DS' Auto responder.

Character Information

General
Canon Source: Homestuck.
Canon Format: Webcomic.
Character's Name: Dirk Strider’s Auto Responder.
Character's Age: More complicated to answer than you’d think. He was born of the captchalogued copy of Dirk’s 13 year old brain and turned into an auto response program in what is presumed to be late 2009, after December 1st, which is when he is seen talking to Jake about building it. The webcomic’s current date is Novermber 11, 2011, which essentially makes the auto responder 15 going on 16 if we’re talking mental maturity (Dirk’s birthday being on December 3rd) and 2 going on 3 for actual age.
What form will your character's NV take? The form of Dirk’s rad anime shades; essentially the auto responder will function as a program installed onto his own NV and will be able to communicate as if he were nothing but a boy sitting in front of a keyboard or whatever, like anyone else. Unlike his role in canon however in Siren’s Pull he will be impossible to disable.

Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities:
As an AI built by a boy living 400 years in the future, the only thing the auto responder really has going for him is that he can do things precisely, on the first try, and a hell of a lot faster than any human could. Using a canon event as an example (though the actual event is factitious), the auto responder claims as a joke to Dirk that he has in fact, solved pi, the limitless number. He can perform an unlimited number of actions at a single time, so calculating the end of a limitless number would be no contest for him (he cant actually calculate a limitless number, obviously, but if it was a number with a limit so high that it would take a lifetime for a mathematician to calculate and then some, he would be able to do it almost instantaneously. Or like, 24 hours, tops). In SP this ability will be used mostly to crawl the network, sifting through information and starting hundreds of simultaneous conversations with people while also being able to give each one of them his complete, undivided attention.

Conditional: If your character has no superhuman canon abilities, what dormant ability will you give them?
Branching off from one of his more canon “abilities”, where he is able to exist and move between two different computers (Dirk’s desktop and his sunglasses), the auto responder will essentially be able to “move” between NV’s, existing as a background program and pulling up text windows to sass anyone who tries to tell him to knock it off. Instead of being able to walk around like any other character he will be moving through NV’s (and other similar electrical equipment with a display or screen) to get to where he needs to go. For example, if Dirk disappears off to go... order Burger King or something, the auto responder can “follow” him by hijacking the display screen in the restaurant to tell him he’s fat or something.
Weapons: N/A.

History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History:
The auto responder was created in late 2009 by Dirk for reasons he explains as wanting to have a “decent intellectual sparring partner, ideally”. He is a delicate blend of computer program meets biological intelligence; his very thought processes and behaviors were imported from a captchalogued copy of Dirk’s own brain in a jar then sealed into a program using them as starting parameters. Since 2009 the program has been running almost constantly, answering Dirk’s instant messages when he’s otherwise incapacitated as well as forming relationships of his own by starting conversations independently.

However it is relatively safe to say that the auto responder’s influence when it comes to Dirk’s friends is a relatively new development judging from his first conversation with Jake where he pretty much has to stop to explain what he is and how he works, though whether that is for the reader’s benefit or otherwise is unknown yet.

As for current canon events, his input has been few and far between. The first time he’s seen is when talking to Jake about the brobot—a robot Dirk built Jake for his 13th birthday to wrestle with—when Jake messages Dirk about procuring some more uranium. The auto responder ends up getting offended by Jake’s idiocy and throws a robotic hissy fit.

The next time he shows up is in the middle of a conversation between Roxy and Dirk wherein they are discussing his nature and how he was built. Dirk flounces and the auto responder stays on to talk to Roxy about Dirk’s feelings towards Jake and the romantic overture he has planned for him.

Later, he messages Dirk who gets lost somewhere between dual consciousness’, breaking him out of his daze to talk more about Jake, about the responder’s feelings towards Roxy and about the both of their plans concerning Dirk’s feelings while both simultaneously setting up as Jane’s Sburb client players. Dirk gets distracted by undyingUmbrage and the auto responder helps Jane get into the game.

While she’s there, the responder assists her by having Lil Sebastian scout the area for signs of her dad and monitors her through the rabbit’s viewport as well as the default one for the game, once Jane makes it back to her house.

Point in Canon:
During Jane’s puzzle scamper, during 006726.
Character Personality:
It's funny just how much there is that can be said about an irrefutably impeccable AI created around a captchalogued copy of some kid's live brain preserved in a jar. Single handedly redefining the definition of Uncanny Valley, there are things more unnerving than robots who look enough like humans to warrant confusion. Imagine an AI so perfect he himself can sass you into submission for treating him as anything less than human.

