Okay, so, the more I typed this post, the more I decided it was OT for the WCDT and needed its own thread.
So Emily can just casually catch roughly 4+ feet of air, convert all forward momentum and strength into a rubber mallet hit, get bounced straight back from said hit into the floor (there's about 6ft of clearance between her butt and the floor at this point, and there's the speed going backwards too) and she's just ok? Emily is superhuman I tell you.
What if... she's an incredibly humanlike robot?!
One sort-of-fanfic idea I've posited about Emily is that she isn't a human at all. Rather, she's an experimental 'Synthetic Child Response Equivalent Anthroform Model' (SCREAM), developed by Dr Ellicott-Chatham as a consumer product for childless families. The project was abandoned after Beatrice's lawyers warned that it was a potential legal quagmire. Emily is the only prototype that was ever completed and, rather than shut her down when the experiment was red-flagged by Legal, he gave her to Mr and Mrs Azuma, old colleagues of his, to raise as their daughter.
Emily's CPU/brain box is locked into her chassis and can't be moved to another chassis without risking serious damage. Her chassis has few truly mechanical (metal or plastic) components but instead is primarily made of synthetic organic substitutes, most of which were originally developed by E-C Industries as rejection-proof organic transplant tissue equivalents. Basically, she seems human to any but the best professional examination. Amongst the breakthroughs included in what Dr E-C tactlessly referred to as the "Synthemeat Chassis" is that it can metabolise most organic materials and can
grow, mimicking the human ageing process.
The thing is that no-one had ever stress-tested an AI algorithm with human-like sensory input, a totally unshackled learning algorithm and baseline programming quite like Emily's before ("You are human and will ignore any evidence to the contrary"). The result has been an...
anomalous personality with huge eccentricities (from the perspective of humans and other synthetics). Simply put, she isn't human and her brain doesn't really work in anything other than a human-
simulating way but
she isn't able to realise that she is not human. Because of that, she's internalised several non-human capabilities as her being 'weird all the way down' and it's made her behave in strange ways.
Emily is
not a robotic superperson. Her bones and muscles are marginally stronger than that of a human's, allowing her to run slightly faster, jump noticably higher and sustain stronger impacts and electric discharges without perceptible ill effects. Having an AI box rather than a organic cortex means that her processing of data is noticeably faster than human average (but never enough to be considered more than a prodigy). However, she can't do things like bench-press SUVs, jump over tall buildings and the like. What's more, she wouldn't even
expect to be able to do this, having been carefully programmed not to suspect her true nature (one of the things that led to the aforementioned red flagging of the project). This has led to several fascinating quirks, such as her casual use of her far wider than human vocal range to summon dogs in the park and her complete psychological inability to question why she can do it and other humans can't.
I guess I like this idea because it would explain so much about her behaviour. It could also lead to a fascinating story if, somehow, Emily were to realise her true nature, despite EC Industries' many safeguards and how her friends (biological and synthetic alike) would react.
So, what do you think? What's your 'take' on the mystery that is Emily?
