〈 PLAYER INFO 〉NAME: Chris
AGE: 29
JOURNAL: ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
milennialfalconIM / EMAIL: canadia.dayo@gmail.com
PLURK: ![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
objectpermanenceRETURNING: Cisco Ramon, Lando Calrissian, Merle Highchurch
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉CHARACTER NAME: Ash Starmer (2.0)
CHARACTER AGE: physically ~11, mentally ~30
SERIES: Black Mirror
CHRONOLOGY: post-2x01,
Be Right BackCLASS: average citizen
HOUSING: house him with random strangers, please. any city.
BACKGROUND:The world of Black Mirror is like ours, only with technology that is slightly more advanced in seemingly innocent, but actually unsettling ways. Each episode is its own unique story, and it is unclear whether the episodes share a universe or not. For the purposes of this app, I am treating Ash's episode as its own unique universe.
Martha Powell and Ash Starmer are a young couple who move to a remote house in the countryside. Ash is a social media addict and compulsively checks his phone for updates on his social network pages. The day after moving into the house, Ash is killed returning the hired van. At the funeral, Martha's friend Sara tells her about a new online service that lets people stay in touch with the deceased. By using all of his past online communications and social media profiles, a new "Ash" can be created virtually. Martha rejects the idea outright, but Sara signs Martha up to the service anyway, without telling her. When Martha is sent an e-mail supposedly from Ash, she furiously confronts Sara, who urges her to at least give the service a try before dismissing it.
Over the following days, Martha is overwhelmed by grief, and soon discovers that she is pregnant. Becoming emotionally unstable, she responds to the artificial Ash's e-mail. She starts to communicate with him through instant messaging, and informs him of the pregnancy. She then uploads videos and photos of Ash to the service's database, and the service duplicates Ash's voice to talk to Martha over the phone. Martha allows herself to believe that she is talking to her dead partner, and over the following weeks she talks to the artificial Ash almost non-stop, keeping him updated regarding the pregnancy. After Martha accidentally damages her phone and has a panic attack when she temporarily loses contact with the service, the artificial Ash tells her about the service's next stage, which is still in its experimental phase: a body made of synthetic flesh that the program can be uploaded onto.
Martha buys a blank, synthetic body from the service, and following the artificial Ash's instructions she allows the body to take on Ash's physical characteristics. The end result is a clone that looks almost exactly like Ash, only missing minor characteristics such as his facial hair and a mole on his neck. From the moment the clone is activated, Martha is uncomfortable and struggles to accept its existence. Despite the clone satisfying her sexually, she quickly becomes frustrated by Ash constantly doing what she says without question, its lack of emotion (only expressing emotions when she tells it to do so), and the absence of certain habits and personality traits which the real Ash had but the service did not have information on. After an argument, Martha decides she can no longer tolerate the Ash clone, taking him to the edge of a tall cliff and ordering him to jump off. The clone agrees to do so, but Martha grows even angrier, saying that the real Ash would not have willingly jumped. The clone responds by begging for its own life, causing Martha to realise that she can't bring herself to get rid of it.
The scene cuts to several years later, and Martha is shown to have raised her daughter in the country house, keeping the Ash clone locked in the attic. She allows her daughter to see the clone on weekends, but the daughter convinces Martha to allow her into the attic on her birthday to give him a piece of birthday cake. Martha's daughter reveals in her conversation with the clone that she knows it does not need to eat, and merely used this as a ruse to get extra cake; he compliments her guile. While her daughter is in the attic with the clone, Martha waits at the bottom of the attic steps close to tears, then after regaining her emotional composure, she climbs the ladder to join them.
PERSONALITY:On the surface, Ash's personality is quite bland, only displaying emotions when he is told or given permission to. He is focused on sensing the feelings of those around him, and trying to react accordingly. He does have a sense of humor, as the real Ash did, but he has a limited knowledge of how to behave, and can sometimes say or do the wrong thing. When he makes a misstep, he asks for correction, and learns from it, acting correctly the next time the situation arises. Of course, his only teacher has been Martha (and to a lesser extent her daughter), so he's used to her particular way of doing things.
Being around Ash for a short time, one might not immediately tell that he isn't "real." But spend a prolonged amount of time with him, and the difference becomes not only apparent, but disturbing. He is definitely Uncanny Valley territory. He was created for the purpose of providing companionship to a grieving loved one, and doesn't know how to function in any other context. Additionally, in his particular case, that loved one decided she could hardly bear the sight of him after just a few days in his presence, and locked him in the attic for the rest of his unnatural life. Ash has spent the better part of the last decade alone, and as such is somewhat out of practice in dealing with people.
Ash is an odd mix of child and adult, in that he's only existed for just over a decade, and so only has a child's worth of experiences, but he possesses an adult's body, brain, and social expectations. No one is going to look at him and treat him as though he's only eleven years old, even though technically he is. They will expect him to know how to behave as an adult, even though there are so many things he's never done that normal adults have.
It is unclear whether Ash feels genuine emotions such as fear, amusement, or love, or whether he's merely parroting back what his programming tells him is the appropriate response to the given stimuli. I argue that they're the same thing. His expression of emotions is as close to true feeling as he can get. One thing he can genuinely feel is confusion. When he is faced with a query or a stimulus that he cannot parse, he doesn't know how to react. His first instinct is to ask the person to repeat their question, or redefine the parameters of their request. This very much shows how he is basically just a computer with legs. If the code is broken somewhere, the program will not run.
