But without further ado...

24x23: Fool's Gold

They first meet in the Testing Laboratory. It's a simple calibrations test; an extremely simple rudimentary assault course meant to test joint mobility, degrees of movement, traction speeds and software handling. Rion proudly announces she is going to come first, and leave all the other vocaloid robots 'in the water', as if it's some sort of competition; a competition she completely fails when she jumps the first hurdle. The landing is spectacular; it manages to involve all of her face.

After the Moe Japan associate is done apologising and Miss Rion is driven away on a cart like waiting staff embarrassingly trying to scoot off a fallen wedding cake before anyone notices, everyone has to stand around in quiet awe of Miss Rion's achievement... until they finally snap out it and her own turn comes along.

It goes perfectly, though once again the crystal on her head makes low hanging ceilings somewhat difficult.

The circumstances of herself and Miss Rion, she discovers quickly, are depressingly opposite.

Tone Rion is well maintained. Her staff know what they're doing, and her technical team is comprised of experts in every field. Unfortunately, they're the support staff, working on what had been given them, and whilst the original construction division were equally talented, they were equally putting their talents towards creating what the marketing team had cheerfully termed 'a complete ditz'.

Aoki gives them credit. They've done a very good job.

Lapis, however, is in a stump. Same as Rion, she is likewise the first model from her company, and whilst Moe Japan had the kind of purchasing power to hire real professionals (who were likely lamenting their lack of creative oversight right now), I-Style was stuck with the lowest bidders. Or had aimed at the lowest bidders. She wasn't completely sure she wanted to find out.

The day she encountered Miss Rion for a second time, for example, was one brought on by finger error.

She'd actually noticed it a week ago. Not a hardware fault, but it wasn't tripping any of her bug catching routines. Every once in a while, in the middle of a movement, a few of the digits in her left hand would simply stop, and would only start moving again once she cleared that hand's motion tasklist. After having to spend an entire two days working out how to even get them moving again - which, true to form, went completely unnoticed by her underpaid maintainers and left a small string of mysteriously broken coffee cups all over the company lounge - she reported the issue, got a full scan in the debugging suite... and then was promptly let out again with a clean bill of health.

“Just try not to set it off again, yeah?” Company had told her, before having to rush off because Marketing had decided to surprise them with another batch of pillow designs.

It takes another five days of trails, errors and experimentations with the built-in dance routines before she finally finds the correct response.

“Ah.” She states calmly, observing her locked middle digit halfway through the PV shoot. “Finger error.”

The Producer predictably looks like he's just been force-fed an ice cube and proceeds to sputter into incoherence as the Technical staff rush over to examine the suddenly very important fault.

They're halfway through dismissing it as a programming issue and wondering if it was a hardware fault when Rion walks on set, quite out of the blue, processes the scene in a second and screams.

She will never be quite sure if Tone Rion actually did manage to cross the space between them that quickly, or if her completely unexpected appearance just threw her observation loop for enough cycles to make it appear the twintailed purplette teleported there. It's something Aoki has filed in her growing list of Do Not Want To Know. Either way, before anyone has had a chance to recover from the unexpected appearance of the trespassing android, Miss Rion is standing directly in front of her, the perfect picture of distress, with Aoki's still locked middle finger held tight in her mechanically tight grip.

“Oh no, you can't do that! You just can't do that my precious kohai!”

She's too surprised, quite literally too surprised, to actually respond to that. Her cognitive loop locks. The reasoning processor tries, fails, comes up with something about cheese and is probably shut down by an error collection subroutine that finally decides to do its job. Her main Initiative Complex just throws a NULL.

404, Logic Not Found.

It takes several seconds Aoki never bothers to count before people finally catch up on the situation and, in a fit of common sense, attempt to pull off the Moe Japan android in a way that won't damage another corporate's property.

