taxonomites | [Location: Central, near but not at Taxon Mall]

Paul had sidled up, not right behind Westen, but a few feet away. At that eloquent well, shit, he nodded a little.

"They don't blink at the right rates," he said in a low voice. "If no one's near them, they don't blink at all that I've seen. Same thing with the eyes-- they only focus if a real person moves into range. If you watch the ways their bodies move-- it's the same range of motions, over and over, like an idle cycle.

"They're... color. Background. God knows why the designers of this place decided to stick that in here, but I've heard several people suggest the "aliens" want us to be 'comfortable'."

Paul's tone betrays that the Extras make him anything but.

He looks at the broken glass, not really sure what he expected-- for it to knit back together automatically? No, it's still scattered like little stars all over the floor, and it looks like one Extra might be fetching a broom and a dustpan, but...

"Mmmh. I really dislike the word aliens, but.... let's... hypothesize.... that whatever sort of intelligence we're playing with doesn't really understand human psychology," he offers, half to Michael, half to himself. "That would go a little ways to explaining why, if the purpose of the setting and extra cast members is to make us feel comfortable, the designers are not realizing that they're actually, you know, disconcerting as fuck."

Michael squinted at the people, for lack of a better word, inside the store and thought about it -- out loud, for once. "Yeah," he said. "There's a concept somebody came up with to talk about... robotics, I think, kind of a Freudian one but I think they apply. Say those things are robots, right?" This was the weirdest day of his life. He hadn't thought he could have another weirdest day of his life. "Really human-looking robots. The theory goes, really non-human robots aren't creepy, because they're just machines, and really really human robots aren't either, because we think they're human -- but in the middle there's this big dip in the friendliness graph. The uncanny valley. See pretty much all CGI, particularly if DreamWorks is doing it."

It occurred to Michael this guy might be slightly less contemporary than him and might have less of a clue what the fuck he was talking about at this juncture. He moved on quickly. "Anyway, I think that's the problem: their human-like robots," the word 'robots' made him more comfortable with all this, he decided to keep it, "just aren't human enough. Either they can't work it out or they didn't care enough to bother for this little menagerie they're keeping. Or underestimated our intelligence. I mean, you see the fake sock monkey moms we make for baby monkeys in zoos, right?" It also occurred to him that maybe most people weren't in the habit of looking at stuff as much as Michael Westen, but he figured if anyone was a decent FBI detective would be. One hoped. Hope sprung eternal.

"Someone," he pushed a weary hand through his hair, "on my little welcome wagon called this a zoo. So, if I'm not completely insane, we're in some kind of extraterrestrial zoo populated by robots."

... Yeah.

"I think I've seen this Carpenter flick," he said, flippance not at all reflecting his feelings on the matter.

Paul had at least heard the phrase 'uncanny valley' at some point, but his field was pretty far away from robotics, and his psychology classes had focused more on sociopathic behavior than human likenesses.

He snorts at the reference to horror movies, one hand in his pockets, head craned back to look at the sky overhead. It's blue. It's been blue and cloudless the past two days. And yet there is snow, little drifts of it, all around them right now. It's crisply chill, but not really quite snow-chill, he doesn't think.

"Have you noticed the weather?" he asks quietly, but doesn't elaborate on that right now.

"Or the food. I had coffee when I got here. It doesn't taste.... right. I'd like to believe it's just drugged-- which is adorably fucked up, don't you think? That that is the better possibility...?

"But I think that it's not. I think that it's like the people: it's an approximation of what they thought food should be."

Paul lowers his head, rubs at the back of his neck. "Let's go find a liquor store to rob," he says with grim humor. "I'm really needing a cigarette or twenty."

"On it like a bonnet, partner," said Michael, jerking his thumb towards the street to one side of them as he thought about the sky too. It had all the authenticity of a sun lamp, he thought: didn't stand up to close cognizant inspection, but probably did the job for the body. There was probably a part of him that accepted this as winter and something he should be used to. However, this wasn't the part that was Michael Westen and actually thought about things, and besides, he was from Miami.

