "Everything is so strange and amazing and terrifying here." She had thought that things like the akuma and Innocence, and the inventions of the Order's Science Department were odd. And yet, none of that compared to what they had here.

"Yes, we had index cards back home," Miranda said, nodding. "But how do you find the cards with the computer? Do they show up on the screen?"