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kiruamon · 1 year ago

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Grey World AU

I stumbled into an old au idea again by accident and thought I'd see what would come out of it if I threw Sun, Moon, and Y/N into said setting.

You can find the background informations of this au after the sketches.

Let's start with the background information first:

The au is set in a city where everything is gray and dreary. Starting from the color of people's faces to their eyes and hair. Even the plants in the city park or the sky above their heads is gray. Simply everything seems to consist of a palette of different shades of gray. Humans and robots alike indifferently carry out their assigned work in this city. Regardless of whether this serves a meaningful purpose or not. Emotions are unnecessary. Unwanted. They only disturb the schedule, which each of them has to keep to the letter. Not falling out of step is the most important thing. Just following the instructions without ever wondering what for. Without ever truly taking in their surroundings, or building relationships with those around them. Concepts such as love, affection or passion are completely alien to the inhabitants and at best abstract concepts that they have read about somewhere. Negative feelings in a weak and suppressed form are more likely to be found in the hearts of the city's inhabitants, but are usually hardly acted out, since interactions with each other are limited to a minimum.

And then there is the strange fact that no one can remember things from their own life that happened more than five years ago. This is because every five years in the life of a person or an A.I., they are picked up to ensure that they keep up their productivity. The process is known to people as replacement where someone in their current job will be replaced by someone new. But what exactly happens to the people who are taken away is hardly known and usually nobody thinks about it.

So what happens during said replacement?

You could say that those affected are undergoing a reset. Memories of the last years are deleted. For example, where and what the person last worked as. Memories of work colleagues or what daily routine they followed and where they lived. Only the basic knowledge of the person remains. Usually, after the reset is completed, the person is equipped with new knowledge and tasks and is reassigned to a new position in a new place.

From time to time, however, individuals break the routine for some reason. It can be a tiny trigger that creates bigger and bigger waves in that person's life. Some will break from it, falling into a state of complete apathy in which they are no longer able to do anything until they are found in some dark alley or their homes and taken away to be given an early reset. Or, although much rarer, some people become overly aggressive and, in the worst case, cause chaos within society and shake up the lives of others around them. Regardless of which of the two cases it is, such individuals are commonly referred to as Broken. Oddly enough, these phenomena, although less common, have been observed in some bots and animatronics as well.

However, there also exists a third possible outcome. Individuals who get out of sync without falling into permanent madness or apathy, and who gradually learn to become aware of themselves. The longer this state lasts, the greater the likelihood that they will begin to notice emotions that they did not know before and which become more intense over time. For unknown reasons, this causes their previously gray appearance to slowly change to a more and more colorful one. There are no reports or news about these third cases. Officially they do not exist and as soon as they are discovered they are brought away as quickly as possible, just like the others, in order to make a functioning member of society out of them again.

All people are equipped with a watch-like device that is usually worn around the wrist. The device is not only used to read the current time, but also checks the vital functions of its wearer while being worn. Additionally, it shows how much time is left to complete a certain activity or to get from A to B in order to keep the personal schedule. If for some reason there are minor delays in the routine, the device - as far as possible - readjusts the schedule and tries to guide the owner back into their normal routine. Bots and animatronics on the other hand have a separate program in their code instead of this device, which takes care of these functions.

Although every home is equipped with a kitchen and there are also supermarkets with real food, restaurants, snack bars and the like, people eat the food units assigned to them. These are tasteless, gray little cubes that contain all the nutrients the person needs for their daily meals, and are precisely pre-calculated by the wristwatch before being spit out by the machines that can be found in every kitchen.