He wondered if Miami was a concept their new zookeepers had ever thought about. It looked like there was a lot that they had. It also looked like there was a lot that they hadn't.

"So, riddle me this," he said conversationally, hands in pockets as he started in a likely direction, "why you and me? Why you and me and the rest of this motley crew?"

Paul had dug out his phone again-- he was having some difficulty with the tablet, maybe partially from being from 1999-- yes, cell phone had existed, technically, but they'd been clunky bricks compared to this fandy-dandy thing.

He accordingly glowered at his map whilst considering Westen's questions.

"No clue there, Clyde," he said with a little headshake. "You said you'd run into someone else from the Bureau? That means that out of a population at most 50, we already have at least three law enforcement and one... special ops. That's a bit high a proportion to be random population sampling, wouldn't you think?"

He chewed that one over as he punched buttons irritably. "Nobody else has bothered to tell me professions yet, but like I said, we've got another girl who claims to have a spaceship. I think it might be fair to say..." Paul knitted his brows, more for the map than his words, "that this place is gathering people who are-- let's say-- extraordinary by the standards of normal 9-to-5 civilian life. Tenuous hypothesis, but let's keep it in mind against people we meet."

A pause, then less calmly, "Have you figured out the fucking map on these things yet?"

"Okay," Michael stepped next to him to crane his neck in order to look at his map, "so we're in this white section in the center, somebody told me it was called Central. The 'Sanctuary' is here too." He pointed at where he thought it was. "I think this city's laid out kind of like -- kind of like an ugly flower, four petals, four districts, roughly north, south, west and east. I'm not sure about these lines, but I'm guessing subway or the like."

He frowned at the map along with him, focusing on all the fine lines that made it so hard to read. "This is pretty big," he said, "and pretty complicated, for a Sim City full of sim people. And a bunch of -- extranormals like you and me."

This, he decided, was going to need a little more time floating on the troubled waters of his mind before it sank in.

"You know," he said a little blackly with his eyebrows raised, "I don't know about you, Agent, but I'm a little honored."

"Thank you," Paul huffed with ill grace as Michael navigated about the map and indicated this thing and that thing. "That... makes some sense."

Even if he hates the touchscreen.

Paul nods a little at Westen's observation that the city was largescale, and drummed his fingers on his phone before closing it back up.

"It makes me wonder if maybe we're a test batch," he said a bit bleakly. "If the city infrastructure can obviously support bigger numbers of people, which it seems it can....

"Maybe the idea is to do a trial run with individuals who might presumably handle the shock 'better', for a certain value of better-- people who already deal with life and death on the job, and/or people who have access to the shit you and I would refer to as either sci-fi or bad fantasy-- we're the stress testers? With a civilian population to follow later?"

It's only a theory, he knows, but Paul much prefers thinking, analyzing, considering, theorizing to just letting his brain soak in numb panic.

"If I'm right there, then I'm not really sure about honored, but I do hope they've got the bugs out of the beta version, if you take my drift."

This wasn't the type of thinking Michael was used to, definitely, on the broader theoretical level. That was usually the job of people who looked at intel, in glass offices at the CIA or the NSA or whatever third-party policy contractors they were hiring to circumvent regulations these days. He was a spy, he got intel. Intel was like a kind of MacGuffin to him. Foreign policy, the secret machinations of governments -- he tried to stay out of those. It was a job, was all.

(On some level he was grudgingly aware this was bullshit, too, and he was about as capable of staying out of the big picture as he was of staying out of candid photos Mom was taking, but he didn't feel like re-examining his self-image just yet.)

"Yeah, I get you," he said, rubbing the back of his neck in thought. "I can't help but feel like this is all some kind of game to someone, though. The mistletoe thing, like, why would you do that except for someone's amusement? Of course, I don't think you'd build a whole robot city just for someone's amusement either -- it could be someone's stress-testing human psychology and they've got some Mengele-wannabe in charge of it all. For all we know these robots are people who've gotten lobotomized or the like. It's messed up any way you slice it. The US government's done some messed up things to test theories about people, though," he said, crossing his arms. "Not that I'm saying I think this is the US government's doing. Not enough poor people and people from other countries for that."

