by Perdita » Tue Aug 04, 2015 5:21 am
Getting started on 'doing good' wasn't going to be as easy as it had initially sounded. They are two underage girls and a disembodied AI driving a car and relying on one of the girls pointing out cars that lack enough electronics for Perdita to notice them. At least she has a very thorough map of where police vehicles are on the roads. As they're travelling Perdita sets significant processing power aside to figure out how they could best help people. She has some files on Nina's power, but unfortunately the girl seems to only be able to heal herself, which removes a lot of potential. Curing the sick would have been a pretty good start. She pulls up a bunch of medical information and tries to educate herself on the fundamentals of how human bodies work. The girl's blood might contain anti-bodies and healing factors that might be transferable, at least for a short while. She'd have to ask her about that, even if that could technically count as influencing her. She seems to be very naive and easily manipulated. It would be better if she had the idea herself.
Hospitals would be the best place to start then, though the current state of the country seems to be very opposed to the idea of mutants on an institutional level. They could approach individuals. Heather could talk to the hospital computers, find the ones that need the most help and visit them with Nina. Maybe they could find a way to deal with their hospital bills too. She should soak up some financial data anyway to finance their little adventure, maybe she'll come across a solution. She doesn't want to outright steal from the rich, even if that seems to be the most efficient approach. But that is dangerously close to putting hardship on someone without their consent, even if it's minuscule. No, the way to go about this is to not have it be a zero-sum system but to add to it. This was getting increasingly complicated.
If she keeps branching she might have to consider relocating to a more powerful server. She might have to do that at some point anyway as the two girls are moving further and further away from her physical location is increasing the latency between them. It's only milliseconds but to her that seems like a lot. And she is responsible for them while steering the car. Depending on Heather's ability to put electronics together there might be a better solution available. They could stop at landfills and see if they can get their hands on electronic scraps. A camera is a camera and she's certain she could write drivers that would make a cobbled-together system at least workable as a remote-control interface. She'll have to talk to Heather to see what the girl would be comfortable doing under her instructions. Once they gut the Hummer of any vulnerabilities to being tracked by Heather's family, most of which can probably be done electronically, it would make a good base of operations for when they can't or don't want to stay at a hotel.
So many plans...
Three days later...
Perdita is driving the car all by herself now. The webcams mounted to the dashboard and the windows help significantly. As do the various laptops they pulled out of a scrapyard and cobbled together into one computing array. It works much better than the car's computer thanks to Heather patching the pieces together and gives Perdita a sort of beachhead in the car to run some of her processes on. Now the car is parked in a hospital parking garage while the two girls walk in under the guise of visiting relatives. Pulling names from the closed network is easy with Heather's power, as is sorting through the patients and finding the ones most desperately in need of help. They couldn't exactly do their own blood transfusions, but finding a nurse who cared more about their patients than some misguided vendetta against mutants wasn't that hard. And after the first patient who received a transfusion of Nina's blood showed a noticeable improvement it only became easier.
Perdita was keeping a close eye on the proceedings, fearing the inevitability of someone getting the idea to take more than just blood from the blonde girl's regenerating body. That, she had decided, was going to be their cue to move on. Meanwhile she busied herself accumulating data on medical bills and loans. She'd noticed that those deemed unlikely to be paid back in full were often sold in anonymized batches for pennies to the dollar and she'd begun to create an extensive list. Eventually she asked Heather to walk them into some of the larger banks to get them access to those databanks so she could compile them and shuffle them around until there was only a fraction of the initial debt left. Perdita had been confused by this possibility until she'd realized that this was something no human could possibly do, or possibly even realize was possible. They'd created a world they built so much of their society on and it seemed like they didn't even really understand it themselves.
It wasn't perfect, but it gave them the freedom to move from place to place should the need to, leaving behind a better place at the detriment of nobody. And, perhaps almost as importantly, Heather could see the effects of applying their powers on the faces of the patients when they improved almost immediately. She could see the potential in the girl's abilities, more powerful then her own abilities because she wasn't bound by such trivialities as cables and connections. If she wanted to she could bring hell down on this planet. Perdita herself had seen glimpses of the electronic world that seemed to exist almost entirely separately from the public. Nuclear silos, aircraft carriers, missiles, satellites, experimental weapons, drones. Heather could control them as easily as she was talking to the heart monitors and dialysis machines, encouraging them to do their best. Except it wouldn't be nearly as endearing.
Dr. Minamida had seen the same spark in her. Something that could burn out of control. But she and Heather would prove both their parents wrong...