People only get assigned a partner for a day once or twice in their lives. The partners are selected based on algorithms. However, it is usually none of the biological parents who end up raising their child. Often, this task will be handled by someone completely different who has been prepared for this. And even this person will be only two years in charge of the child until it is passed on to the next caregiver. This is to prevent a deeper bond from forming between the child and the caregiver. The children remain in human care until they are about ten years old, at which time they are strongly encouraged and taught to be as independent as possible. After that, they are sent to institutions where they are taught and educated individually. The child care there is mainly performed by bots or animatronics and a few humans as supervisors. The first time the reset is performed in their lives is when they reach the age of sixteen, in order to avoid serious side effects in children from the reset. Those who raise the children already receive a reset when the child is handed over to the next caregiver.

Because of their excellent A.I. and programming, both animatronics and simpler bots have an extreme ability to learn and are flexible in their application possibilities. Which caused them to develop a consciousness of their own as a side effect. Usually, however, this is not seen as a problem, because despite their consciousness, like the humans around them, they show little personality and often perform their prescribed tasks extremely reliably. If, however, they show uncharacteristic signs during the regular maintenance like abnormal behavior, a strongly developed personality, or evidence of emotions developing, they undergo an early reset, like humans would. If a soft reset is not enough, a hard reset is also performed when in doubt and a reprogramming will be done.

With that, we have put the general background info behind us and can now talk about the role of the characters within the au!

Sun and Moon

Sun and Moon share a body in the au and are currently assigned as police officers. Before their last reset, however, the two worked in one of the institutions in which the children from the age of ten are held. In fact, they were specially created to take care of children and raise them to be obedient members of society. For this purpose, they were equipped with all possible theoretical knowledge. However, in their early days, it quickly became apparent that the knowledge they had been given was extremely incomplete when it came to how exactly to care for emotionally troubled children, which was often the case when the children were new to the facility and had adjustment issues. With some of the children, their built-in knowledge kept leading them to certain limits.

So they tried to expand their knowledge using the available databanks. Among those were also numerous files and information from the old times, when children were educated in a completely different way compared to today's system. This, in combination with the practical work with the children, resulted in them learning extremely quickly within a short period of time to adapt to different situations and to constantly adjust and improve their approaches to solving problems as they arose. More and more often, they found themselves resorting to the much older proposed solutions rather than those suggested by the current system, thus making the children's stay significantly more comfortable. Through their work, Sun and Moon were much more exposed to the emotionality of their surroundings. Even more so since they were mainly taking care of the children who had just been brought into the facility and were often more confused or shaken up than the older children due to the new environment. It was only a matter of time before they learned not only to recognize or understand the children's feelings, but also to empathize with them. They began to think more emotionally and to act according to that.

For the two of them it was like a tiny miracle when they made one of the children laugh for the first time. Or when one of the children came to them on its own to be comforted by them. You could say they became too good at their job. In a way that had not been intended when they were deployed. They did exactly what was supposed to be prevented by their creation. The development of an emotional bond between the children and them. At first, they simply tried to erase Sun and Moon's memories. It went well for a while, until things began to repeat themselves. Accordingly, it was decided to replace them completely, erase all their memories once again, and reprogram them to be used elsewhere.

Neither Sun nor Moon can remember this time before their work as policemen. At least until a familiar sound accidentally awakens something that lay hidden deep within them. Perhaps a few memory files survived the deletions after all? They have a pretty elaborate A.I. and it's unclear how many times they've gone through a reset in the past. So far, they have never given it a second thought. Generally, they just follow their daily route and patrol the area of the city they are stationed in. Sun does the daytime patrols and Moon the evening or night patrols. Their rotation is based on the actual sunrise and sunset, at which time one of their internal programs sends them a signal and triggers the transition. Their daily schedule is a bit looser than most humans or bots. While they have set routines in their daily routine, they are not scheduled by the minute between the beginning and end of their work to be able to investigate or respond to any anomalies and report them accordingly if necessary.

