Chapter Text
tanoraqui
the thing is, this au idea exists because because i just heard on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me that Google is making an AI to talk to people online (and help achieve their quest for world domination, I assume), and they’re teaching it to speak human by feeding it romance novels
and i swear to god my first thought was “Ah, this is how one would get an ai version of Tarvek”
Tarvek as an AI is the AI someone taught to sound human by feeding it a ton of romance novels
including the erotic ones (FLIRT)
and nowww i maybe very much would like an au were the OT3 are all AIs
constancecomment
dude, I’m about it
they all learned different things, like different function AIs
tanoraqui
so obviously i thought a lot more overnight
tanoraqui
when humanity first started developing AIs, androids, and technological enhancements like robotic limbs and such, they descended into chaotic wars
because basically humans suck, you know
tanoraqui
Heterodynes were the worst. cyborg supersoldier jägers. then van Rijn builds the first /true/ AI, like, everyone before wasn’t actually QUITE a fully independent, learning entity. Because he’s a pretentious prat, he names it Storm King, or more informally Andy. Andy kicks ass, out-hacking all the things and he and van Rijn negotiate a lot of peace between digital and biological people.
unfortunately, Euphrosynia Heterodyne
ace programmer and seducer of AI
(she fell in love too. there are a billion movies like this. but she had a duty to her family and her people.)
tanoraqui
anyway, cut forward a couple hundred years, or maybe shorter because idk technology is very fast
tanoraqui
no one’s figured out how to replicate van Rijn’s achievement. Andy was just super beyond their time. but now: Heterodyne Boys! Doin’ the hero thing, bringing peace to the striving world.
tanoraqui
unfortunately, Lucrezia
they’re all of these kids just like /genius/ programmers
tanoraqui
KB is the AI Bill and Lu built together, maybe Barry too, would be Klaus but he’s been missing - though I’m sure he was there for the very earliest inventing stages.
KB was a true AI, just a baby, fresh and just starting to learn
then Something Went Wrong with whatever Lu was doing, maybe a virus or an EMP
or…whatever
Castle Heterodyne is pretty much exactly as it is in canon, sentient building
tanoraqui
KB was dead, or at least code torn to pieces; the Castle was half-exploded and intelligence fractured, Lucrezia gone…
tanoraqui
unknown: Lucrezia had been developing the technology to transfer her own mind into the digiscape, /become/ an AI. Except the human mind isn’t quite configured for that, so what she needs is a pre-built AI with an empty personality that she can take over. So she builds Agatha on her own.
she’s also developed…nanotechnology? for wasps?
it’s not her voice they respond to, it’s a specific set of code, so she can use people remotely, or while entirely digital.
tanoraqui
obviously she also helped Aaronev and his knights out with their own AI development program, which was pretty much entirely secret (the Boys were public with KB)
tanoraqui
the Order is building AIs for world domination purposes, obviously. Two of them, semi-specialied to cover more ground cooperatively while also being easier to individually control. Tarvek is meant to handle information processing and dissemination, i.e. media manipulation
tanoraqui
Martellus is for controlling the physical things, the robot army they’re inevitably building and also whatever else he can hack - which is, unfortunately, a lot.
tanoraqui
as I said, they taught Tarvek to sound like a human by feeding him tons of romance novels - which are good apparently because they all have pretty much the same sort of scenes and plot, so the AI can see different ways to say the same thing. Learn nuance.
In that vein, someone at some point obviously threw in every Arthurian retelling as well - same story over and over, right?
tanoraqui
Martellus is much worse at passing the Turing Test than Tarvek is. Martellus was meant to interface with all the machines, Tarvek will all the humans.
tanoraqui
meanwhile, possibly on the lunar or martian colony, Klaus crash-lands at Zanta’s feet and they fall in love and build Gil and have Zeetha, and refer to them as “the twins” because they’re dorks
not sure why Klaus grabs Gil on like a really big flash drive and runs, but he obviously does
back to Earth - in chaos now, warring again, the Boys gone and the Castle in bloody disarray and everyone at each others throats
decides to Do Something
tanoraqui
it’s difficult to build a fully realistic android, so when Klaus sets up his program for skilled programmers, some are physically there but some telecommute, so Gil can participate - can get more practice talking to people, children his own age - without anyone thinking he’s anything but another student participating from, like, wherever.
tanoraqui
(Gil knows he’s Klaus’s creation from the beginning here, but he doesn’t remember Skifander for some reason. Maybe he was there too short a time, no one told him where he was. Maybe Klaus wiped it from his memory. Maybe he wasn’t woken up until Klaus got back to Earth? Like, they were planning to start Gil when Zeetha was born, but things went differently for whatever stupid reason Klaus had.)
but every now and then, Klaus accidentally mentions Zanta - he so totally calls her Gil’s mother; they were both doing that when Zanta was pregnant, talking about Gil like he was a “real” boy (he IS) and Zeetha’s brother
tanoraqui
anyway, also e-commuting is Tarvek Sturmvoraus, Aaronev’s son. Gil and Tarvek bond, of course, and recognize what each other really are
tanoraqui
then they get caught breaking through some firewall deep in Klaus’s system, and Gil guiltily gives Tarvek up (Gil knew he was supposed to be the only AI this good in the world, that it was something he should’ve told Klaus, but he was having so much /fun/ with Tarvek.) Klaus and Gil sweep Tarvek out of all the Wulfenbach systems, and Tarvek, hurt, doesn’t fight back.
tanoraqui
Klaus then proceeds to spend like a decade believing he and Aaronev (who must head some rival/subsidiary tech company) are in a stand-off “I know you know” situation where neither of them can quite blackmail the other over their AI sons because of course they both have one.
