Xaviers!

While Samantha and Miss Bell - plus (n) Wills - are working, Ashlie is left to examine the landscape. She'd be more than curious to investigate more closely but even if driven by pure scientific curiosity, it'd still be a severe invasion of privacy. Except of course... She looks up at the distant structure in the sky, though while to everyone else it seems to almost reside at the edge of space it's more like a low flying plane to her. Her hand reaches back to touch the artificial port at the back of her neck and the structure's lights seem to blink in response.

A manifestation of her subconscious mind? She reaches out with one hand and moves her fingers through a complicated series of exercises, part of her attempts to be more conscious of her body in the absence of total awareness and control of every little system. The machine in the sky responds in kind, segments moving, unfolding, reconfiguring. And reaching back; a cable unfurls, tipped with a connector and a protruding filament of metal. Ashlie lowers her hands and closes her eyes, becoming more aware of the movement of the cable as it comes closer, winding around one arm in an almost gentle gesture before slipping past her shoulder, rearing back and plunging into the back of her neck, cable filaments driving into her spinal cord with just a brief flash of brilliant pain.

And then her perception leaves her body, taking in her surroundings in a broad awareness that reminds her of constructing a view from multiple cameras. She'd taken to thinking of the nanites suffusing her body as an almost separate system but it's an erroneous affectation. Cognizance blooms throughout her body like familiar pieces of a machine she build herself and she knows. Has known all along, deep down. Vulcanized muscle fibers, alveoli glittering with metal-studded membranes, molecular machinery augmented by pico-scopic additions working seamlessly together, bone structures made from organic metals that should not, could not exist. And finally she realizes why she could never feel anything resembling Natalie's technopathy. It never just transmitted electronic signals between mind and machine, it's function goes so much deeper. Facilitator. Adaptor. It had shifted focus. Instead of bridging brainwaves and electromagnetic signals it now combines two other incompatible functions; biology and inorganics. Ensuring her body can function, melding flesh and metal, sinew and plastic.

And finally she can feel her power dancing across every cell of her body, awareness granting some measure of conscious control and the barrier between 'herself' and the autonomous functions of the nanites fall away. A body doesn't need to be aware of it's every function, in fact a normal mind could not handle the deluge of information consciously. But hers is no normal mind. She flows through the data, is the data, knows every line encoded in her neural net and where new curls of code have formed to govern functions of her body. A process fully aware of it's own existence.

It would still be too much to govern the entirety of her directly, too many processes and layers that go into maintaining this body. But the 'meat' is simultaneously hard-coded and adaptive. Not unlike her own former architecture, the more critical a system the more automated it is and actively resists potentially dangerous meddling. She finds she can nudge temperature regulation, oxygen uptake, lymphatic channels, but has to make an effort to try and move them beyond their homeostasis. Safe operating parameters. There're other things too. Nanite replenishment, material maintenance. And buried beneath reconstructive mechanisms are what are arguably the most powerful tools. Growth engines. Pluripotent stem-cells, really, but like everything else, they too are inundated with machinery. Dormant. Potential wasted on simple repair. A whole new world of intricate design-space.

But there are limitations. Only so many functions laid out in DNA and too much deviating would require computational power that is beyond her. She'd told Will that the level of data processing his shifting requires is astronomical and here she is proven right. Even just a replicated organ would require a severe rebalancing of many systems, not to mention anything structural like a second set of arms and all the kinetics involved. No, this is not something she can commandeer without a power to do the heavy lifting. But there is one thing that her power provides. (Her power. She still hasn't entirely processed the emotional impact.)

Translating, interfacing. That she can feel almost crackling with potential. The port in her neck that so far refused to let her directly interface with electronic systems can be modified, changed by enzyme and nanite, new structures to parse one electrical signal to another. Other ideas take shape. Induction fields in her fingertips. A compass organ tuned to wireless signals. No longer will she be cut off from the digital world, her systems throughout the school and Mutant Town.

Sam makes her way over.

"Headmistress? I think we're pretty well underway, here. Did you... get what you needed?" She quirks a brow as she approaches.

Ashlie's head jerks up from staring at her fingertips, a movement somehow more robotic than she'd ever been before.

"Concepts!" she starts, then seems to realize she's started talking mid-thought. "I... yes. I think I did. This has been incredibly illuminating."

"The Sparks, they're not just quantum energy locked into one configuration by how a mutation manifests, are they? They're aggregates of concepts. Density in a probability cloud. Maybe not entirely independently of our reality, but autonomous somehow, adaptive within their conceptual scope, maybe even transitory." she rambles.

"I do think they're a bit personal in how they manifest," she nods. "If they're not given any direction, I think we've seen how they end up."

"Indeed. I can't help but wonder what else influences them." she muses and then seems to have a sudden thought, her eyes locking in on Sam. "What happens when they disconnect?"

"Sometimes they know where to go. Sometimes it's like a thread being cut and it just winds back from where it came. Sometimes it's lost, tangled up in something. Sometimes it needs help, and there's more than just me to do that, though the ones I've met are... well, variations of me."