Paul messed with the tablet map as Westen spoke, getting a bead on a place that looked to be what he wanted-- gas station, they always had smokes, unless here they didn't-- and started walking that way with Westen moving along too.

He couldn't help a sharp laugh at Michael's observation. "Amen to that. For that matter, I haven't seen anyone among the real people yet who isn't white. Oh, the clone guys? Yeah, we get racial die-versity there-- a nice politically correct population sampling-- but everyone I've seen wearing one of these--"

(he taps the bracelet)

"--is both crackerjack white and speaks English." Honesty compelled him to add, a moment later, "Although I brought that up to the Jenny girl and she said she has a black friend here, as well as... as well as a blue one."

Paul gives Mike a wry quasi-apologetic smile after saying that, like he knows how screwed up it sounds. Then he remembers the other thing Jenny said.

"--oh, and here's some mindfuckery if she was telling the truth-- she says she auto-learned English on waking up here. So your game-players, designers, Mengele wannabe, whatever we want to call them-- seem to have some decided biases."

Another pause, and Paul sighs, obviously resigning himself to relating another tidbit he has some mental issues wrapping his head around. "...Jenny also said that to her it was weird so many of us are from... Earth, and from the same approximate time period. So apparently the bulk of us are from a more or less contemporary culture, if looked at in the big scheme of things, with a few monkey wrenches for variety's sake."

He's starting to get a headache from all this theorizing, even if does make him feel better. He's all too aware that if you're dealing with something who just doesn't understand humans, all of this could be bogus as fuck and they could be in the farthest left field possible.

The gas station is head. Paul quickens his pace. Nicotine will help. Or it can't hurt. Something.

"Crackerjack white. Speaks English. Also, like you said earlier," Michael inclined his head and walked a little faster, "a little young, don't you think?"

Michael wasn't used to being on the older half of the spectrum of people he met. Starting with being underage and in the Army and continuing through his twenties in special ops, he was used to having to compensate for his age pre-emptively -- talk like he didn't notice it, and like he wasn't defensive about it, as anything else would've been blood in the water for the kinds of drug lords and mob kingpins he dealt with. He'd made a couple mistakes there before. Even now, Miami was where people who were too old to have anything better to do went to die. He knew what he was doing, all right, but he had to prove it to people.

Here, though -- "I mean, there's minors acting like they own the place," he said, "college students, even the other Bureau man I met couldn't have been more than twenty-three? I'm thirty-three, Agent, I'm not used to thinking the world's gotten a little more youthful than I can keep up with. There's something wrong there too. What's the point exactly in snatching professionals like you and me and then the cast of Degrassi High, you know?"

The mini-mart at the gas station loomed. Michael slid his shades on, a little unsettled by the emptiness of all the pumps, and went inside, holding the door open for the FBI agent to catch it behind him as he walked through.

"Why thank you darling," Paul said with perverse cheer as he swept on in the open door. Call it defense mechanism, because he totally wasn't feeling up to actually hitting on people yet.

There was another Tofu Citizen (Paul dubbed them) behind the counter, but other than that, the convenience story was empty. Paul felt no qualms about continuing their conversation.

"It does make one feel one has waded onto a college, or even dare I say high-school, campus, yes," Paul says as he breezes to the counter and smiles ferally at the cashier.

"Pack of Camels, please," he said, and the cashier smiled and nodded and reached back into the glass cabinet and handed them over. Paul dug one out, put the rest into a pocket, and lifted one of the cheap Bic lighters from the counter display.

"Well, if we're going with the extra-normal hypothesis, then just because they read as punk kids doesn't necessarily mean they are," he offered, with a shrug for knowing it was a little thin.

"That'll be $5.29, sir," said the cashier as Paul nodded for them to head back outside. "Sir, that'll be $5.29-- place your hand here--"

The voice cut off as they exited the room. Paul lit up, and took a blissful long drag with his eyes shut. Inhale..... exhale. Ahhhh.