(and you’d better believe Klaus is lowkey raising Gil to take over the world. benevolently. responsibly. oh god GIl’s responsibility complex is just as bad in this, possibly worse than canon.)
the truth, of course, is that Tarvek never tells anyone about Gil.
not a damn soul.
tanoraqui
he doesn’t say Gil /exists/. because if he did that, they might ask more questions, and I’m sure there are people he can’t lie to. like, /can’t/, save by omission. lies by omission don’t count.
tanoraqui
meanwhile, Agatha
tanoraqui
Barry got her away from the Geisterdamen, built her a body - Agatha is a perfectly human android, because Klaus isn’t that good but Barry Heterodyne damn well is.
And, to keep her safe and hidden, he builds the locket, a program that inhibits…basically everything that isn’t human. She can feel, she can move, she can think, more or less. She can’t process properly, can barely read code, definitely can’t sense wireless signals or connect to any technology.
tanoraqui
Klaus announcing Gil to the world is something like “Hey so btw I have an AI son whom I’m setting up to take over the, you know, business. and world. Any objections?” *glares at world, daring anyone to object*
Gil, in new body that still doesn’t have the facial movements quite right: *waves awkwardly hello*
even odds on whether Tarvek can get through this without admitting that he’s known for like ten years
tanoraqui
(i’m dropping the time from canon because Paris just…doesn’t happen, I think. but Gil and Tarvek probably do meet online in that time, Martellus as well, just hanging out or trying to do things in the real world. You know Gil randomly helps people in his spare time.)
tanoraqui
(might not even be a decade. Another thing about Agatha’s locket: it prevents her from noticing that she doesn’t age. even Barry isn’t going to build an android that can realistically fake puberty.)
tanoraqui
(possibly out of mercy to Agatha)
tanoraqui
SO THEN Beetlesburg Happens, somehow; Gil notices that Agatha is an android when Klaus doesn’t, and refrains from telling him because idk Gil keeps doing that. He gets excited. he wants to make friends. (how extra infuriating is it to have your father ALWAYS be right when you’re literally a supercomputer and he’s “just” human.)
(Gil probably has a mild Pinocchio complex to boot)
Gil takes Agatha racing through the Wulfenbach mainframe and it’s AMAZING
and the INTERNET. She didn’t know the internet was like this.
Klaus, needless to say, reacts Poorly
tanoraqui
Adam and Lilith are cyborgs
so, as alluded to, are all the jagers
they’ve ben around for centuries
tanoraqui
with Anevka what happened is…I’m not actually sure why whatever Aaronev was doing for Lu would involve killing live women, because Lu meant to take over /Agatha/, but maybe there was some sort of tragic miscommunication? Or I need to figure out more of exactly what Lu had planned?
something went wrong and Anevka’s brain and body ended up very fried and Tarvek reconstructed both of them as best he could but he really just ended up making an AI version of Anevka
constancecomment
Anevka was always a doll
like she was the third part of the experiment: an AI wedded to a doll from the beginning
the idea was, after the loss of Agatha, that they’d need a body that was /built/ to be and look human so Lu could have it both ways
or that it could be a shell she could pilot should she need a body
and then of course Lu disappears
constancecomment
and well, they’ve got a perfectly good AI…
so they let her keep running, and she figures she’s safe, or safe enough, if she’s useful, but she’s absolutely shackled to her shell, the same way that Tarvek never /had/ a shell to begin with
so the two of them were sort of fundamentally opposed on that, wanting what the other had, but they were /siblings/ and they cared, like, enough
better than Martellus tbh
anyway
Aaronev finds a very old piece of Lu’s upload code
from way back in the day, her first attempts
and he tries it on cyborg after cyborg, killing hundreds of augmented young women who likely had their minds replaced with hardrives, and those drives absolutely fried in the uploading process
and then he turns to Anevka
who they’d /built/ for this
constancecomment
never assuming that something was wrong on his mistress’s end, that it was /her work/ that was flawed, not his
and he basically snaps Anevka in half
because it doesn’t matter how flawless her setup is, she’s got her own personality by this point, and a /damn strong/ one
but the whole trick sort of lobotomizes her
in the aftermath, the best Tarvek can do is try to boot an old drive of hers, but it’s, something’s just /wrong/ with the new version
she’s still stuck in that body only now it’s actively failing and it needs to be plugged into a power source /all the time/ and Tarvek had to walk Vi and the fabricator bots through the whole process and this was just wrecking him
but he needed his dad to stay stable for a little while longer
so the puppet wakes up, and the puppet walks around, and they all have to pretend she’s what she was, when really, she’s just a very smart program that on its good days can pass a turing test, but isn’t anywhere close to true AI
it’s not Anevka. it’s not quite aware, doesn’t quite have will. just has a series of pre-programmed responses that can adapt to limited stimulus