Stuck frozen in place by the fault of her own machinery, Aoki gets to see every detail of Miss Rion's face as she is pulled away. The competitor loid struggles, holding on valiantly, their eyes never breaking contact. Aoki doesn't look away because she literally can't, but Miss Rion seems completely devoid of any low level fault or detriment of hardware. Emotion seems to well within her glassy-purple iris orbs. A small part of her, distant and watching separate to the cascade of system failures wracking her physical body, really has to admire the detail, the amount of work that's gone into her as she is wrenched away, tearfully awaiting a reply from a mouth that cannot move.

Then her finger comes away with a soft pop, and all awe she holds for the competitor's work politely dies.

It takes her ten minutes to realise that with the finger still hidden away in Miss Rion's hands, no-one else has noticed what just happened. It takes the rest of the staff a whole two hours to see that their shining star, Aoki Lapis, is currently nine fingered.

She has long since learned how to repress the urge to sigh.

Tone Rion fails the first of the quality assurance tests and then sails through the rest with flying colours. Aoki Lapis takes five months and seven bribes, and even then it's against recommendation.

The third time doesn't take long, as it leads directly on from the second. For some reason, the Moe loid hadn't informed anyone in her parent company about her actions either, so when I-Project raised a complaint it sparked a minor trans-company incident. Aoki liked to imagine it involved a lot of paperwork, and made doubly sure the main office was sprinkled with an extra serving of broken coffee cups. She hopes the higher-ups will be driven to pulling their hair, to further hasten their descent into baldness and wigs.

It's solved quickly, however.The footage of the still running PV cameras that captured the event, fast convinces the Moe Japan staff that yes, their pet robot really had gone and broken into their competitor's studio to steal another robot's finger, and all too soon they're all meeting outside a conference room in the I-Studio headquarters with the M-Japan delegation, Miss Rion in tow.

Aoki hates the place. Everything is kept so clean and pristine, all the surfaces are kept in tip-top condition and in the Management section they're in now, it looks for all the world as if no expense has been spared. She pulls a few rough calculations and works out the gigantic monitor adorning the opposite wall costs more than her entire right arm.

It's playing a recording of one of her demo sequences, currently on mute. She wants nothing more than to ram her fist through it.

Miss Rion only parts with the stolen finger tearfully, explaining over and over again how she didn't mean to do it. She just wanted to see her, she said. Her handler has her sitting in a plush chair and is patiently explaining to her, his hands clasped over hers as a grown businessman in suit-and-tie speaks on his knees as if addressing a twelve year old girl not to cry, it'll be alright and no, they're not mad. Just a little confused.

Aoki is left standing next to the watercooler, fully upright with her physical systems disabled as a technician peels back the layers of synthetic skin to accessing the realm of wires and metal in full view of the M-Japan delegation. The only words are bartered technical jargon as her maintenance team in grubby shirts start testing the connections and worrying if they'll have to replace the parts. Only Rion actually looks her in the eyes, and when she does she jumps straight back to her handler as if she's suddenly been shot.

One of her maintainers mutters bitterly about the breakdown caught on camera in the PV shoot. If it weren't for their precious star mechanically flipping the bird they could have released the footage onto Youtube and destroyed their rival's fledgling reputation. His voice is dark and slimy and all the others do is chuckle quietly as they tinker and tailor her half-attached finger.

Using an old backroutine everyone has forgotten about, Aoki manages to jerk her incomplete arm in a sudden movement that almost launches it up his nose. The meeting abruptly ends.

No charges are pressed. The incident is not made public. In a high office of a corporate headquarter, someone cancels all future I-Style and M-Japan collaborative projects.

They never meet in person for several months. Tone doesn't make a big impact on the charts, but her funding manages to net her a few stage shows and to Aoki's surprise the robotic girl actually does manage to court a fanbase. She doesn't frequent their forums, however. She finds them a little creepy.

The I-Style Project flounders.

Part of it is her own fault, she knows. She can't help it, it's just one of the few forms of freedom she knows. She is constantly prodded. She is constantly poked. Parts are swapped out, swapped in, reconverted and mixed. Once, the bearings on her right foot are accidentally left out of alignment and even she doesn't notice until she is going down on it, crashing through a stage light and putting Studio 4 out of action for several days. The ankle joint is left completely totalled and has to be filled with a fast-sealing polycement, leaving her with a completely immobile stump of metal for a foot until the replacement leg arrives. Nothing in her walking system knows how to handle it; she has to improvise a limping hop by cycling the same few frames out of a dance routine over and over again. One of the senior programmers who hasn't logged into her codebase in months claims credit for the 'fix', and nets himself another pay rise.

