(no subject)

[fearofpiggies]

It had been a few days of radio silence on Dib's end. His house's AI picked up the IMs he missed with 'Dib's not home, pal. He's off doing that dumb deep research thing he does. If he dies, I'll let you know' and that was the end of it.

And Eddie was right. He was doing that dumb deep research thing he did. In fact, he had been in an abandoned amusement park that had been built on top of an old factory site that had lots of fucked up deaths attributed to both places, and even more fucked up hauntings. It didn't help that some freaky cult of demon worshipers had been using the abandoned haunted house attraction as a meeting place and had been doing rituals there for years, thus inviting in literally every dark presence in the immediate area of the site. It was basically the only time Dib could be talked into going to an amusement park without getting him grousing.

When he returned home after three days of extensive research and recording of phenomena, Dib was exhausted, but satisfied with the results he'd gotten. His first order of business was to take a long shower to wash off the dried ectoplasm that had gotten on him, as well as the three-day stink of someone who slept in his car instead of getting a hotel room. He didn't bother brushing his hair back or shaving, because he'd be going straight to sleep after winding down from an adventurous weekend. Once he stepped out of the bathroom, he made his way out to the living room, sprawling out on his sofa to see what he'd missed on his social networks.

Not much, it seemed. He didn't keep a very long list of contacts; the few that he kept were in alternate dimensions, or in the vague shadow agency of the Swollen Eyeball Network.

Do you never sleep? He wrote to Sollux, having seen him actively online practically every hour of the day, over the course of about a month.
 

Comments

[apocalypticduality]

Sollux shrugged again and sprawled across the couch with his legs stretched out to let his heels rest on the floor, his ankles crossed. He laced his fingers together on top of his stomach, looking over at Dib getting comfortable and deciding he should do so as well with his head back on a couch cushion, legs crossed one knee over the other. "Mothtly I worry about it becauthe anyone with a perthonality hath the capability of becoming a pthycotic athhole like your little alien buddy, just more capable. Then the philothophical quethtionth come up and nobody wantth to deal with that exthept for Karkat." He'd mentioned the others every so often over the time he'd been in contact with Dib and had given him at least some background knowledge of them, just in case they ever decided to drop by while Dib was visiting. Thus far the only thing that had happened was a couple of phone calls.

[fearofpiggies]

"Anybody ever tell you that you read too much Asimov?" Dib said with a smirk as he kept his eyes busy with the TV. "I know some folks in different realities that have that kind of shit happen to their artificial intelligence, but you have to remember this is this reality we're talking about, and by and large, my reality is fucking stupid. When I have to go out scouring different planes of existence to find someone reasonably intelligent to talk to? Yeah. Not exactly what I'd call stellar amounts of terrifying here. I mean sure, shit is deadly, but the last time I ever felt any fear of mortal danger by way of sapient computer intelligence was in third grade." He finished off his beer and looked over to Sollux. "Not to say there isn't a possibility that Eddie would be able to go batshit insane and try to kill me, but I'm more worried that he's going to try and build himself a mouth and eat all of my cheetos."

He looked up at the ceiling and shrugged. "But I mean, from your perspective, I suppose it makes sense that you're taking the pessimistic route. Shit hardly seems to go well for your reality, it's just one set of complicated bullshit after the next." He rubbed his scruffy face and let out a small yawn. "You know what? I still would prefer your far more dangerous world than this place."

[apocalypticduality]

"The likelihood of a non-thtupid death ith higher but at least mine is infinitely more interesting than used napkin food," Sollux agreed, snorting as he finished off his own beer then stretched one leg over to prop his foot up on Dib's knee. "How ith all that working for you by the way? Having an actual diet that conthithtth of food?"

[fearofpiggies]

"My body is still getting used to processing it, I think," Dib said honestly as he raised his eyebrow to Sollux's foot, idly examining the build of it and how it differed from human feet. "I'm still wary of actual meat. That didn't work out as well as I would have hoped. It tastes amazing, but I'm pretty sure I'll have to stay away from it if I want to live." He wrinkled his nose and then shook his head. "I'll probably be all right after a year or so."

After a couple minutes, he shook his head, having started to drift off. "All right, unless you're planning on sleeping on the couch, I think it's time we head back there." He turned off the TV and sat up, stretching his arms over his head before standing. "C'mon, the bed's comfier anyway."

[apocalypticduality]

"Ath long ath you don't have an alarm clock thet to go off in the morning for any reathon, I would love to join you," Sollux yawned and stood, following after Dib and leaning heavily against his back. "Jutht acclimate yourthelf. A ham thandwich a day or thomething," he murmured then stepped around Dib to crawl into his bed, sprawling facedown on top of the blankets. He would be out in minutes, as he would have been had he stayed on the couch.

