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

[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.