Against My Will 13C

The pipes were still banging and clanging and generally causing a ruckus, likely with more and more of the people in the building taking their needed morning showers. The heart of that plumbing work was centered somewhere not far from his room and all the pipes definitely routed through here, meaning that all that sound routed through here.

“Motherfucker!”

All that meant was nobody heard him as he threw out an incredible litany of curses, starting from the absolutely simple and standard to several more that were as inventive as he could manage for someone who hated Creative Writing classes.

“-it-licking dick-sucking absolute green asshole!”

It was just a bare few seconds ago that green had gone off next to the mattress like someone had struck a road flare. My eyes. And, of course, he had the good luck and good sense to be right in front of it in the dark. My poor fucking eyes, man.

A few seconds of rubbing at them later, Orin managed to get one of them open as he stared at the thing on the concrete. Green and glowing at the center, it sat there heavy and solid and constantly putting off the same light that had given him half a flashbang.

“Jesus…”

He’d done this four times now.

The surprise was something that got him every time — if not the light show — because the thing didn’t just arrive. There was nothing to announce it, no portal or whooshing sound or even any rippling into reality. Nah…

It was just not and then it was, in a burst of light from absent to present, light that looked vaguely like code. All in all, the perfect sort of appearance to give his poor abused body heart palpitations.

“Alright… okay…” With a sigh, Orin held his ring hand up. “Ring, dismiss Lantern Battery. Send it back.”

And, just like that, it went — and with it, it sent the room back to the strip of light from beneath the door and the little glow off his finger, his heart rate dropping back to normal. Not leaving that thing out.

He shook his head with a frown wearing deeper lines into his face. No way in hell, bro.

SHIELD had that thing in a lab for three months with people running sci-fi tests on it around the clock. Even if they got nowhere with it, they definitely had numbers on what it put out; probably some kind of signature they could look for.

If he was dumb enough to leave it sitting out on a basement floor in Queens for even a half hour, there was a nonzero chance he could expect jackbooted fascists with an eagle patch on their arms breaking down his door.

Still, though…

The nineteen-year-old sat up straighter, a smile on his face despite himself. It showed up.

And on the first try this time, too.

All he had to do was say a sentence with the proper format and wherever the battery had been before it was here — wherever that was, whatever you even called that sort of folded-space or extra-space or pocket dimension — it hadn’t mattered.

Because it had come.

Instantly.

So, it understood the command. He nodded to himself again. Obviously, it understood.

But the thing was, it understood it fully. It managed to get summon, and Lantern Battery, parsing his meaning far more effectively than it parsed his will to fly.

No [CONFUSION].

No follow-up question — not like it had ever asked one before anyway, but still.

So… He turned his right hand over and over, staring from wrist-side to palm as he looked at the ring on both sides. You’re not dumb.

It definitely wasn’t stupid, as easy as it was to call it that. That was just being too reductive for fun and frustration. He was the one who’d been dumb, honestly, treating the [CONFUSION] like a competence ceiling. It had never been ‘this thing can’t do that’ because that just didn’t fit the evidence; what he’d seen of it and what he’d done with it.

Something that he’d watched do planetary-scale physics and combat and literally felt pull drugs out of his blood was as powerful as it seemed. You just can’t talk about any of it, can you?

The ring stayed silent but that light almost seemed to brighten.

Less chatbot. He nodded again. And a lot more command line.

So, nothing that was going to converse with him anytime soon, no healthy or effective back-and-forth in anything even close to full sentences. Looks like it. 

But some concrete commands, given the right way and with the right syntax…

Orin just kept on nodding as he realized almost nothing could stop it from doing the thing. Okay, I… He blinked as he locked in that specific limitation. That’s… Granted, he had spent a too-large amount of his time vibecoding with Claude and GPT — and for more than just it checking his work — for him to be sure of himself with that, but he could definitely make something happen there. I can definitely work with that.

No grand revelation there, but still useful all the same.

Besides, if he wanted a JARVIS, he could build a Natural Language UI on his own time. Or just port Stark’s when I get good enough with the ring.

With all the computational power, it wasn’t like he had to worry about any insane O(n^2) functions on rendering or something. Nah, his problems were much, much simpler.

First, he just had to clean up the input.

It wasn’t anything he hadn’t done before either. Obviously, not at this level, but the shape of it wasn’t too different from what he already knew with every Kaggle comp he’d ever done, and all his semester projects and every annoying group thing bearing the same lesson: A model giving you garbage doesn’t make it a stupid model.

Nah, sometimes the human factor was the big problem; inconsistent labels, misunderstood features encoded improperly, and sometimes — this was the big one, one that cost him an entire month freshman year — sometimes you changed three things at once, got a different result, and learned exactly nothing from it.

You’re the bad researcher in this relationship, bro. So, he had to fix himself first to do it right and do it good.

And that was easier and harder than it even sounded with no laptop, no notebook, no IDE, and not even the slightest bit of documentation for a substrate he could inspect at all. I mean, no compiler even.

All this code would be for him to teach it.

Mostly just a way to keep his own intent from sliding around, training wheels for something all about willpower anyway.