[fearofpiggies]

"Ahahaha, no," Dib laughed, sounding a little flat, "I don't even have a clock in there, except for my phone most of the time." He sprawled out under the covers and took off his glasses, putting them on the bedside table before falling straight to sleep.

The heavy, dark drapes kept the sun from coming in, although the north-facing apartment helped that, as well. Waking up was a slow process for Dib, when it wasn't out of being startled awake by the sound of Eddie's panic alarm going off or the sound of an onslaught to his defense systems by a certain green nuisance. He blearily opened his eyes to see Sollux beside him, and then drifted back off for a few minutes. Once he was more mentally coherent, he finally sat up and rubbed his face, looking a little amused by the thin, tall form of his friend sprawled out over more than half of the mattress, before he got up and started his morning routine. One which started somewhere in the mid-afternoon, and apparently didn't have shaving in its plans this time around. He made his coffee, ate a bowl of breakfast, and poked around at the things on his work bench, before he went off to get dressed.

[apocalypticduality]

Sollux barely moved between Dib getting up and him coming back to get dressed, his face pressed just a little deeper into the mattress as he slept. He cracked one faintly glowing eye open and watched Dib move around the room, sucking in a deeper breath as he sat up and rubbed a hand into his eyes. He leaned back against the wall with his legs crossed, hands in his lap. He didn't have to ask what time it is; he really didn't care. The only reason he felt he would be going home in the next day or so would be to retrieve something edible, provided Dib didn't still have any real food left from his last shopping trip. He didn't bother asking about clothes either, knowing that very little of Dib's stuff would actually fit him. And it was still tuesday. Eddie could just eat his ass.

"Planth or jutht dicking around the houthe?" he yawned as he climbed out of bed and fished around for his glasses, slipping them up the bridge of his nose then vigorously scratching through his hair with both hands.

[fearofpiggies]

"Hm? Oh, no plans, at least none yet," Dib said with a murmur, pulling on his black jeans. "I can't seem to wake up enough to really focus on anything," he continued as he smiled, nodding to Sollux's clothes that he brought in with him from the living room on his return trip to get dressed. "Coffee's made, there's cereal in the cupboard." He pulled out a shirt at random and tugged it on. It clearly didn't matter which shirt he was going to wear, they were all variations on the same theme of black sleeveless t-shirt with either some monosyllabic word in white, or a simplistic memento mori design.

"If you need anything, let me know, I've probably got it around."

[apocalypticduality]

"My needth don't really get much more complicated than jutht thomething to do that doethn't make me want to cave my pan in on the nearetht wall," Sollux shrugged then pulled on his pajama pants, leaving his sweater for when a shirt might become necessary, which didn't seem like it would in the near future. He knew better than to walk outside this house when he was here, and Dib rarely seemed to get visitors besides a single shouty green guy that he'd already encountered and come out singularly unimpressed. As soon as Dib was dressed he leaned over him, putting his chin against the top of his head and leaning against his back mostly to invade his space. His fingers hooked into the back loops of Dib's jeans, pulling him back with a vague smirk.

[fearofpiggies]

With the pull backwards, Dib huffed a chuckle, and crossed his arms, tapping his fingers on his elbow. "I guess there's a couple things I could think of doing for right now, but I wouldn't call them full-blown plans." He squirmed away just to get into Sollux's space instead, looking up at him with a dark little grin. "How good are you at holding reeeeally still? I've got another project that I need some help with, and I'm pretty sure nobody else will volunteer."

[apocalypticduality]

"I could make a statue weep in envy," Sollux replied with a quiet, brief purr and leaned forward against Dib, dipping briefly to catch his lips then standing back up straight, or at least as straight as he ever did before his natural slouch kicked back in. "What's the project then?"

[fearofpiggies]

Dib kissed back and then led the way out of the room, talking the whole time.

"Neural transceivers. I was talking to Vriska about her robotic prosthetic arm, and how it's directly attached to the tissue and muscle of what's left of her natural arm. It uses the electrical pulses sent from the brain to move, and she says it works just as well as any natural arm ever did for her. I got to thinking, what if it could work better than that? Instead of waiting for the impulses to register in the prosthetic, which probably has something of a delay, because the nerves and tissue of her arm are damaged, why not work with a neural transceiver? That way it's coming from the source - or at least closer to it - and give more subtle instruction in what to do. She says she has middling small motor function, which leads me to believe that her guy, while talented, hasn't figured out how to properly program things for minor movements that make things more fluid." He settled down on his stool in front of his work bench and held up something that looked like a microchip, which it basically was.

