Summary:With Jeriah tinkering with Jemma's systems again, Kelly runs some deep diagnostics Log Info:Storyteller: None |
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Jeriah London got woken up at 4 AM to come to the Triskelion because a certain scientist had an idea. He's been in the Mind-Machine Interface labs for the last five hours because SOMEONE got inspiration. And when a scientist gets inspiration, watch out.
"Alright. This is Immersive VR test number twelve, recording…" He says. "You know that DeHaven and Harper are gonna be here, like, any minute, right? And they're going to walk in and see you laying on the bio-bed and playing with an Oculus Rift that I am trying to wire in through your implants. And that's presuming I haven't been giving them full body hallucinations with the weird sensory input." Though, if they'd been doing that Jeriah presumes that they'd have gotten an irate phone call by now.
"Ready? I'm connecting up the Rift to your cortical implants in three… two… one."
Beat. "Are you in Minecraft now?"
Seriously. Kelly and Roy are gonna get to work and find Jemma playing VR minecraft in their lab.
As if on cue, there's the sound of Kelly's laughter down the hall, and then the door is pushed open to reveal Kelly and Roy. The former's laughter dies away as she espies Jeriah and Jemma already in the lab. Her brow furrows. "What are you guys doing here already?" She looks over to Jemma lying down. "Change that, just.. *what* are you guys doing?"
Yes, she could just peek into their brains to see what's up, but generally she doesn't go opening the doors into their minds unless she's got some cause. If they can answer questions, then she'll let them do that.
Jemma did have an idea when thinking about how to test the exploits for the robo-archer. Without a working model, she'd not felt right about sending the team in the field on theoretical data and her mind had turned the problem over in her sleep.
So here they are and here she is, in leggings and t-shirt on the bio-bed.
"Yes, yes, I am. Wait, I'm in the water - couldn't you have configured this to put on the land?" She huffs.
"Oh, hi Kelly. I uh had an idea that I asked Mister London to help me with me."
No. She's not blushing. Really she's not.
Following Kelly in, Roy lifts his brow, and then shakes his head. "What, did you send her to a tropical beach or something?" he asks curiously as he folds his arms over his chest to rest them there, and lets everyone else handle the questions as he is just gonna go over there and glance at the screen to see if he can get a peek what's going on.
He's sneaky, like ninja.
Okay, a paleredhead ninja ina trucker hat. Chris Farley was probably a better ninja.
"It's procedurally generated, I wasn't about to hack Minecraft of all things on the off chance that you spawned in water." Jeriah rolls his eyes. "Hang on, I'll de-initialize you so we can pull you out. Hate to scramble your brain because we didn't shut it down properly."
A screen comes up in response to Kelly's question. "Jemma-of-Nine here had a brainwave at O'Dark-Thirty. She wanted to make a fully immersive VR testing environment so that folks like Roy could test against things like that robot archer without putting themselves in danger. Nevermind how fiendishly difficult that would be to build, let alone code. Anyway this is step one. I wanted to see what it would take to put her in a full body illusion so we jury-rigged a Rift and hooked it into her implants. Right now, as you can see, she's in Minecraft."
Hissssssssss. Oh. A creeper just spawned behind her.
Kelly Dehaven's tone is disbelieving. "You *what*?" She looks from Jemma to the screen and back to Jemma. "Minecraft? Really? I… what?" Oh look! They managed to break Kelly.
The redhead puts her hands on her hips and looks at Jeriah. "Seriously. This sounds like something Roy would come up with." Like a boxing glove arrow! She glances back at him with a slight apologetic grimace. "Sorrynotsorry."
"Jemma, seriously. You should have *called* me or something instead of leaving your brain at the mercy of London. He can barely take care of a kitten without help!" You know, that kitten that mostly lives in one of his CDM's. Canine Death Machines.
Speaking of Jemma, an image forms in the biochems head - a memory - of Jemma in a Jeri Ryan style Star Fleet medical uniform. It's possible anyone 'looking' will get that image.
