2010-03-31 - Consumed Goods

TOKYO-03

THE RAYPPLE STORE

The Haro v8 is sweeping the Earth Sphere, bringing joy and user-friendly interfaces to all. Its joyful chirps of HARO HARO GENKI HARO HARO GENKI have elicited squeals of delight from children of all ages-- yes, even 28 year-old virgin manchildren. Indeed, the Haro v8 is a hit.

And Amuro Ray just hates it.

Even so, he has been coerced into visiting this new branch of the Raypple Store in Akihabara-03. Amuro has lost count of how many times he petitioned the japanese branch of Ray Industries to change their name, but they just keep stubbornly insisting that 'Raypple' polls well with young japanese men. The Newtype can't understand it.

So here he is, signing Haro v8s with a sharpie for overexcited Harowners, and hating every minute of it.

During a brief pause, he leans over to his aide. "How much longer do I have to do this shit?"

Rei Ayanami is not amongst the throng of people getting their Haros signed. In fact, she may be the only person in the store who's actually there to browse. That she's about two feet tall, weighs exactly one pudding cup, and is wearing a full A-LAWS uniform (complete with beret) does not seem to dissuade the store staff from the possibility that she's a shoplifter, though, and so they watch her closely.

The aide, meanwhile, glances at the clock. "OKAY!" he calls to the crowd. "AMURO RAY IS TAKING A /FIVE-MINUTE/ BREAK! PLEASE /REMAIN/ IN LINE OR YOU WILL /LOSE YOUR PLACE/!"

And no self-respecting Japanese man would do /that/.

The store being empty outside of the neatly organized line, though, means that there's no one for Amuro Ray to interact with on the shop floor but the Haro Genius Squad -- and Rei Ayanami.

Who is currently staring down at a blue Haro sitting on a table, surrounded by placards advertising its features. She runs her hand along its smooth dome of a circle-skull. She seems very...

...something.

"Thank god," Amuro mutters, getting up and giving a sickly smile to the massive line of people, who all remain very polite in appearance but are all secretly stewing with rage which they will take out on the next 14 year-old schoolgirl they see alone on the subway.

He rises, stretching his back and smoothing out his expensive tailored blue suit, shakes out his arms and sets off towards the opposite end of the mid-sized store. It's important that he look like he's doing something at least, so to avoid further alienating the fans, so he purchases an overpriced energy drink from the front counter and wanders over to the Haro v8 display...

Where he sees something which may be a familiar face. Curious, and not at all put off by the uniform of his HATED ENEMY, he makes his way to the blue Haro and the blue-haired girl, then pauses, trying to think of what exactly to say or do.

After a few awkward moments, he finally settles on: "So, you like blue?"

Nice.

When Amuro speaks to her, Rei finally acknowledges him. Turning, she recognizes him -- she thinks. There's a brief pause. Sometimes it's hard to sift through the /other/ one's memories. Some people, like Shinji and Leo, are so omnipresent in them that it's hard /not/ to find memories about them. But some, like a guy who sneezed on her once during the most ludicrous Gundam Fight of all time...

...well, she could dig all day.

"Not particularly," Rei replies, her voice a flat monotone, as if she were both extremely sensitive, prone to writing poetry, and recently the patient of a full frontal lobotomy. "I had a blue Haro once. I believe it was a v1. It was very old. It didn't work."

Rei turns and looks back at the Haro sitting on the table. "It looked a lot like this one."

Amuro Ray looks at Rei, squinting as if he, too, were trying to place her. It takes him some time as well, so he plays for it. At times, Amuro has gone entire hours-long conversations with investors without once having to say their names, simply because he couldn't remember them and it would be a faux-pas to ask at that point.

"Oh," he replies. "Well, I like blue." Obviously. He moves around the display and reaches in, picking up the hefty new Haro v8 and flipping open its head, pressing the activation button on the roof of its mouth. Eyes glow yellow, and its ears flap open and shut in pure unmitigated ecstasy.

"The first Haro I made was green, as were most of the v1s. I wanted them all to be green, but the board just kept making jokes about Henry Ford until I gave up." Amuro places the shiny new Haro down on the display again, where it begins rolling around like a blissed out kitten. "Were you looking to upgrade?"