"Which is what got me to thinking, why just program for things that the body can normally do? Why stop there? She's got a robotic arm, for fuck's sake, she could upgrade it and make it do all *sorts* of shit, like it was as natural as flipping the bird."

[apocalypticduality]

His head at a tilt, Sollux listened and thought about potentially asking Equius about his hardware, though he knew that the blueblood never made blueprints, given the lack of fortified pencils that could handle him. He looked down at the little silicon chip and nodded. "He hath thlight ithueth with being able to work really fine tuning, it'th not really hith fault. If you were to be able to fine-tune tech like that you'd be able to do just about anything ath far ath artificial limbs are contherned. So what do you need me to act ath the guinea pig for?" he asked, leaning his elbow on the work table and picking up one of the larger chunks of slightly foreign-looking tech to turn over in his hand.

[fearofpiggies]

"She told me that, too, something about him having mutant strength. I don't look down on him for what he can't do, that's for sure, especially when what he can do is leaps and bounds ahead of most everybody else." He smiled when Sollux asked. "I've found that thinkpans and brains are almost literally the same, with only minor, superficial differences. The fact that they both connect to the body through the spinal cord is all I really needed to know to work this up. I've already tested it on myself, but just to get the kinks out of the system, I'll need you to put this at the nape of your neck, where your spine and skull connect." he said, handing the chip over. "The sticky back should hold it in place and also serve as a conductor. You might feel a little bit of a tingling sensation, but that's all." He stood and went to awaken Eddie from his sleep mode, and with Eddie's assistance, he brought up a floating screen that would give readouts of what the transceiver was receiving in terms of brain activity, and eventually show information it was putting out to remote groups of prosthetic nerves.

"Awesome. Setting things at base level takes more than one set of readouts," he explained, "And if you just... move your hand, you'll see the difference. How much information it takes just to curl your hand into a fist. You need a faster neural transceiver to pick up that kind of information, or a lot of it gets lost. I bet every time Vriska has to do anything with that arm, she has to really concentrate on it." He sat back down beside Sollux. "But the practical application of this isn't specific to prosthetic limbs for amputees. My dad used to be on the brink of cybernetic technology, advancing it by decades, but his infamously short attention span pulled him away from it. We really haven't made much progress as a society with that front since then. Individually, though..." He got a tiny, secretive smile.

[apocalypticduality]

Sollux returned his smile and immediately turned in place. A moment's discomfort was nothing compared to advancing neural technology. Once the chip was in place he fought the urge to scratch at the back of his neck, wincing a bit at momentary stinging then reading the information as it started to roll up the screen. He started small, moving his fingers, then curling them inward to make a fist. He was beyond impressed with Dib's handiwork, that much was obvious.

Soon he was moving his arm in every way he could think of, giving as much data as possible, even going so far as to start fiddling with his sylladex, his fingers tapping the holographic keyboard then catching a rubber ball out of the air as it fell out of its slot. He started to toss this from hand to hand without paying much attention.

"When you go all mainstream with thith and become the world'th premier neurothientitht don't forget the little guyth that helped you get there," he teased, looking back at Dib with a small smirk.

[fearofpiggies]

"What? No, I'm not doing this for money or fame or anything," Dib said with a scoff. He shook his head. "I'm doing it because I can." He didn't want to have the fame his father did, especially in any field that his father had already touched on. "So the next part is to sit really still and just imagine you're doing everything you just did. Just imagine moving your hand, curling your fingers, blah blah, you get the idea. It should still show up, though in a more subdued way." He settled back with a tiny smile on his face. "And then we'll get to the fun part."

[apocalypticduality]

"You take joketh way too theriouthly thometimeth," Sollux muttered and laid his hand against the back of Dib's neck, pressing a brief kiss to his forehead then sitting back and going through the mental motions, clearly taking the instructions seriously. His fingers twitched every now and then, his eyes flickering across the screen.

"There'th one more thing you should probably add to the readout," me mentioned after a few moments. "If you really want to fine-tune thith I mean. It won't take long to gather the data and I imagine it'll give you better data for really fine motor thkillth." With that he once more sifted through his sylladex, retrieving his laptop and booting it up, finding one of his online friends to start to bother. He told them a little bit of what he was doing, mostly getting a confused response as he lapsed into the technical language. Eventually the window was filled with a wall of yellow text that he'd tapped out just as quickly as anyone would have expected of him, and he bit the troll on the other end farewell before putting the computer away again. He looked back up at the monitor readout and smiled faintly at the information scrolling by.