"You know you can edit the starting coordinates, right?" The biochem snarks "Arrrrgh." She nearly falls from the bed as she tries to turn around - hands flailing to ward off the creeper.
"Because it's not my brain that's going to do this. I needed an Engine—— " She colours again. "I uh … didn't want to disturb you and Roy?"
"Lies, I'd put her in Dark Souls." Roy retorts as he glances at the screen. "Uh, Jeriah. Did you put her in Creative or Survival?" he asks as he notices the creeper on the screen. "Cause you know, I hope you gave her some pork chops or something." The comment is made as he sticks out his tongue at Kelly, and then the archer waits a moment.
"He's allowed to have a pet and I'm not??!" comes the complaint.
"You think I modded this at all, Simmons? No, no pork chops Roy. She might have a couple of apples but uh… maybe I should have given her a sword. She's in default mode whatever that is. Survival I guess? I'm not really in the Mojang scene." It might be a little weird for Jemma, the way she has really blocky, stubby arms and legs. Because more than just wearing the Oculus, this is having a lot of the information transmitted directly to her brain. Fortunately minecraft isn't MADE to have things like tactile or olfactory sense input and Jeriah's largely drawing on Jemma's own memories to tell her body that, say, water is wet.
"It's not mine. My pets are are generally obedient robot death machines. The kitten is YOUR fault Harper." Because it's the one that Roy gave Kelly. That she then stuck in one of Jeriah's bots as a kitten carrier.
"She was worried about disturbing board game time." Jeriah smirks. "Or that's what she called it." Beat. "Swim faster Jemma."
The Creeper is just starting to flash and getting ready to detonate when the whole thing de-initializes and pulls Jemma out.
"Alright Simmons. You're good." She might be pumping adrenaline but she's good.
"And yes, DeHaven. Minecraft. It came with the Rift and also it was good for making sure I could get the visual and audio inputs in without screwing anything up. It's taken us four hours just to get her to load in."
There's another short pause. "So, how was that, Simmons?"
"You two have been here for *four* hours?" Kelly says, apparently still rather incredulous over the whole thing. Shaking her head, she heads over to look over Simmon's readouts.
"So, what was it again? You want to create a rig that sits between like, Roy and the robot to avoid what happened to Clint? Isn't that just adding a layer without it likely to stop any of the transference?"
Roy gets a glance as he mentions the pet. "It's a *tiny* kitten. It needs a lot of attention." That's totally why it comes to work every day and rides around in Jeriah's puppy.
"Isn't that kind of hard without the psisteel stuff?" comes Roy's question as he frowns slightly. He'd rather be out shooting things with arrows. All this sounds supisciously like they are making him /learn/.
"It has a litter pan and can eat kitty chow!" he comments to Kelly with a roll of his eyes as he blinks. "Oh. The robot assassin thingie. Is it still like.. out to kill me? Or did it move to Clint?"
"Have we?" Jemma supposes times flies. "No. I want something to simulate the archer in full, it's body and such, so we can test the exploits we think we've found. I mean, we don't have a full body to begin with but we've the footage of the one that Clint had to deal with and the data from the one that Mister London recovered."
An AI environment to immerse someone in.
Jeriah moves to get the Rift off Jemma and Jemma off the table. "As she says. Her idea was to avoid hooking up the bot altogether. Someone like me could program it will real world data and simulate it."
"Welllll it's probably harder. But I don't have psisteel and Jemma's idea doesn't involve DeHaven losing bits of her hands every time we want to test something." Also, the testing can be done without Kelly which might be important if someone outside this little team wants to use the method.
"Okay. Not hurt, Simmons? No headaches, ringing of the ears, pain in any of your extemities, lingering smell of gunpowder, anything like that?" Because that's one of the big dangers of doing this. The risk is low, the Rift isn't designed to stimulate nerves in that fashion but it's not designed to interface with someone's brain at ALL so… it IS a risk.
