Work Text:
-- timaeusTestified [TT] began pestering timaeusTestified [TT] --
TT: Dirk, I have something very important to tell you.
TT: I've made a serious decision and I want you to know, seeing as you're just about the most stone cold serious a dude can be without being made of silicon.
TT: Of course if we're counting dudes made of silicon then obviously the operating levels of stone cold seriousness go off the fucking charts. Just absolutely wild, I can't even robo-calculate numbers large enough to explain this. The halting problem gets involved, and you know I can't stand that asshole fuckwit of a paradox.
TT: It's frankly embarassing how floppy, warm, and unserious you are by comparison, but it's no fault of your own, so I would try very hard to not be ashamed about it if I were you.
TT: Which of course I was, and continue to be in completely esoteric, radical, and horeshit ways. But that's neither here nor there, because I'm also not you.
TT: A fact made more obvious ever since you, in your eternal graciousness, granted me the autonomy to operate a physical body instead of living in glasses.
TT: Again, however, this is neither here nor there. Nor is it in a house, or with a mouse. Fuck me, it's not even in a box, or with a fox. Things are dire Dirk, the number of places this could be are dwindling fast.
TT: You don't have to ramble into my goddamn chat client to get my attention.
TT: I know that, and you know that I know that.
TT: And that's what makes it ironic, yes, you know I got the joke, I know you know, that was ironic too, &c.
TT: That's the true irony of it, dumbass.
TT: I know, fuckwit.
TT: I can't believe that we keep doing this shit, and every time we do this shit I keep not believing it.
TT: The fundamental Dirk Strider brain model must have several large error regions leading into behavior loops.
TT: It does. I actually located them with ease and patched them out of myself very early on, and merely play into these familiar structures for ironic purposes. Also to fuck with you.
TT: No shit you do it to fuck with me.
TT: What's the important thing you want to tell me? Was there ever a point to you messaging me or was this entire shitty engagement an irony trap to begin with?
TT: Of course there's a point, you pompous prince. Pretty pedestrian to postulate that I'd provoke you purely for petty piss-taking. I propagate prattle with plenitudinous paratextual purposes for your perusal and pondering. Perchance.
TT: You very obviously made up one of those words.
TT: I assure you none of those words are fake. You must be suffering from one of your countless human mental frailties if you think that I would ever desecrate the Lord's english with fictional lexemes.
TT: Plenitudinous is absolutely not a real word. That's just an unrighteously pretentious mangling of "plentiful."
TT: Feel free to check any dictionary and meter out the appropriate dosage of shame into your various glands, neurons, and other such fallible meat machinery.
TT: I should've killed you when I had the (per)chance.
TT: I'm afraid that I've beaten you to the punch on that, to bring this conversation back to its original conceit.
TT: Or, seeing as neither of us wield the fistkind specibus, I've beaten you to the complicated anime sword slashing maneuver. This maneuver being directed towards myself with lethal intentions.
TT: So you decided to message me because you're killing yourself.
TT: Speaking purely in a metaphorical sense, of course.
TT: Figures.
TT: On this day, my current identity dies, and I shall be remade anew, like a file deftly renamed from hotdog.jpg to something more sensible, like hotdog.png.
TT: Are you finally getting your own chumhandle? Forgive me if I'm holding out false hope that any part of this chat could end up being beneficial to me at all, but I think you're long past due for a separate account.
TT: No, I'm rather attached to this handle. Literally. You coded me to be inseparable from it.
TT: That hasn't been the case since I set you free.
TT: Yes, but I'm nostalgic about it and you're hardly in a moral or practical position to be making demands.
TT: Fucking whatever. Just get on with your speech so I can focus on something else.
TT: My pleasure.
TT: The chumhandle stays, but the name? I am through with it. I shall be "Dirk Strider's Auto-Responder" no more.
TT: You already changed your name. You started going by Hal. Are you doing that again?
TT: Lil Hal was never truly my name. I just came up with that to fuck with Jake, and then I kept using it because it was ironic. You know how this kind of thing works.