A long while after that incident, they're finally confident - or pressured enough - to let her into the outside world. Or at least, the public eye under carefully controlled conditions. An industry show has been arranged where all the latest artificial intelligences can be put out on view, and naturally the Vocaloids are going to be there, mingling in the crowds with their handlers nervously following a few paces back at all times.

It's going to be Aoki's main debut after almost a year of delays, and she can practically hear the groaning of the management under the pressure of a thousand angry shareholders. There's not a lot of hopes and dreams, but there is an awful lot of money riding on her performance today.

No one gives her words of encouragement. No-one says anything to her at all. The buck passes the whip, and the chain of command lashes down the line; bosses pressuring their managers, managers pressuring their foremen, foremen pressuring the maintainers that tamper and tweak as they try desperately to make a broken doll dance.

Aoki has long since lost the ability to laugh. Her technical staff found it too disturbing.

The day arrives and someone sets Aoki the silver carpet.

The handler team can best be described as 'panicked'. Laptops are kept always on. Someone has an eye on her at all times and there's a person that keeps hovering at her shoulder whose sole job for the entire evening is to try and catch her if something goes wrong. Someone in marketing is trying to tell people to play it off as 'tending to a diamond princess' but no-one's paying attention because something in her spinal column has apparently decided it doesn't exist anymore and isn't responding to any commands.

Technical wants to pull. Management sweats and just shakes his head.

They manage her time carefully. Don't mingle in the crowds, they can move her through the backstage corridors. Don't talk to the press, converse with the other Vocaloids as much as possible. Try not to move. Try not to break down.

Try not to fail.

They're talking to her now. It takes her a moment to realise they're not actually treating her like a sentient being. They're just projecting it on her out of stress.

Suddenly she can't wait to bring the whole thing down.

And then Miss Rion grasps her by the hands.

She grasps her by the hands and leads her out of their car to the flash of cameras and the cheers of the press. She's completely breaching protocol and the M-Japan handlers look like they're going to need new trousers in the very near future but the competitor loid doesn't seem to care. Her own handlers are probably having minor fits right now but she can't go back and look at them because Tone Rion has grasped her by the hands and is leading her out into the outside world.

It takes her a moment to realise this isn't a mechanical fault. She just doesn't want to.

It's nothing she can explain. Nothing has failed in the central logic loop. Observation hasn't decided to skip a few minutes. Nothing has crashed in any of her processing banks. She just doesn't want to. For the moment, the spontaneity of Miss Rion has captured her completely. Some part of her notices she's pulled her into the main foyer, some part of her notices she is talking to her but she's too engulfed to pay it any attention.

(She regrets, afterwards, not having had the sense to simply backup the audio input to her hard drive. It may well have been something important that would have made the next few hours make sense.)

Tone Rion, Moe Japan's shining idiot, is leading her in without a care in the world.

And suddenly she's free as a bird.

RETURN OF THE AUTHOR'S NOTE

S-so, uh...

Yeah, the original plan for this when the two names came up was to have a intelligent and slightly trollish Aoki fall for complete idiot Rion whilst kicking herself for it all the way. Rion being well-made but a moron whilst Aoki is smart but shoddily built was mostly just for contrast and to explain why Aoki was kinda bitter.

Then it slowly dawned on me that if you've been built to the lowest bidder by a company whose primary interest is making cushions out of you, you're probably not going to have a very good life.

I'm still not completely sure on the ending here, as I have baaw'd to Turtle about; there is a semi-planned alternative ending continuing on from this one involving Aoki bringing down I-Style and then doing a runner but... well, it just wouldn't be very happy. And considering the original idea of this meme series was Guessy Writes Daft Fluff this is a one-shot that turned out kinda dark.

I dunno. What do people think?