"Well it called Clint an 'inferior archer' which he did not like and yes, it is still out to kill you. Actually the data suggests that there are several and they're all out to kill you. You. And DeHaven. And Simmons, here."
He glances to the two scientists. They'd probably rather not be reminded of the fact that they are apparently on a hit list.
"Let me run a full diagnostic on your systems, Jemma." Kelly says as she steps over, pulling out her datapad to bring up some programs to help with that. It's also a great time to do that deep dive into them that Clint had asked. Especially since Jeriah's been mucking with her again. It's like she's his new favorite toy!
"Well, if you wanted it to go after Barton, you could always let him be the superior archer." Kelly doesn't even look up at Roy as she says that, though the grin likely says it all.
Since Roy and Kelly almost always have that 'door' between their minds open, the archer will be able to sense when Kelly opens the door into Jemma's so that the redheaded scientist can better access the hardware in the biochem.
"And it was the middle of the night. Like sensible people, we were *sleeping*." Kelly says tartly, shooting London a look.
Jemma doesn't need reminding, she remembers all the time. Each time she looks in a mirror or at her arm. "I'm fine. I ran a diagnostic last night." She looks really uncomfortable at that. "And no, no other effects. But you'll have to learn to set that up better. Not everyone is as resilient as me."
Kelly can connect though, Jemma's not going to stop her. Everything is, of course, running as it should be.
When Kelly connects she might notice that Jeriah is still in the system. He looks like he's doing housekeeping. "Jemma do you have internal data caches on that thing that should be cleaned? I'd hate for you to have a .jar file floating around in there that does something unfortunate at a key moment."
It would make sense if she did and it would make sense that she can trigger them. Though he could also do the cleanout. She's got to wonder at this point, though, if he's doing that just to keep her systems clean or if he's trying to hide something. This especially in the light of her conversation with Clint and the fact that Kelly is in her head and Kelly would be able to tell.
So many things he does can be interpreted in a suspicious way… if one is of a suspicious frame of mind.
Also… he called her Jemma and not Simmons.
"I'll get you a nice skin next time, Jemma. Maybe a high res texture pack. You look like you can run 64 bit…"
"Who sleeps at night?" The hacker retorts to Kelly. "Anyway, Jemma was sure it was a marathon session of twister or some such." She said NO such thing but he DOES like making her blush.
Kelly Dehaven will take her time checking through Jemma's systems even if the biochem just ran them. In fact, Kelly will pull up Jemma's logs so she can compare them against each other. "I sleep at night while you two are playing virtual footsie." Kelly remarks tartly while Roy's decided to Exit, Stage Left.
"You know, it's actually harder to try to do a sort of VR experience and keep the subject conscious because you're having to intercept their sort of 'live feed' from their physical body to insert the simulated one. If you can take their mind 'off-line', then you don't have the competing imputs." Kelly remarks in an off-handed sort of way as she checks carefully through the system, 'watching' Jeriah work.
The biochem sits up and shakes her head to Kelly "It's was 4am. That's not the middle of the night and I got … four hours sleep." Is that different to before she was Death Lok'd? Probably not, Jemma's a workaholic.
Why would Jeriah call her Jemma? He's not done so before and that gets a look from the woman. After Bartons visit, she's been rather uneasy and hopes to see May sometime this morning.
Blush. Right on cue - from the two of them and their damn comments.
"They're cleared regularly, Mister London. I'm sure you don't need to do anything." beat "And it wasn't anything of the sort Doctor Dehaven." Someones prickly today.
"Are you suggesting though, that we would be better served putting a subject to sleep before trying to VR them?"
Some of the files in Jemma's mind have Jeriah's fingerprints all over them. They were put there by him in a direct transfer.