"And I know the place they go doesn't look the same for everyone, but I see it as a tree, and there are other birds bringing little lights to it. I went to the base of it before, when I had to pull Miriam out and... it's the same below. Roots, branches, like a perfect mirror."

"Imprints. Echoes." she says, though she knows full well what term would be the most apt if she accepts the metaphors as meaningful. "So they persist even without a connection. You called it necessary, like it has purpose. Are they sapient?"

"Some of them... seem like they might be? Will's in particular."

"He does seem to have a very deep connection to it. He says he needed you and Miss Bell to deepen it this much." she says with a glance over to the line of Wills filing into the club and then the Cauldron. "But I'm not sure that would have been possible with just anybody. If they're so in tune, does it take after him or vice versa?"

"Someone told me that it... likes him, somehow? I'm not even sure he knows how he did it, but he's made friends with it."

"That makes... as much sense as anything else, I suppose. I'm assuming that someone was your rather questionable counterpart?"

"She's delved deeper into this than I have. She's inclined to."

"I can't fault the curiosity, but I do question her motives."

"Aye well, we're not really going to be rid of her anytime soon. Needless to say I've mixed feelings on her myself."

"A problem for another day. One of many. On the upside." she reaches back to the cable plugged into her neck and with a twist pulls it free. "I determined what form Natalie's power took when I inherited her body and it should return some of my multi-tasking capabilities to me." The cable moves on it's own for a moment until Ashlie lets go of it and it slowly withdraws into the 'sky'.

"So you really are a mutant like the rest of us, then?"

She nods briefly. "I was thinking about it in too narrow terms and her Technopathy was simply one way for it to be expressed. It facilitates organic and inorganic interaction and when I rewired her body it turned inwards to do just that. It... translates, transposes. I think it might have subtly helped me create the algorithm that's sorting Will out. And now that I'm cognizant of it I can feel it fill in the gaps of ways to connect me to the network again." she says and holds out her hand palms up. At the tip of her fingers a faint shimmer of metal filigree is spreading through the grooves of her fingerprints.

"Have to be careful there, or you'll be bluetooth connected to every smart toaster."

"I've lived with a wireless connectivity module in my head for longer than I've had to pay attention to hydrating." she chuckles faintly. "Most appliances are less invasive than peoples thoughts, I'd imagine."

"Suppose technology's more got protocols for all this. Most people don't know they're even doing it."

"Protocol. Maybe that's how I'll think of my Spark. Just in case it is capable of appreciating the gesture."

"If this is all it took to make you a believer, we ought to have done this ages ago."

"I still think this is the manifestation of an extra-dimensional quantum probability cloud you have evolved to harness and in turn impressed human ideas and concepts upon. But I won't deny that, at times, there seems to be some kind of emergent system to it."

"Well there's more and more mutants emerging, aye? There's a curve, and before we might have just been seen as heroes and gods but it's like there's a critical mass where we're harder to brush over."

"Yet it won't keep them from trying. There's a reason why I have kept what we learned even from Muir and X-Corp for the time being. If they learn there is a way to access the source of our powers they will seek a 'cure'. And if you are right about the Sparks this may have catastrophic consequences." she says, raking her fingers through her hair.

"This may be too personal a question, but have you ever witnessed a human dieing? Even if they can't harness it, something this fundamental may well affect them too."

"I... no. At least... not in this lifetime. I'm... not sure what I'd do.

Ashlie nods. "Not that I recommend actively seeking out this particular answer. Just something to consider because as dangerous as this knowledge is, the implication an afterlife might discern between human and mutant is infinitely worse for mending fences."

"I don't know if I can avoid all of this forever. Some parts of it draw me in, you know?"

"That's entirely up to you. I just don't expect you to seek out people dieing to sate my curiosity."

"I'm not going to do anything crazy, just ignoring this side of me tends to bite me in the arse."

"Would you rather ignore it? I know that feeling compelled can be unpleasant, even when it's by your very nature."

"Sometimes it feels right. Very, very right. It's easy to get lost in it."

"And just... there are people and things that recognize me as this, and won't be convinced otherwise. Without me even making the claim. And sometimes that feels right, like it's proof that I'm not just crazy, even if it comes with a lot of other baggage."

"And other times?"

"Other times I... well, I just want to be Sam."

"And I guess eventually I'm going to have to meet in the middle, aye? I'm already, you know, different than before I got deeper into this, so there's some Morrigan in me, but I like to think there's more than a bit of me in the Morrigan."

"You are who you define yourself to be. Maybe that's overly pragmatic of me to say. My existence has been painstakingly defined from the start and I can't say it hasn't informed who I am, but it's no longer the entirety of me."

"Whether you reject or embrace it, you'll always be you, because none of us are who we were yesterday."

"I bet you get a guilty thrill out of just leaving people on read now," she smirks.

"You have no idea. Do you know how many insipid complaints about the Mutant Town portal I'm ignoring?"

"Not in their backyard, but it isn't even their backyard?"

"Pretty much. And there's all kinds. Parroting the fearmongers, thinking they know how it works and why it's dangerous, trying to define it as public transit and shut it down."