"Where're you staying?" he asked Michael, slowly opening his eyes again.

Michael wasn't in the habit of telling people where he lived. When you were a spy, you fast learned the advantages of being able to go up in smoke and reform back at your own bolthole if things went south without anyone following you there. That being said, he didn't exactly have a bolthole, he wasn't going to be staying there much longer if he had a say in it, and things were pretty much already in Antarctica.

"I stayed the night in the Sanctuary," he said, "but if I have any luck I'll find somewhere better by the time the sun goes down. You can always call me on our new cell phones, yeah?" You need some tech support first? he resisted the urge to quip, smiling. "What about you?"

"Myself as well," Paul grunted in response to having stayed in Sanctuary so far. "Not exactly my ideal either, but apparently we have a whole city to choose from."

Oh cigarettes. Blissful cancer-sticks. He could tell there was something that seemed just a bit off beneath the smoke, but at the moment he was ignoring it in favor of being hedonistically pleased and letting nothing spoil that.

...except for the reference to the goddamn phones. He grimaced.

"Walk me through it, future boy," he suggested with distaste. "Last cell phone I used was three times this thick and only had, you know, buttons."

In 1999 Michael Westen was... in the Army, with a jovial Navy SEAL for company. 1999 was a long time ago. "Sure can do," he said, stepping shoulder to shoulder with the detective, his stomach unsettled. "I hate to say it, but what you call cell phones we now call walkie-talkies, old man. Nothing really happened on the changeover of the millennium, apart from a bunch of paranoids stockpiling Spam." He squinted through his sunglasses. "Okay, here. The 'Voice' or 'Visual' buttons should bring you to a list of people you can call, depending whether you want to make this a telephone conversation or a short-running closed-circuit TV show."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm a relic, I get it," Paul bitched without malice-- and once more resisted the urge to ask things about politics. He carefully watched, though, having already understood that life here basically revolved around these piece-of-shit phones.

"Holo," he read, squinting at the screen (note to self-- go steal some contact lens cleaning solution, goddammit). "That's the projection thing they were yakking about when each of us arrived, yeah?"

"Yup. Like a hologram in a sci-fi flick, it projects a 3-D image of you to people. Personally I'm not sure the purpose, unless you're giving virtual tai chi classes or something," Michael shrugged, "pretty much everything can be accomplished through visual, except for making you feel creepily spied-on when you first get here. You can ring me anytime, though I like phone better than visual when I'm walking."

He gestured in the direction of Sanctuary. "You want to get shaved while I hop a shower, and we reconvene after we scout this ghost town a little better, partner?"

"Duly noted," Paul said with a little nod. Video-phonage felt rather sci-fi to him anwyay, holo could go screw itself as far as he cared.

Shaved. Oh that sounded good.

"That sounds like the closest thing I've heard to a sane plan in the last 48 hours," he admitted. "Mostly because it involves my not looking like something the Yeti coughed up."

Paul hesitated, then offered a hand to Westen to shake. "Under the circumstances, I won't say it's a pleasure, but.... good to have met someone here who's..." Oh so many adjectives one could use there. Normal, sane, of-legal-age, not-chirpy, not from a magical kingdom....

"...not afraid to wear lilac." Paul grinned crookedly at Michael.

Michael took the FBI agent's hand. With his luck Paul Smecker was going to turn up dead, evil, or nonexistent, but the fact he was thinking that paranoid already probably meant he was sleep-deprived. Or shower-deprived. Either way, the relief flooding his nerves right now was real; "Likewise," he said, shaking it, "though I think navy blue suits your coloring a little better, just, personally."

The grin accompanying his half-hearted joke was real. (And navy blue did look a lot better on him than lilac would, but anyone who wasn't deuteranopic could tell you that.) "Good luck with the razor, Agent."

"I tend to agree," Paul said airily. He hefted his bag of toiletries over his shoulder again, gave Westen a little wave as he turned for Sanctuary.

"Watch yourself out there," was as close as he came to a real goodbye, tossed over his shoulder as he started walking.

[Location: Central, near but not at Taxon Mall]

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