Room 401, Sunday Evening

[ultron_junior]

Victor's entire birthday celebration this year had consisted of two jelly donuts at J,GoBs, and he was totally fine with that. First, because he was turning 19, and that wasn't really a big birthday no matter how you looked at it -- he'd been legally old enough to vote for a year, but wouldn't be able to buy a beer to celebrate for two more. (It also made him feel like a little bit of a dumbass, still being in high school at 19. Though he figured spending a year in an underground teen crimefighting gang would put a lot of people off-schedule.)

Second, it was a pretty arbitrary date. Maybe it was literally the day he was made, maybe Ultron had just picked a month and a day at random. Wherever it had come from, it wasn't like he was even the ghost of an idea on February 16, 1995.

Isabelle had called off their date on account of kids, and Victor had no particular other plans for the day. (He also had no kids this year -- a fact that he had decidedly mixed feelings about.) He'd gotten a couple birthday greetings on Facebook, and he spent some time thanking people before settling down with his physics textbook. Science was his birthday party this year.

[OOC: Cracked door, open post.]

Comments

[nobloodymessiah.livejournal.com]

Eleanor didn't mean to be nosy; she was simply wandering the halls, unwilling to stay cooped up in her room, and not especially wanting to visit with any of her friends' new children, either.

She saw Victor through the door crack and remembered that she had yet to stop in at his workplace, so he could explain the Internet to her.

Impulsively, she knocked.

(if it's not too late?)

[ultron_junior]

Victor hadn't expected company, and it took him a moment to pull himself away from a fascinating chapter on fluid dynamics.

"Eleanor," he said, once the door was all the way open. He was surprised to see her, but actually pretty happy about the company. "Hey. What's up?"

[OOC: Not too late anymore?]

[nobloodymessiah.livejournal.com]

"Hi," she said, feeling a touch uncertain. She wasn't exactly sure of the protocol of just ... knocking on people's doors. Making friends. Any of it. "I'm sorry. You weren't busy, were you?"

She offered him a wry smile. "I mean, not so busy that you don't mind being disturbed."

[ultron_junior]

"Well, I had a hot date with my physics book, but I think it'll wait for me," Victor said, moving out of the door to gesture Eleanor in. "It's fine. Besides, it's nice to have somebody visit when everybody else is busy with kids."

[nobloodymessiah.livejournal.com]

"That's why I'm avoiding the common rooms," Eleanor admitted, as she stepped through the doorway. "Entirely too many loud and tiny people swarming about. Were you skipped, too?"

It shouldn't bother her -- she had expected it, really -- and yet it did.

"I am pleased that I outrank thermodynamics," she added.

[ultron_junior]

"Fluid dynamics, actually," Victor teased, grinning a bit. "Would have been a harder choice if it was thermodynamics."

"And yeah, no kids this year. But I got two last year, so I figure it averages out."

[nobloodymessiah.livejournal.com]

"I'll keep that in mind," Eleanor laughed. "No knocking on your door if you're knee-deep in entropy."

She gave him a curious glance for the rest of it. "So it varies?" she asked. "These aren't the set, decided future? I thought perhaps ..."

That it had been a message, of sorts. One she didn't particularly like to hear.

[ultron_junior]

Victor shook his head firmly. "Nah, it's just the island giving us sneak peeks at possibilities," he said. "Last year I had one with the girl I was dating and one with a guy friend of mine. Pretty sure neither of those relationships is actually going to turn into real kids."

he added, off-hand, "I don't think there's a set and decided future, anyhow."

[nobloodymessiah.livejournal.com]

"I don't know what I believe," Eleanor admitted. "I've never really thought about it before. How would ..."

She frowned, catching up. "A guy friend of yours. So the children were adopted, or ... aren't constrained to the realm of biological possibilities?"

(sorry, was at work!)

[ultron_junior]

Victor wrinkled his nose. "I think Buzz was a made-in-a-lab cloning project," he said. "We can do stuff like that in my world. But some of the kids are just these totally bizarre combinations where you don't want to think too hard about how the biology works."

[nobloodymessiah.livejournal.com]

Eleanor was going to be grateful for a moment that she hadn't had any clones of herself show up. That would somehow have been worse than no kids at all.

"I feel like that applies to so much of the island," she mused. "Many things you don't want to think about too hard, or your brain starts trying to devour itself."

[ultron_junior]

"Some of this stuff bends my brain, and I have a high tolerance for weird," Victor agreed. "And you're coming from a place without a lot of technology, right? That has to be a couple thousand times worse."

[nobloodymessiah.livejournal.com]

"I haven't much idea what's weird and what isn't," she said, apologetically. "I grew up ... in an unusual sort of place. And I'm only a few decades behind, but they seem to have been very eventful decades. Suddenly everyone has mobile phones that play sophisticated games, and all the computers talk to one another."

[ultron_junior]

"Which I was supposed to tell you about," Victor remembered. "Got time for a crash course on the internet?"

[nobloodymessiah.livejournal.com]

"I absolutely do," Eleanor said. "If you don't mind. I don't want to keep you from fluid dynamics, even if they are less dull than thermodynamics. So why are all of these computers talking to one another, anyway?"

[ultron_junior]

"Because about 40 years ago, a bunch of computer scientists decided they wanted to figure out a way to get information from one computer to another without, like, carrying tons of magnetic tape all over the place," Victor explained. He was already turning on his laptop as he spoke. "They started sending data over the phone lines. Then maybe ten years after that, computers got smaller and cheaper, so some people had 'em at home. And they used the phone line thing to set up bulletin boards so they could talk about Galaxy Quest or trade recipes or whatever."

He glanced over at her. "With me so far?"

[nobloodymessiah.livejournal.com]

"I think so," Eleanor said. "You tack a message up and anyone can reply. It's like calling in to a central location and saying 'I like ice cream, who else?' and then calling back to see who else has contributed. I imagine it wouldn't take long for social groups to emerge."

[ultron_junior]

"Right!" Victor exclaimed. "Especially after computers got even cheaper and faster, so pretty much everybody had access to the internet. So instead of just the 'I like ice cream' group, you have a group for chocolate, a group for vanilla, a group for vegans who think ice cream is the devil, and a group of people who want to write dirty stories about ice cream." A pause. "It's a weird place sometimes."

[nobloodymessiah.livejournal.com]

"So ..." Eleanor was trying to follow along. "Now everybody joins groups so they can passionately argue about whose ice cream flavor is best? That ..."

Well.

"Actually, that ... sounds like something people would do."

Human nature being what it was, and all.

"The ... dirty stories, about the ice cream, is that just a metaphor?" she asked, hopefully.

[ultron_junior]

"Yeah, that's a metaphor," Victor said, though his eyes were shifty.

It seemed a little early to explain Rule 34 to Eleanor.

"And yeah, people online will fight about anything. There are a lot of people who make crap up just to start a fight, even. Like, somebody who doesn't care about ice cream might go to the chocolate board and post that chocolate ice cream made them sick, then laugh if people get mad."

Because humans.