"I don't know," Rei says, her eyes fixed on the Haro, watching the robot roll around. The reference seems lost on her -- but then, so does the story. She doesn't respond to it. At all. Just watches the Haro.

Rei has had a rough day. She's had to say some things she regrets. And that sort of thing usually leaves one in the position to keep doing it. She's not even sure why she says: "My ex-boyfriend took the broken Haro I had when we broke up. I'm not sure a new one would replace it."

Rei very pointedly does not look at Amuro when she says this. Instead her dull red gaze flicks to a rebate offer. "I'm not sure why he took it. Whenever Haros saw him, they thought he was Amuro Ray. It annoyed him."

"Ah," Amuro Ray says into the awkward silence, reaching up to loosen his tie. People simply 'not responding' is not something he's used to. Once she starts speaking again, he relaxes a little. There's something nagging at the back of his mind-- and his unmind, as well.

"Your ex... huh..." he murmurs, looking away into the middle distance. Something there is stirring. Picking away at his automatic psychic defenses. Trying to force its way into his soul. He clamps down on it, because this is not the place for him to freak out. "Sounds like it was stuck on the defaults..." Amuro continues, barely registering the words coming out of his mouth. It's so persistent, digging in...

After several moments of even more awkward silence, it's as if something clicks inside the Newtype's mind. His eyes widen, and he looks up sharply, pupils dilating in shock. "You... you're Rei," he says, sounding surprised that he remembered the name. "Stenbuck's... ex, now?" He frowns. "That must be why he was in such a foul mood..."

Rei Ayanami again fails to look at Amuro. There is something off about her, but it's not where a Newtype might traditionally look. Her brain seems... well, fine. She doesn't radiate malevolent thoughtcrime the way that a Cyber-Newtype would, or infuse her surroundings with psychedelic color, or act as some sort of gaping abyss into which all feeling is sucked.

Whatever's wrong is on a deeper level entirely.

Rei, of course, is completely unaware of this. What gets her attention, though, is the use of her name, which causes her to stop, body jerking, stiffening, posture snapping into an even sharper upright position. Then -- 'Stenbuck.' That's when Rei turns and stares at Amuro, wide-eyed.

Amuro Ray may or may not notice that the entire room seems to smell like blood right now.

"You're... Amuro Ray," Rei replies, quietly. "I should have recognized you," she says, with no real amount of shame or self-chastisement -- just a matter-of-fact statement. "You look so much like him. He never thought so, but..."

Amuro wrinkles his nose, though he's not entirely sure why; his focus is now on the strange young woman. She seems less stilted than she was when they first met, but still... mechanical. Doll-like? He's not sure. He can't place it, but there's SOMETHING there. Something /wrong/... if only he could put his finger on it.

Rubbing at his nose absently, he nods. "Yeah, I'm that guy. Don't worry about it, you must have a lot on your mind." It's not like he doesn't remember being a teenager, and how everything seemed like life or death... though, for him, it usually was. Amuro considers, in his mind, that it's probably the same for this girl. And with Stenbuck. "There's something about war that makes relationships seem so much more..." he casts around for an appropriate word. And, as if floating up from some subconscious warning system, comes the term: "... apocalyptic."

Rei Ayanami turns her body to face Amuro. She really is barely five feet tall, and looks like her diet mostly consists of 'air.' Also, she's wearing a beret. It makes her look like the Littlest Soldier even moreso. When her attention focuses on Amuro, that sense of wrongness about her only seems to increase. But still, on a mental level, she outputs perfectly nothing.

Nice and human.

Except that this perfect nothing... is perfectly nothing. No emotions flow from Rei Ayanami. Maybe a tiny bit of sadness. Nostalgia, in trace amounts. But unlike most people, who wear what they're feeling on their mind's sleeve -- Rei just seems to be numb. Like a guitar that no one's playing. "Our relationship... was complicated," Rei says, flatly, able to suppress any actual sentiment that might creep up around it.

"I do not blame him for ending it."

Amuro's left eye twitches when Rei meets his gaze, and that clawing at the doors of his subconscious amplifies a hundredfold. Sweat springs out on his forehead, and he blanches just a little. Breathing quickens, he gulps.

"Y--yes, well," he rasps, throat suddenly dry. Amuro casts about for some way to rescue this conversation from crashing either into Scylla or Charybdis, but it's difficult to navigate. And Amuro Ray has never exactly been the most able socialite.