Having spent the past decade or so of his "life" locked in an attic, only seeing two people and only that quite rarely, Ash has become lonely. He enjoys talking to people and being social, as the real Ash Starmer was a very sociable person, constantly talking to other people on his phone and listening to the news. Ash as he exists now still longs to connect to people, he has just been unable to as he couldn't leave Martha. He'll be eager to see new places and meet new people, to have new experiences and be able to learn and grow.
Ash may have better luck with strangers than he did with Martha, because Martha judges him against her feelings for, memories of, and associations with the real Ash. He could not possibly match up to her perfect example. When faced with people who never knew Ash as he was when he was alive, clone Ash has a much better chance of being accepted, despite his quirks and shortcomings. It all depends upon the open mindedness of the people he meets. Perhaps this is one reason that Martha's daughter seems to have less trouble interacting with Ash than Martha does; because she never knew her father.
POWER:Android Physiology (canon power)
As an android, Ash does not need to eat, drink, sleep, blink, or breathe. His body is completely synthetic, and also comes with the following features:
LEARNING MEMORY
Ash remembers everything the real Ash ever said or posted online, and can learn new behaviors through being told stories of what the real Ash used to say or do.
SUSTAINABLE POWER SOURCE
It is not shown in canon how Ash maintains operation over a long course of time; whether he needs to "plug in," etc. However, we do know that he is still functioning when Martha's daughter is approximately ten years old, so I headcanon that he has some sort of self-charging battery, possibly solar powered or conductive. (Or it's the future and renewable energy is just a thing.)
INTERNET CONNECTIVITY
Ash's memories and personality are stored in the cloud. He can access the internet remotely, googling things in the span of seconds merely by thinking.
PHYSICAL CUSTOMIZATION
While he cannot grow facial hair, Ash can reproduce moles or freckles instantaneously.
DAMAGE REDUCTION
While Ash's skin is not impermeable, he does not bleed if cut, and his cuts will heal if given time. Still, anything that breaks Ash's skin should be wrapped in paper.
SEXUAL PROWESS
Ash comes preprogrammed with numerous sexual subroutines, designed to give his partner ultimate pleasure. In addition, he is able to become instantly erect.
DISTANCE RESTRICTION
Ash is incapable of leaving the vicinity of his activation point, unless his administrative user, Martha, is with him. (This restriction would be lifted in game, of course.)
Digital Transferance (non-canon)
With this power, Ash will be able to send his physical body through any internet connection, allowing him to travel between internet connected devices instantly. The process has to be willing, as in the person whose device he is traveling to must accept the file transfer. He can't just travel to any device he wants to, regardless of distance or willingness of owner.
Childproofing (non-canon)
If anyone tries to attack Ash with a weapon, or use a weapon in his immediate vicinity, the weapon instantaneously gets replaced with a plastic toy replica. Guns shoot nerf bullets, knives become flimsy rubber, bombs explode confetti, and lightsabers' blades collapse in on themselves (but they still light up and make cool noises). The effect will fade after one day, returning the weapons to their rightful state after 24 hours. This does not apply to improvised weapons— if someone were to attack Ash with a chair or a smashed bottle, he would have no defense.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE: [ The video comes on, a little shaky, as if the operator is fiddling with the camera. You'd think someone as tech-connected as Ash would be experienced with a smartphone, but in fact he's never used one before. Which might explain why he's turned on the forward facing camera when he'd wanted to turn on the camera facing himself. After a second of showing an empty room, he figures it out, switching the view to himself.
He's a scrawny looking fellow, with a pale face that might be recognizable as an imPort already present in this universe, though never quite as raggedy looking. He wears a plain jumper, and his red hair lies flat, not gelled or styled. When he speaks, he speaks with an Irish accent. ]Hello, everyone. I've spoken to some of you, but I haven't really reached out to the whole lot just yet. So I suppose this is me, reaching out.
Hi. I'm Ash.
I, em, heard we just passed Christmas. Which is too bad, I would have liked to see the decorations.
[ Martha didn't really decorate the outside of the house with lights, as she didn't have any neighbors to see. There was a tree, of course, but Ash was never invited downstairs to see it. ] It's a bit mad, really. It was only just Spring, for me. We were having birthday cake. I suppose it'll be Spring again soon.
[ He's rambling. This is what happens when you feed an entire person's life into a predictive text generator and let it run free. He catches himself, realizing that he isn't really making any coherent point, and pauses. Resets. Starts over. ]I've never been to America before. I'm wondering what I should go see. I don't mean things like the Grand Canyon-- it's really just a big gap, isn't it? But things worth seeing. Interesting things.
[ He smiles. That's enough of a request for now. ]Ta.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: TDM threadFINAL NOTES: Whether Ash's personality programming would be housed on the "cloud" or downloaded into his body, I will leave up to the mods' discretion. I have played it both ways in previous games. I would like him to come into the game with a charging station for ease, but perhaps it can need adjustment to work in this time/country/universe, to allow for CR building right off the bat.
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