"Time for the fun part?"

[fearofpiggies]

Dib wasn't about to protest some more data, especially when Sollux was being such a good sport about all of it. "Okay no seriously? That's ridiculous, even by non-human standards," he said to the way that Sollux typed so fast that his fingers were almost a blur. "Anyway, back to what I was doing. Which I was doing in an order so your mind got used to the process. Okay, I need you to go back to doing what we were doing before, just imagining moving your hands, your arms, showing what data we had before." He watched the progress on the screen, and then smirked.

"Okay, now I need you to imagine doing something you can't physically do. Tell me exactly what you're imagining you're doing. It can be anything. Like maybe you have a sixth finger on your left hand, or you're opening up a hidden compartment in your forearm. Y'know, whatever it is. It has to be realistic in your mind, though. Like, as real as imagining you're making a fist was. You get me? It'll help the data if you tell me exactly how it works in your mind." Dib looked over at Eddie's camera, and smiled a little. "Eddie's recording the audio so I don't need to dictate everything you're doing. Just go ahead and start whatever it is you're not doing."

[apocalypticduality]

Thinking over his options, Sollux propped his chin on his hand and tapped his fingers across his lips, then hummed quietly at a sudden image that came to his mind. He described, in great detail, the act of simply typing, then lifting his fingers from the keyboard and extending, then splitting off into another three tips that would allow him to type the code as fast as it scrolled through his mind. It was any worthy coder's dream. It didn't matter that it was some anime shit.

[fearofpiggies]

"Aha, that shit," Dib said with amusement, knowing exactly what Sollux was describing. "Okay, instead of focusing on both hands doing that, can you imagine just one finger doing it? That way it'll isolate each movement in your mind, and that'll help a lot more than the chaos you're showing on the screen right now. That's really complex work, too, but I can't say it isn't fucking awesome. And you'd be an unstoppable force, that's for sure." Once he had Sollux focused on a single finger doing what he wanted, and then the sensations that would come with it, he concluded the experiment, and had Sollux remove the transceiver. "See, that data is going to be really useful for my next big project, assuming I have time to do it." He leaned back and swiveled in his chair, grinning a dark little grin that he got when he was orchestrating a grand scheme in his mind.

"I might not be doing it for fortune or fame, but I'm sure as hell not going to turn down commissions on it. And I already have a certain spidery bitch who's really interested in upgrading her arm." He shrugged, "I've got a thing or two I want, myself, but that comes next."

[apocalypticduality]

"Great, upgraded spiderbitch. KK'th gonna evitherate me." Snorting quietly, Sollux captchalogued his belongings again and laced his fingers together behind his head. He looked back at Dib with a lazy smile in the face of that evil look. "I thought you thaid now we were going to do thomething fun," he teased. "Thith hath been interethting, but not exactly my definition of high entertainment."

[fearofpiggies]

"Whatever, that was pretty fun," Dib argued, slipping out of his seat to put one knee on the space of the chair which wasn't currently occupied by Sollux's ass, and he leaned over him, putting his hand on the back of the chair. "But I'm pretty sure I know where your mind was headed with that." The dark smile had been replaced by something just a shade more impish. He ignored a groaning protest from Eddie, who decided it was time to go back into standby, and he looked into Sollux's eyes.

"But maybe you should fill me in on what you were thinking."

[apocalypticduality]

"You," he interrupted himself with a light peck of Dib's lips, "are a huge," another kiss, "nerd." Grinning, Sollux slipped his fingers into the pockets of the other's jeans, pulling him forward just a hair more then mouthing along the underside of his jaw and down the front of his throat. "Honethtly I didn't really have much in mind, I jutht want thomething to do that'll latht a while. Even if itth jutht playing video gameth or thomething, ethpethially thinthe I'm not thtepping foot out of thith houthe while I'm here."

[fearofpiggies]

"A wise decision if I've ever heard one," Dib said with a chuckle as he tipped his head back with a purring murmur of, "I like the or something option. There's a couple consoles hidden away in the entertainment center, but..." He tipped his head down and caught Sollux's lips with his own, persuading him into a rough kiss.

[apocalypticduality]

"Then gameth later, or thomething now." Sollux pressed back into the kiss and slipped his tongue in past Dib's lips, encouraging the kiss deeper as his hands began to wander, shoving Dib's shirt up to his chest then leaving it there as his thumbs ran over the other's nipples. He wanted to continue on right here in the chair, but at a small warning creak he finally leaned away and ran his hands back down to rest at Dib's hips.