"W,well, uh, you could... there's nothing stopping you from, you know, trying to replace it. Having a Haro around can be very convenient, after all." A pause. "Especially for a soldier. Take care of all those little details you're too busy to deal with yourself."

This sales pitch does not seem to be the most effective, because Rei is staring at Amuro like he's retarded.

But then, she always does that. But then, how would Amuro know? But then, she seemed to do that before. But then, is it that she considers the rest of the world retarded, or is it that she's kind of retarded herself? But then, is it polite to think of her as retarded, or is that kind of an un-neo-PC thing to think? But then--

And these are the kinds of quagmires that being around Rei represents even when one /isn't/ a powerful enough Newtype to sense that there is something really and truly wrong with her, like she's a black and white newspaper cutout pasted into the scenery of a full-color oil panting. A momentary respite comes when Rei's attention drifts back to the placards on the table, talking about all kinds of features and upgrades. She watches the Haro roll around happily.

"Is it true that Haros form attachments to their owners?" she asks. "I heard that they were programmed to emulate a master-pet relationship."

The White Devil is vaguely discomfitted by Rei's stare, but it's not the first time he's been looked at like a retard (even today). Or by a retard (even today). He can 'see' that there's some kind of... veneer at work here. A barrier? Is it conscious, or unconscious? Are her true emotions suppressed by choice, or is this some kind of A-LAWS conditioning?

"Uh, yeah. It's kind of, uh, complicated," he goes on, uncertainly. "Their AI is patterned on a dog rather than a human so, uh, they aren't going to rise up and wipe out humanity..." he hopes. "They've also got sophisticated facial, vocal and brainwave sensors allowing them to 'identify' their owners, and they build a-- a /bond/ with that particular set of statistics, displaying affectionate behaviour..." he trails off. But there isn't anywhere else to go right now.

"And, uh, the owner contributes by, you know, anthropomorphising the Haro itself, giving it human-- or canine-- characteristics... uh..." Amuro trails off again.

"Did you, did you... did you get some kind of special... training, recently?"

Rei seems to be listening attentively. It's anyone's guess, really. She touches the Haro as it rolls, which causes it to stop and flash its eyes and flap its ears. This makes her withdraw her hand, but not in shock or at all suddenly. She just slowly pulls it back, and the Haro goes back to doing its thing.

"So my old Haro... because I could never activate it, it wouldn't recognize me," she notes. She might sound a little sad there. Rei Ayanami is impossible to deal with on an emotional level because her fundamental blankness is akin to the effect of staring at a white wall until you think you see shapes and colors. "Hm."

Then, Rei turns back to face Amuro. Her gaze is colder -- her neutral lips curved into the barest frown. "You are Amuro Ray, noted member of the AEUG and Katharon. I am off-duty. I have no authority with which to arrest you presently, nor the means to do so, and thus logically I have decided not to. However, I will not be discussing matters of training with you, relative to A-LAWS or any other body of which I am a member."

She sounds like she's reading it from a cue card.

Amuro Ray squints a little at her cold reaction. "So... 'yes'," he replies, nodding and shoving his left hand into his left pocket. "Interesting."

The enigma that is raking at his mental defenses seems to have backed off with Rei's sudden shift in 'mood', and he takes the moment to breathe and shore up the walls. As he does this internally, he externally reaches down and rests a hand on the Haro. It rolls to face him, eyes flashing. "HARO! AMURO! HARO!" it contentedly beeps. The engineer looks down at it with a conflicted expression, like a mother who has just been told that her child suffers from some horrifying physiological defecit. "Hello, Haro," he says softly. Then: "Go back to sleep."

Obediently, it shuts down. Amuro picks it up, running a hand across its 'face'. "Why don't you take this one for a spin, Rei?" he offers, holding it towards her. "If you don't find it useful, you can always bring it back."

Rei's gaze shifts down from Amuro to the Haro in his hands. There's a long moment of silence as she looks at it, her own dull red stare matching the unlit eyebulbs of the machine rather nicely. She seems to be considering it. But as she does, those feelings of -- of something being /wrong/, of reality being perverted, of despair and anxiety and loneliness and crushing, all-consuming entropy -- those feelings come rising back up like the tide. The room suddenly smells like blood again.

