Room 307, Saturday Morning

[dollpocalypse]

Topher woke up to find his roommate missing and to find himself the proud owner of a killer headache that he suspected had something to do with the coconut-bra antics that had transpired last night. Well, great. He dug one of his laptops out from where he had been storing it under his pillow (shut up) and pulled up some Minecraft.

That would take care of the headache, yes.

The fact that he looked different today? Totally lost on him.

[[door and post are open]]

Comments

[lockestheway]

Oh, please, of course Peter had figured out where his new minion friend fellow third-floor-student lived. It'd be a little useless if he didn't know where to go for his easily-manipulated hacking talent.

"Topher," he said, sticking his head in the door without looking, "I had an id-- oh, hey."

Crap.

[dollpocalypse]

"Hey," said Topher, shoving his laptop aside. More hacking fun was always welcome.

"Need me to pull up some more files for you?"

Sorry for the confusion, Peter.

[lockestheway]

"...I don't think we've met," Peter said, after a long pause. "Morning."

[dollpocalypse]

Huh? Absurdly, Topher scanned the room to see if there was anyone else around.

"Dude, I hacked stuff for you, like, yesterday," he reminded Peter slowly, as if he was stupid. Actually it was two days ago, Topher, but good try.

[lockestheway]

"No, your roommate did that," Peter said, going with the safe assumption. He was getting a little annoyed at the way this guy was treating him like he was stupid, though. "I'm pretty sure I'd remember seeing you."

... Not dirty.

[dollpocalypse]

Psh. Totally dirty.

Sighing dramatically, Topher got up, rummaged through a pile that appeared to consist mostly of dirty clothes and food packaging, with some actual food mixed in, and eventually came up with a small mirror. Probably his roommate's. He didn't know he even had a mirror.

"Whoa," he said. "What the...?"

[lockestheway]

"Har har," Peter said. It was possible he hadn't quite caught on to the situation yet. "Very funny. Ohhh-- are you going to give me the 'impromptu plastic surgery' line next?"

[dollpocalypse]

Topher was now at the point of feeling his face. It didn't feel different, but then, he didn't exactly do this very often.

"What the hell?" he wondered, bewildered. "I look weird..."

[lockestheway]

"I hope that's not your way of fishing for compliments," Peter said, crabbily.

He was crabby because he had been talked to, and he was crabbier because he had no idea what was going on. If Topher's roommate was trying to pull a fast one on him, he'd--

... be better off keeping his cool. Sigh.

[dollpocalypse]

"What? No," Topher said, slightly distracted as he kept up the whole face-analyzing thing.

Then --

"Oh my god," he said, struck by an idea. "Oh my god. What if last night I died and someone wanted to preserve my genius so they imprinted someone else with my memories and personality? What if I'm trapped in a new body because I'm dead?"

If it helped, Peter, Topher was probably the only person who could come up with something like that.

[lockestheway]

"Then I'd give you the address to a nice mental hospital," Peter said, before he could keep himself from snarking. "Imprinting whole personalities? Even monitor technology can't do that."

... Oh sure, three seconds later you start thinking about how feasible that is and whether the public would accept it. WTF, Peter.

"Though think about the havoc that could cause..."

Seriously, Peter, quit it.

[dollpocalypse]

Oh, it could cause a lot of havoc. Topher would find that out on his own when he invented the technology that could do it.

"Oh my god," Topher breathed again, totally ignoring Peter. "What if everyone has this? What if instead of dying, people just get imprinted onto other people, and all the people in the world are just an unending cycle of the same personalities, again and again?"

He needed to stop. Soon.

[lockestheway]

Peter squinted at him. Really, there'd be more efficient ways to use technology like that. Which wasn't liable to happen any time soon anyway. "We'd get a whole swath of grudges that'd never go away," he said, "Also, you're getting paranoid, T-- whoever you are."

[dollpocalypse]

Paranoid was his middle name. Well, actually, it was Reckless Genius. Or Andrew, depending on who you asked.

"Maybe," he said, unconvinced. Then he shook his head to clear the thoughts that were spinning there and had another thought. "Or it's the island."

Hey, it could move around. Maybe it could change people's faces, too.

[lockestheway]

Maybe one of these days, Peter was going to opt for 'the island' as his first explanation for stuff like this. If he woke up being someone not Peter. He was going to prefer blaming people for everything whenever possible, thanks.

"Sure," Peter said, "You woke up and the island decided to switch out your face--" And then he blanched. "...Give me the mirror."

Please tell him his own face was still the same?

[dollpocalypse]

Topher snorted. Yeah, now Peter decided to come around to his way of thinking. He passed up the mirror (definitely Dave's; Topher hadn't looked in a mirror on purpose since he'd realized that his hair stood up on its own).