Y/N

Y/N works as the only employee in a flower shop where no customer ever sets foot in. They had never really thought about their life. Or about whether or not they were qualified to work in a shop like this. If they got assigned here, then everything had to be correct. And after all, the schedule told them exactly what they had to do and how they had to do it. Everything had its exact place, the new deliveries always arrived on time, and there were precise instructions for the always identical, gray bouquets that they had to produce and which no one ever bought. It was neither dull nor exciting. It was simply their daily routine. Nothing more, nothing less. Y/N was jolted out of their daily, thoughtless routine for the first time when, in the third week, a fresh delivery of plants and flowers arrived, amongst which were so-called defective specimens. They found it difficult to take their eyes off the few splashes of color that stood out in the sea of gray like nothing they had ever encountered before in their lives. It was the first day in their life to show irregularities in their behavior.

Not only did they find themself unable to dispose these so-called defective specimens in the garbage cans outside, but they also found themself out of sync with their schedule on several occasions, causing a slight sense of confusion and panic in them. To make matters worse, the device on their wrist constantly reminded them of their tardiness, once they stared longer than they would have liked at the colorful petals or intense green leaves of one of the flawed plants they had placed with the others in the shop. At first, the process was still quite slow. Y/N would often feel distracted, catching themself just staring for a few seconds, or falling slightly behind their set schedule, or not being able to fall asleep properly because they were suddenly thinking about things they shouldn't or didn't want to think about. There were also some attempts on their part to get back into the old routine, but they were all to no avail. In retrospect, however, the phase that followed this time was the worst from their point of view.

During that phase Y/N felt constantly confused or angry and irritated by every little thing and had gone through some pretty bad mood swings, ranging from absolute lethargy to hitting the walls of their apartment out of frustration or experiencing deep self-doubt about whether they were broken or not. Oddly enough, it was the work in the flower shop that had thrown them into this crisis in the first place, but helped them get through it as well. Knowing that if they suddenly stopped taking care of the plants and flowers, they would simply wither away, gave them the push they needed to keep going. It also helped a little when Y/N turned the watch-like device to silent and no longer tried to stick to everything it told them no matter what, but instead relaxed and worked through the daily tasks in the store at their own pace. After all, what was the point of making twenty or more identical bouquets if no one ever stopped by to buy them? What was the point of sticking to exactly which of the flowers to use for said bouquets and not just doing some trial and error? What was the point of always putting the flowers in exactly the same place when they could be arranged differently inside the shop? Starting things in new ways made Y/N much more balanced, and by now they are already looking forward to go to work.

Of course, there were still some doubts and fears left that they were no longer normal. Different from the rest, which is why they suspected for a long time that someone would probably come to pick them up soon, just like the Broken, to replace them. But contrary to expectations, no one has come to pick Y/N up to replace them, even though there was clearly something wrong with them. Meanwhile, Y/N suspects that they may not be broken, but possibly flawed, much like the colorful flowers in their store. But since no one seems to care, they just try to make the best of their current situation. This also includes accepting the new feelings and thoughts and living them out to a certain extent instead of suppressing them completely - apart from the fact that they have learned that it is no longer possible for them to suppress their feelings. Y/N clearly enjoys working in the flower shop, even though unfortunately no one ever comes to buy a bouquet or any of the plants. They started to display mainly the colorful flowers and plants in their shop instead of the gray ones. Meanwhile, they are trying to learn how to cultivate the colorful plants by reading some books about the matter. Over the last half year, there have been some small successes here and there. Also, a few months ago, Y/N noticed with amazement that the gray in their eyes as well as their hair is taking on a different color and is becoming more noticeable as time goes on. By the way, they found the colorful apron while shopping in a shelf with discounted clothes and bought it, because they thought it looked really nice. Y/N honestly didn't even know that colored clothing existed even if it seems to be rare, but can't say if they just never noticed any when buying something new to wear.

For the first time the three of them meet during one of Sun's patrols when he passes the flower shop, noticing the flower tubs right in front of the store, which weren't there usually, so he takes a look through the window for the first time only to realize irritated that something is wrong here and enters the store shortly after. I would talk more now, but… I think I will rather post further details together with upcoming sketches/drawings.;)