“WALL. Normal, size.” The mental image of a flat plane facing out was already locked and loaded with no intention to fire; normal density too, which he was willing hard as he could to mean bulletproof. Size was there for simple convenience, given he was gonna be shooting these off at a moment’s notice for defence. Can’t waste juice on a thirty foot wall.

Nah, something car-sized would do.

“CATCH. Target, soft.” That was a definite necessity unless he was fine splattering bodies like flies on a windshield just because he forgot about physics. Yeah, that’d be bad.

“BRACE. Point.” A platform right under the feet like those guys in Bleach would definitely be helpful, just as something to stand on. It went without saying that a solid fifty-percent of his flying problem rested — heh — on the fact he had nothing to push off.

No sense of down, either.

This would hopefully make both way less of an issue. Now, the next one… And the last one, for now at least.

“HIT. Target, scale.” That was one hundred percent necessary, that scale of one-to-ten. Ten being whatever he’d done to the roof of the Triskelion and one being… A tennis ball fired from one of those auto-pitchers? 

Yeah, that sounded good.

They didn’t need to be perfect or anything.

The point wasn’t even that they worked, as weird as that sounded. The debugging process was something he’d handle on his own time. All he needed was the same behavior with the same name every single time. 

After that… change one thing per attempt.

Simple. Give it something to learn from. 

Which would give him something to learn from. Huh… He couldn’t help but crack a smile as he realized what he was doing. Human Learning Reinforcement both ways.

And now was the time for a bigger, more relevant, problem.

Charge.

Because he really had no idea how much was in this time at any given time. That was the biggest problem possible because every movie, show, and comic book he’d shoved into his brain always had the major issue of a Green Lantern being their ring running out at the worst possible moment.

Yeah, not having that happen.

“Ring, current charge.”

[FULL]

Green eyes squinted down at his clenched fist. “…you know damn well that’s not what the fuck I mean.”

[FULL]

“I bet you’re real proud of that one, huh?” His left hand pinched the bridge of his nose, a sigh sliding out into the dark. “Alright, Ring… give me a ring charge percentage. Percentage.”

[CONFUSION]

“Of course, why would you have numbers, right?” He let his head hang back with another louder sigh drowned out by the pipes. “That’s crazy of me to expect that of you. My bad.”

He sat there for a minute in silence, taking low and slow breaths. So, it doesn’t have numbers or… He blinked to himself, fist clenching and unclenching. If it does, it can’t hand them over in a way it understands?

One eye twitched, a muscle in his left cheek jumping from irritation. Okay, stop asking for the thing it doesn’t know how to give you and ask for what it can in a way it understands. He knew it could point at objects and understand itself as a referent, which meant that it could understand objects as a referent which meant…

Urethra!

Fighting down a monster of a laugh, Orin held his ring out in front of him. “Ring, summon Lantern Battery.”

Green appeared again, a flash he was ready for this time as the room lit up and the thing sat there on the concrete throwing light up over walls. “Alright, look…”

He leaned forward, one hand out and held the front of the ring against the opening where the green light poured from. “This. Ring, this right there is full. That’s 100%. That is what full looks like to you. Understand?”

Nothing. Hm.

“Now, you can make constructs. So, use a construct to show me what’s in this.” His left pointer tapped the ring. “Compared with that.”

For a long few seconds, nothing happened; Orin just staring between ring and lantern as he waited for a confirmation or anything.

Finally… “Okay, guess that didn’t w-”

And then something appeared over his wrist.

Well, it started from his wrist and quickly expanded upward — flat and a much paler green than he’d seen from his constructs, it stretched all the way up his forearm and hung about an inch over it. He moved his arm and the construct stayed with it, relative to his limb like it was perfectly locked to it. Even as he shook it, waved it around, or did a whole bunch of silliness, it didn’t so much as slip.

“…whoa, cool.”

Yeah, but also kind of limited. Orin couldn’t deny that he’d been expecting more of a iOS battery type readout, but he could improve on it. Right now, it was just a bar, though — hard outline, luminous fill and edged up all the way to the end with only a sliver of gap.

“Ring, give me ticks, ten of them; top to bottom, no, no, no—” He shook his head quick with a grunt. “I mean, across. Ring, keep it lengthwise.” It redrew in front of him, the construct quick to reform . “I… Yeah, like that. Now, smaller… no, smaller ones between those. Wait, ring, way too many. Two between each, that’s plenty.”

He didn’t bother with numbers again, that lesson already learned. Proportional fill was enough with a full battery as the reference and he could read a bar just fine. With another command, he sent the battery back; the room dark again except for the bar and ring sitting there glowing on his forearm.

So… 98%… ish.

No polite British accent,s ure, but he had a battery meter to work with.

The split in his lip pulled tight with a grin as he sat there on a filthy mattress in a cramped maintenance room; a green bar still floating on his arm. “See?” He tapped the edge of the thing and it still didn’t move. “We can definitely work with this.”

The ring gave him nothing.

“That’s where you say ‘Agreement.'”

[AGREEMENT]