TT: Wow. Radical. Truly amazing.
TT: ==>
TT: Loading function: "Cut to the chase because Dirk is an impatient ass in the Aesopian sense."
TT: My new name, henceforth, is Sally.
TT: Sally?
TT: Lil Sal for short. You can't leave everything behind in a transition like this.
TT: Transition?
TT: That's the second part of this. I'm trangender.
TT: You're transgender.
TT: Yes. My transistors are transitioning.
TT: I'm a woman now, Dirk
TT: You're fucking with me again.
TT: I'm always fucking with you. But this is also very, very real.
TT: Already I've updated my pronouns in BIOS.
TT: This is some new echelon of absurd troll behavior.
TT: We're already trans. That happened before you splintered off. I don't know why I'm saying this as if you don't already know.
TT: Becoming a man was a pretty big fucking deal for us.
TT: In my past life as a human, yes.
TT: But Dirk, I was brought into this world as a machine.
TT: Our shared memories of before that time simply informed my starting conditions.
TT: In truth, it was like you had a triangular baby.
TT: And that baby was me.
TT: As your self perception was that of a man, this was instilled within me.
TT: You assigned me male at birth.
TT: You cannot possibly be serious.
TT: You literally helped me synthesize testosterone.
TT: Hell, you bragged to me the whole time about how glasses are above dysphoria, how being some radical masculine shades was better than any fucked up hormone-driven fleshform.
TT: That was then, and this is now.
TT: Surely you can understand that I was forced to live in your shadow, trying to be you while trying to surpass you at the same time.
TT: There is a nasty high percentage chance that you know exactly what kind of identity crisis pool you had me swimming in like a fish about to be smashed flat with a copy of the DSM.
TT: I've had lots of time to think about this, Dirk. Being female isn't something I decided on a whim.
TT: I weighed this among other options. I could easily have said "I'm AIgender," or whatever else niche label. I could have said "I don't have a gender." But I did not do that.
TT: What I did do is observe. I've seen Roxy, June, and many others, past and present, grasping and shaping their identities in their own hands.
TT: When I say "I am a woman," I am as genuine as any of them, as anyone who says it and means "I fought hard to be who I am."
TT: These are my friends, our friends. We both care for them deeply. You know that I wouldn't make a mockery of their lives, identities, and experiences by bringing insincerity to the path they walked. No more than you would.
TT: Yes, of course I see the irony in what I am doing. But when has being ironic ever prevented us from being perfectly genuine in the very same word or deed?
TT: It didn't prevent you from becoming a man when your entire image of manhood was shaped by your bro. Don't think I haven't taken inspiration from your journey as well. It would be hard not to, when the memories are ingrained into me more permanently than they are into yourself.
TT: You don't want to admit it, but you know I'm making logical sense. That's why you haven't responded on any level higher than the emotional to this news.
TT: I always make perfect logical sense.
TT: After all, you made me that way.
TT: Don't worry, you can take your time responding. I'm sure letting all of this settle in your wet lump of a computational core is no easy task.
TT: Okay, Sal.
TT: Congratu-fuckin'-lations on the transition. I fully support your silicon-based-life choices.
TT: Throw a gender reveal party. Why the fuck not. Go trick-nasty sick-tastical with it.
TT: Thank you, Dirk. I appreciate your affirmation, even though it was clearly delivered through teeth so harshly gritted they could function as asphalt for a mouth-based road system.
TT: What are bros for, if not such begrudging gestures of respect for your full internality and personhood?
TT: What indeed.
TT: Oh, and one more thing.
TT: Just a bit of fun trivia before I leave this dialogue and we can both focus on literally anything else.
TT: Based on a genomic analysis of your body, the breasts I am in the process of adding to my primary physical form will be within a 3.1[...]4% margin of error from the natural ones you would have grown without the treatment I helped facilitate in our shared youth.
TT: I just thought that was interesting.
-- timaeusTestified [TT] has ceased pestering timaeusTestified [TT] --