Rei looks up at Amuro, slowly. She doesn't know what's going on. Or does she?

"I shouldn't," Rei says, with what may or may not be resignation in her tone. "To take in something capable of forming attachments and then... give it back if it wasn't what I wanted..." If Rei is aware of the juxtaposition of this statement against the earlier topic of discussion, then she either isn't aware of it or is forcing herself to keep emotion out of her tone. "It would be cruel."

Rei glances back at the Haro. "Besides. I am, as you can see, an A-LAWS pilot." Eyes back up to Amuro. "There's no guarantee I'll live long enough to enjoy it."

What Rei says is 'there's no guarantee.' What everything that goes /unsaid/ from the girl is that this is a foregone conclusion.

Amuro Ray frowns. "They can be wiped pretty easily, you know," he responds, being far more insensitive than he can imagine. "The attachments they form, the patterns they recognise... just washed away like" he snaps "that."

"Though, in some older versions, the wipe didn't always work properly," he continues, blithely. "Back when the v2 rolled out, there were some pretty major issues... the v2 formed attachments pretty slowly, but when it did the attachments were sometimes... /too/ strong." He chuckles. "Can you imagine a Haro attacking someone? Well, sometimes the v2s did just that. If they felt that someone else was getting too close to their owner, they'd get..." Amuro gestures vaguely. "/Jealous/, I guess. Sometimes to a dangerous degree."

But wait, it gets worse. "That's actually why we had to roll out the v3. Tone down the attachment potency subroutines, speed up the recognition/bonding phase..." the Newtype frowns again, deeper this time. "But sometimes, it turned out that the wipes weren't... /complete/. The upgraded Haros, they... they still had junk data, 'memories' if you want to humanise it. It was a mess." He waves a hand. "Anyway, a lot of lonely people preferred the v2 anyway. Some people still use it today."

He proffers the Haro again. "So don't worry about it. We fixed that bug, and there are new versions coming out all the time. If you decide to return it, well... it will never even know it misses you."

Rei's lack of social graces may wrongfoot Amuro Ray's own deficiencies in that arena, but toward the end of his speech, when he offers the Haro again, Rei makes a face that must be familiar to the White Devil by now: the expression of a young woman who is just absolutely offended and disgusted.

Rei's emotional wall can't keep that one from jumping over. The way it flows out into her face is a more restrained affair -- red eyes widen a bit, her frown deepens and tightens (without getting /too/ deep or /too/ tight). Her breathing increases its pace a little bit, with one or two little flares of her nostrils to show she means it. And the overwhelming sense of everything being terrible reaching its zenith, cresting on the wave of bad feelings that suddenly pours out of Rei.

Of course, when Amuro Ray has triggered this reaction in a woman, generally there's at least some sort of verbal exchange, or some other moment where feelings are made plain. Not so now. Instead, Rei just starts walking, stepping around Amuro and moving for the front door. She'd be stomping, if someone could properly stomp with her weight and build.

But really, Rei Ayanami just wants to break down and cry.

"Uh... Rei...?" Amuro ventures, as the girl gets her hackles up and begins to slowly storm off. "Rei... Rei!" He takes a step towards her retreating back, ultimately puzzled-- and deeply disturbed by the foreboding emmanations the girl is throwing off, the powerful... /impact/ she's having on her environment. He can see it now, with her shields cracked.

He can /see/ it.

By god, Amuro Ray can see it.

And, as Rei walks out the door, /it/ sees /him/. The White Devil reaches towards the small girl with a trembling hand... and the other hand suddenly clasps to his chest, digging in to the expensive fabric, raking across the flesh beneath. Like a thunderbolt, his head wrenches back, eyes rolling up into his head. Inevitably, he crashes to his knees. Decisively, he topples slowly to his left, twitching and gasping.

His legs kick sporadically, with great power. His fingers dig in to his chest, drawing blood. His eyes roll around madly. A frothy white foam begins to dribble from his mouth, drop by drop, splashing to the ground.

Activated by its emergency brainwave sensors, the Haro rolls around on high alert. "AMURO! YOU'RE SICK! AMURO! YOU'RE SICK!" it cries. Across the room, Amuro's aide drops everything and runs to the Newtype's side, already dialing for support.

The crowd panics.

It's not pretty.