Yeah, he knew Peter looked normal, but getting him to panic for a minute could be fun.

[lockestheway]

Peter grabbed the mirror and gave it a quick look, then felt annoyed at how easily he'd fallen for that one. "Oh, you're a funny man," he said, forcing some laughter. "Really, joke's over. So what's your name?"

[dollpocalypse]

"Topher!" he insisted. "I'm Topher Brink. I hacked some stuff with you, like, a day or two ago, and you said you'd come up with harder stuff for me to do. And you're writing a paper about bloggers or some crap. Okay?"

[lockestheway]

Peter squinted at him.

Then he forced another laugh. "Sorry, man," he said, "You know how weird this looks, right...? I guess it's even crazier having it happen to you."

[dollpocalypse]

Topher quite agreed.

"Yeah," he admitted. "'s pretty weird. But hey, at least I know what technology is capable of!"

He was back to the imprinting theory.

[lockestheway]

"You really think someone could've imprinted your brain on a different body?" Peter asked, his tone light, but on the inside he was fretting. The IF had years of his brain patterns lodged in a database somewhere... if the process could work like that, anyway.

[dollpocalypse]

"Yup," Topher said easily. "Definitely. It's not that hard, really. You'd just have to brain-map someone and find someone else whose brain had the hardware to respond to an imprint like that."

This was maybe something he'd thought about a lot.

[lockestheway]

Peter let his little freak-out pass over him underneath his amenable guise. At least until he realised that if the IF had that kind of technology, to copy and tweak him, they never would've bothered requesting Ender.

(Unless there really was just something fundamentally wrong with him. The thought sobered him as it always did.)

"So that's what you meant when you said you were interested in brains, huh?"

[dollpocalypse]

Topher shrugged. "I mean, yeah," he admitted. "I wouldn't wanna be a doctor or whatever, but messing around with how brains work could be fun."

Getting excited now, he said, "There's this program I found where you can access a real brain map and see how the system responds if you tweak different things about it. It's awesome."

If you were a dork, yes. Yes, it was.

[lockestheway]

Or an evil teenage boy plotting the take-over of the planet.

Though Peter was pretty sure that 'messing up people's brains just for my own personal gain' was up on the list of things that made people think there was something fundamentally wrong with you, so he shied away from active enthusiasm about the idea.

"It'd probably be very useful in the medical community," he said instead, finding somewhere to sit the hell down. "Where I come from, it's possible to translate that data into... observable thoughts and emotions, I guess."

[dollpocalypse]

Medicine. Gross.

"Yeah, sure," Topher said, going along with it for the sake of their evil-teenage-boy friendship. "That'd definitely work. Like if someone was dying but he was in the middle of an important project or whatever, he could have his brain transferred into someone else to finish the job."

[lockestheway]

"Yeah," Peter said, somewhat distractedly. "Like that. Though you'd have to go looking around for volunteers..."

[dollpocalypse]

"You could offer a reward," Topher said excitedly, like this was a fun brainstorming session. Because really, it kind of was. "Like, donate your body to someone else for a few years and you get... I don't know. Free stuff."

[lockestheway]

"But would the person whose imprint gets moved to the next body give it up so easily again?" Peter said. "And it's a pretty hard-to-sell idea if you're thinking about the general public."

[dollpocalypse]

"Unless," Topher theorized, "you did it to people who couldn't say no." This was getting into the sketchy mind-rape category, yes. "Like... people in jail, or something."

[lockestheway]

"And wind up in trouble with about a hundred human rights groups," Peter argued. ... Yeah, the argument you were looking for was 'but that isn't moral', Peter. "You'd have to be cleverer than that. Go for people off the grid who really need it - but you'd have to build it up slowly, and be able to guarantee that whatever they put in a contract gets held up."

[dollpocalypse]

Topher nodded thoughtfully. It was strange -- when this theoretical facility did get set up, it wouldn't be Topher behind the logistics, but he and Peter seemed to have a scarily accurate perception of how it should work.

"Or," he said, holding up a hand, "we keep it quiet, and only let people know it exists if we're sure they want a piece of it."

[lockestheway]

Of course Peter had a good idea of how it should be set-up. He was Peter Wiggin, thank you very much, and while the IF might not have thought he was special enough to go to Battle School, he was still cleverer than just about anyone.

... Peter's fragile ego was firmly at the wheel here, folks.

"Sure, that might work for a couple of years," Peter said, "But one expose - or one good hacker - and you're dealing with a PR nightmare."

[dollpocalypse]

"Given," Topher said with the wrong icon, "that anyone believed it."

That was important.