"I didn't think the Doc here would much appreciate it if I put her into a cybernetically induced coma beforehand." Jeriah notes. Jemma's systems are indeed running as they should be though there's marks in her code from when he hacked her - three times now. Once in Afghanistan, once in her lab and once to help get a telepath out of their network. He's kicked her door in so many times that there's the digital equivalent of gouges in the door frame.
And yes, then there's those files. They MIGHT be innocuous but then if someone wanted to hide a kill switch or something more subtle, that'd be where they'd put it. Swap files and other junk that most people don't touch for fear of breaking something but that computers generate in droves.
Jemma's look gets a look back from Jeriah. What?
He isn't logging off. Maybe he doesn't see the need to. Kelly hadn't asked him to. But that could ALSO be because he's watching the telepath to see what she does.
"How would you go about doing that and still waking them up?" That's a question to both women. Jemma should know how to do that from a medical perspective. Kelly would know how to do it from a machine perspective. Ideally this VR testing area shouldn't involve anesthetics, he thinks. But there might be some electromagnetic way to put someone under and hijack their sense-centers.
That might well just have both scientists thinking. Well, if they're not distracted by the inside of Jemma's skull.
Kelly Dehaven glances up at Jemma's question and nods with a 'hmm'. "Well, induced sleep-like state, yes. The easy way would be to sedate them, but I'm sure there are some less risky ways." Because sedating people can always be tricky. "I could do it, but I'm not something someone can carry around with them."
Kelly holds up a hand, one finger raised towards Jeriah. "Don't. Say. A word."
She frowns a bit, flagging the files from Jeriah. "What are these?" She asks, while turning her attention to Jemma's 'door' to see if there's any way to make repairs or shore up her defenses some how.
Again, unless Jeriah's put something else in there, the files are clean.
"There's no need to put *me* into a coma, thank you very much, Mister London." Why the hell had he called her Jemma? They weren't that familiar with each other.
"You could use meditation techniques. Binaural beats, Theta Waves and the like. It won't work on everyone but most could be encouraged to use it."
"Project and Case files, as they're marked, Kelly. Is there a problem?" Why, oh why, is Jemma so uncomfortable that Kelly is rifling through these?
The files are data files. Some from the Power Plant investigation the other day. Images, reports, personnel files. All fairly mundane things really. The others are decrypted AIM project files with locations of facilities and information on reverbium, materials and such.
Kelly told him not to say a word. So Jeriah does not say a word. He does quirk an eyebrow though as he takes the Rift headgear and opens up the front panel to mess with it's circuitry a little bit.
"Oh… are we sure about that?" That's in regards to putting Jemma into a coma. And he was doing so well not saying a word too…
A great many of the files are decrpyted AIM files and not ALL of them are stuff that was collected by SHIELD. Some of them predate Jeriah's engagement for the present mission. Sure, it makes sense that he might have those and offer them up if they were relevant to the case at hand but that DOES mean that they haven't been looked at by anyone in SHIELD other than Jemma.
And they're not… entirely clean. Okay they're not dirty. There's no obvious malware in them. But there's little bits of appended code on the end of each one and it won't take Kelly too long to figure out that they form an executeable. It's not clear that Jeriah coded that fractured file, but it's a rather clever way of hiding data. It's something AIM is known to do with high value information, but it could also be used to store parts of a nasty virus. All you'd need to do was trigger a program that brought all the little bits together and ran them.
So he might not have done that. But he DID give those files to Jemma. The only SHIELD agent around who might be susceptible to some kind of .exe file.
"What if you were to put the subject into a state resembling a hallucination. We already know of lots of medicinal compounds that can do that. Figuring out a way to replicate that electromagnetically should be possible." Then you could hijack their senses without hijacking their higher functions. Mostly.
A clever idea? Or a well timed distraction?
Well. This is uncomfortable. Kelly doesn't want to go voicing concerns with Jeriah here if Jeriah ends up being the culprit and Roy scarpered off so she doesn't have him to rely on if things were to go sideways.