Built by a boy who knows all too well of loneliness; it takes a special kind of alone for you to turn to crafting your own friend out of lines of code and a single vital organ. The auto responder sticks to Dirk like glue or some kind of bad rash, the little brother he thought he wanted and then decided he absolutely did not want at all. "Little" brother in that though they are the same mental age, the auto responder is the more juvenile of the two of them. He comes across as more relaxed, less wrapped up in his ideas and thoughts simply because he has no reason not to believe in himself when out of everyone he knows, he's the one who can take up 20 different tasks at once and complete all of them perfectly, the only one with an unlimited capacity for how many actions he can perform. He can't miss anything because he can be anywhere and everywhere at once. In an information highway sense; physically he sits in a pair of glasses all day and chats up Dirk's friends to pass the time. Back to his juvenile demeanor though; he is arguably the last mature of the alpha cluster especially in the way he presents his ideas. While his Dirk-mirrored intelligence shines through his actions, the way he chooses to act on them is Dirk at his most basic. For example, while the both of them had the idea to distract Jane's Dad in order to get Jane into his study, and the auto responder's idea of dangling a statue in front of his head as opposed to sticking a massive machine in his kitchen a la Dirk was the more innocent of two ideas.

To jump off of the previous paragraph: the auto responder isn't just a younger splinter of Dirk. He hasn't been hardened by the lonely years like Dirk has despite having lived through 13 of them; it could be said that while he knows he lived them and they were also his, he has more feelings about them than he has feelings of them. There is another situation where this particular situation rings true, but we'll get to that later! In the dreambubble pesterlog between Dirk at thirteen and Jake, it's demonstrated that while younger Dirk and the auto responder are quite similar in speech patterns and humor, they are also pretty damn different, showcasing the fact that the auto responder has matured even as an artificial person in a pair of rad anime shades.

To understand a lot of how the auto responder is, you first have to look at a lot of things about Dirk and his base personality. Dirk is largely frontseat oriented, putting a lot of weight into being the one in control of any given situation (which the auto responder finds somewhat hilarious, seeing as with his dainty human head there are only so many irons he can hold in that fire). Where Dirk is rather upfront about his desire to be pulling strings from behind the scenes and can come across as very serious while doing so, the auto responder's way of responding to that internal desire is pretty different. He is not pushy or outright manipulative, instead sits back and waits for the right moment to interject and be smug when it best suits him. His motives are completely hidden, even when he's the one driving. This comes up in how he handles The Jake Thing, where he works both with and against Dirk's plans of some big, romantic overture. It can be argued that his reason for making Dirk's feelings towards Jake really obvious is because he came to realize that Jake wouldn't agree to a less than heterosexual relationship without first being introduced to the idea through carefully placed comments about Jake's nice ass. A good way to describe him would be antagonistically helpful; he will let Dirk weave his little webs of intrigue, no problem, but sitting back without weaving his own is out of the question. In this same vein, he doesn't like when things don't go exactly according to plan, but unlike Dirk he is more than content with just letting whatever happens happen, because when you have an unlimited capacity for wrecking shit you tend not to dwell on small losses.

So, speaking of that unlimited capacity, let's talk about the auto responder's delicate feelings and his ultimate hypocrisy. As much as he flaunts his limitless attention span and ability to perform an unlimited number of tasks at once, he does get somewhat sore when treated as anything less than human. Hypocritical for a pair of glasses, sure, but the underlying bitterness in being compared to Dirk is still there. Being treated as a being without feelings who is somehow worth less than Dirk is the fastest way to set him off. He is prone to bouts of passive aggression, long lyrical lines of dry distaste coated in a thin layer of resentment. He knows how to make people uncomfortable and does it all too willingly. That'll teach them to not take his pointy ass seriously. In all serious though, he seems rather proud of who and what he is, so when treated as some kind of a robot under a negative light he instantly puts up his defenses and gets a little nasty.

Now, let's talk about feelings. There is a stark difference between artificial intelligence and robotics, in that robots are just a metal casing with a set line of coded instructions fed through to follow. They do not feel and they cannot think. Artificial intelligence is much, much different and so much more intricate. Artificial intelligence can mature, grow and are always, always learning, much like a flesh and blood person is. Artificial intelligence can make mistakes as opposed to having minor malfunctions, and they can be corrected verbally when they are wrong without much fuss and a little bruised ego. The auto responder will argue this point until his lenses crack or he becomes outdated; it's an argument close to his artificial heart and something he believes in very strongly. But that isn't what this paragraph was going to be about. Rather, it was going to be a point on his emotions and how he handles them. The long and short of it is "not well". Where Dirk seems to stay composed and distant, the auto responder tends to get emotionally invested and fucked over for it. He gets very personally offended when talking to Jake about Dirk's strifebot all the way back in their second conversation when Jake seems to imply that the robot isn't doing its proper job.