Finally, she speaks to Jemma telepathically. Something Kelly tries not to do too often, so it won't make the biochem uncomfortable. "« I'm picking up some anomalies on some of your files. I'm going to quarantine them until I can give them a thorough looking at. »" When Jeriah isn't *right here*.
Jeriah's question gets a distracted reply. "Hmm? Yes, right. Should be able to."
It's a good question why Jemma hadn't done anything about those files. She certainly knew the AIM trick, she and Jeriah had discussed that AIM trick when reviewing some files recently. Should she have been able to pick this up? And if she could have, why hadn't she done anything with them?
The biochem jumps though when Kelly speaks with her telepathically. That's a shock. She's not even sure if Kelly will pick up her answering thoughts "« Uh. Sure? When? What's going on? »"
Jeriah gets another look from the biochem. Oh yes, Jemma is so good at dissembling.
"Well yes, of course that's possible. There's research on that already." That's to the contractors conjecture.
It is at this moment that Jeriah disconnects. Maybe he was just finished with whatever he was doing. Maybe he's satisfied that Kelly isn't going to be doing anything that will get him into trouble. It's possibly really uncomfortable with him here, knowing that it would be difficult for either of them to stop him if he decided to get rid of them and also for Kelly, knowing that he could possibly make Jemma choke the life out of her with that arm.
"So what's the prognosis, Dehaven? Clean bill of health? You know I wouldn't let her go too long without getting defragged."
Jemma gets a curious look. Why is she looking at him like that? It's… weird.
"We'll give you your workspace back shortly, promise. I just want to get this modification on the Rift in and then put away everything." At least he's going to put all the crap from their little minecraft experiment away? This probably isn't the last time he'll be mucking around with Jemma using full body VR though and… is it REALLY a good idea to let him of all people be doing that?
"She looks fine after the little experiment the pair of you decided to cook up." Kelly says, moving over to one of the workstations so she can set up a quarantined area to transfer Jemma's files. Then she can scrutinize them.
"Yes. Please. If the other geeks see I have Minecraft running they'll all pile in during lunch and I'll never get them out of here. Speaking of food, I need to go feed my cat, so I should find Brutus."
Kelly will leave the pair of them to clean up the mess that they made while she goes and gets kitten time.
Jemma looks worried. She can't hide it, even if she wanted to. "Are we finished here, Mister London? I have a meeting to get to shortly that I need to prepare for." She hadn't mentioned that when they started this.
Sliding from the biobed, she starts to clean up. No, it won't be the last time that Jeriah messes with her system and she's not sure she can keep him out now.
"We certainly can be. You didn't mention a time limit when we were running you through minecraft though. Or did the beepy music in your ears distract you from that?" Jeriah doesn't look up from his soldering iron. But she can tell that he is ever so slightly suspicious.
"Is there some kind of poorly handled office romance going on that I don't know about? Because folks are acting a bit weird at the moment…"
"I … forgot about it." Jemma answers colouring a little as she does when she lies. "I was so distracted with this idea, it quite slipped my mind." OK, that might be true. She really was into this.
It's easy to tell that Jeriah is suspicious but there's little she can do about that. "You mean Kelly and Roy? Maybe us being in here ruined their morning plans… you know how they are with their … board games."
There's the blush again.
"Is there anything you want me to do before I go?"
Jeriah looks up. It's a 'from under the eyebrows' look that says 'really?'. It's almost worse that he doesn't follow it up with any actual words. Just a look. Just a rather suspicious, somewhat disappointed look.
"No. Go on to your meeting, I'll clean up in here." He'll probably be in the engineering spaces later, that's if he's not going through the mountains of data that they've recovered. Both need to be done.
"I'm so spawning a whale on you later…" He mutters.
The look from Jeriah makes Jemma flush more and look down at her hands to avoid it. She feels terrible but she can't tell him, can she?
"I'll … see you later." With that, Jemmas out the door, not hearing the whale comment.