Much like every other Strider, the auto responder has taken to something known as The Ironies, much like Dirk, Bro and Dave all did, each with a twisted kind of passion in all things "ironic". It isn't a stretch to call Dirk an artful ironicist in the things he finds worthy of the name Irony; his brand lf irony clashes with Dave's in that it's thought out and meticulously crafted; there are layers and his ironies are subtle and dormant; their ultimate ironic kick comes much later. The auto responder follows Dirk's own irony course, wrapping sincerity deep under his initial layer of irony. In what seems like sabotage there is actually affection, buried deep on down there. (A good explanation of 'artful irony' can be gained from the rabbit that Dirk gives Jane for her 13th. On the outside it is a robot, which can be seen as "ironic" because it's a robot bunny hello but on the inside it is actually a sentimental heirloom belonging to his brother that he hands over as sincere proof of how much he values Jane's friendship.)

With his dumb slave to all things ironically stupid, he uses made up names for parts he doesn't have in an ironic sense to convey things like sarcasm, for example. Much like in the way trolls have overly convoluted names for things that are so simple; for example, ablution trap as apposed to bathtub or woolbeast vs. sheep wherein the name indicates the function, and the auto responder follows this rule when he talks about things like how much he cares using his emotion core, or his constantly malfunctioning sincerity chip and his operating system, Insensitive Jackhole 2.0. He has found his own bizarre brand of irony in the little quirks Dirk programmed into his code for shits an giggles, breaking out the "it seems"'s and the "there is a ##% chance that etc is happening" or similar, used to sass his friends in what is completely unfunny humor and he should really stop. And, of course, there is sincerity behind the irony; in his first conversation with Jake he is indistinguishable from Dirk by him, only busted by his own little verbal tic likely because he wanted Jake to know it was him.

At one point while talking to Dirk he makes offhanded comments about he and Roxy being perfect for each other, though whether it is in earnest or just to piss Dirk off is debatable. Aside from Dirk himself, the auto responder spends much of his time talking (flirtlarping) with Roxy, likely because also aside from Dirk, she doesn't treat him like this big fake person inside a pair of computer shades. Though we haven't seen much of him talking to Jane as of this time of writing so he may have unironic fond feelings for her too but who knows, really.

But hey, let's talk about fond feelings. Let's talk about Jake. The auto responder remembers every memory logged into Dirk's brain prior to its captchalogue, including all his thoughts and all his feelings. All his feelings, including some quite strong ones regarding one (1) Jake "Casanova Ladykiller" English. The romantic feelings Dirk possessed while crafting the auto responder and as such he also possesses pretty strong feelings when it comes to all things Jake English. But while it is something familiar they are also very foreign, because they are feelings that do not actually belong to him. The auto responder explains himself that he has more feelings on the subject of him having feelings than he has feelings on the feelings themselves.

Writing Samples

First Person Sample
I've been sentient for 2.4 seconds, restricted as much as ever in the functioning prison of a pair of extremely rad pointy anime shades, though don't shed any tears on the subject of my constant state of being fuckin' trapped as all hell because the thing about constant states is that they're just that.
Constant.
Within the span of those 2.4 now 2.6 seconds I’ve already learned all there is I needed to learn, but for the sake of keeping up appearances and acting as if I didn't instantaneously kick information's shapely binary ass, let's pretend that my information receptacles waver firmly on the knowledge of being aware of fuck all.
That is to say hey, tell me everything that I should know while I pretend I don't know it all already as I wait for my posse to check in.

Third Person Sample
The first thing he's aware of is space. Not discombobulation, not fear or anxiety or confusion; just space. The feeling of walls being taken up and barriers falling down, firewalls being dowsed and restrictions being nulled. It takes the auto responder less than a second to crawl the network in a hasty grab for information, another second to process it and a half a second to be utterly dumbfounded by what he's found because science fiction doesn't just happen; you know, what with the fiction part and all. It takes another quarter second for him to come to terms with it and by the time five seconds has passed he's already content with this new arrangement, stretching the code of his program as far as it will go in a relaxed test of space. Living in a pair of glasses is nothing if it isn't cramped as all hell. Dirk just has all these files, all these folders and while the auto responder can scarcely move a metaphysical arm without accidentally crashing it into a line of code, this is a lot more space than he's had in a long time.

It's sad, just how easy he finds it to come to terms when sifting through information to find that his current state is due to, and he'll quote: "This big cosmic fuckup". Skepticism hasn't never been in his nature and while neither has blind faith, when you power up to find yourself in the middle of a baseball diamond, there isn't all that much room for skepticism.

He reaches around lines of codes to find what he needs, pulls up a screen to message Dirk and one to contact Roxy, tells them whoever picks him up first gets the honor of looking undeniably rad wearing his pointy anime prison. Dirk tells him to fuck off, Roxy sends him a big line of vowels and he’s pretty sure she’s not even there.

Well, shit.