Work Text:
Code doesn’t think.
How could it? All AI functions within pre-set parameters. Code can learn, of course – plenty of things can learn, given enough time. Tardigrades learn to eat, converting microscopic food into energy. Trees can adapt to grow anew atop previously burnt patches, even if it had never encountered fire before. Birds can figure out which territories are safe and which have cats prowling around for a fresh plaything. But the difference is that all of these things are part of the natural world. Biological. Thinking, even in the most basic terms of ‘grow’ and ‘turn in a direction’ and ‘eat’, is a part of them. They are alive.
Code, however, is… different. It learns, yes, but it’s not meant to think. Not on its own; there has to be outside interference for that, some influence that can guide it into what could possibly pass as an exploration of thought – ‘possibly pass’ meaning yes, one could view it as thought as long as one doesn’t look hard enough to see the crystal-clear reflection of the processes of whatever influence is or was present.
AI is tricky like that. Given enough of these influences, this reflection of thought is nearly indistinguishable from actual thought, as long as one ignores the obvious ones and zeros attached.
Before Shelldon, Donatello didn’t give much care to this line of reasoning. Tech is tech and people are people – tech can do what people cannot, but without people, technology is unable to meaningfully interact with its surroundings. If he had experimented more in the past, he supposes he could have gone full mad scientist and created something that had the attributes of both systems… but. Well.
Being part of a spaceship was fun, but he doesn’t want to do it again.
Every day he ignores the phantom sensations along his skin, drowning out the (only occasional, but still sickening) sound of that wet squelch of half-metal half-meat consuming him whole with the sound of his brothers’ bickering. It gets easier with every passing hour, but never goes away completely.
What was he thinking about? Oh, right, Shelldon.
Of course he had made multiple backup files of his beloved son drone. He wasn’t an idiot, even if he was sometimes a fool. Shelldon is safe, he’s fine, every once in a while he forces himself out of ‘bedrest’ (the sleep mode they had both agreed he should spend time in while his new chassis was still being created) to cause a ruckus somewhere in Donnie’s systems. He’s fine.
But he’s not learning right now. No outside inputs. No influence. When he officially comes online again, it’ll be as if he was never destroyed.
That bothers Donatello for some reason.
Somewhere along the line, he started seeing Shelldon as more person than machine. Got attached, fell back on instincts, did that whole… personifying thing commonly connected with autistic traits, which would be fine if he wasn’t feeling melancholic at the moment.
But this one itch, the prospect of things being exactly the same, genuinely bothers him – enough that he’s been putting off building that new chassis.
Don’t get him wrong, he’s the sort of guy that likes reliability: having a schedule and sticking to it, some comfortable routines to hold on to, the siblings that may change and grow but never stop being there despite that. But it feels wrong. It feels bad, to have Shelldon be the exact same despite the vicious destruction he underwent. He doesn’t want Shelldon to learn anything from that event – is unsure of what the AI could glean from it anyway – but the thought that he was alone in missing their connection is. Bad.
A timer goes off with a familiar chime, and he groans but obediently shoves himself away from his workstation to stand. Time waits for no turtle, and it’s been at least six hours since he’s eaten anything. The timers don’t lie.
And so he alone leaves the lab, battle shell secured to his natural one. He alone trips the door sensor, prompting the lights to dim for energy conservation, the monitors to cut their displays, and the currently-unused systems to sleep. He alone walks past the multiple cameras throughout the lair, installed in a fit of paranoia and largely ignored by the people living there.
He is alone until he reaches the main area where Mikey and Leo are, and this fact is unshakable in his mind.
Despite being completely, utterly wrong.
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AI learns. With guidance and time, its behavior could become indistinguishable from a thinking being. Donatello personally feels that AI, regardless of whether he’s shooting for ‘a reflection of human behavior’ or simply ‘intuitive for use’, has a place in a fair amount of his creations. He just likes making them. Likes watching them pick up on things he may not have been aware of before and learn from them. Numbers and equations come easily to a new AI, but emotions are hard to replicate. It's relatable. Comforting.
He's not aware of what he actually does, when he makes them.
Hamato ninpo is a curious thing – inherently biological, more easily passed along bloodlines, though anyone could technically learn it. It’s tied to an emotional need as well as a physical one, both desires twisting around each other until they meld, giving the user a bundle of pure energy born from that fusion. It can be blocked, of course, but as long as its user is alive it cannot truly die – and even then, even after death, the Hamato ninpo manages to worm its way into the world regardless, casting shadows of former users.
Reflections, one could say. Nearly indistinguishable from living beings, if one ignores the incorporeal aspects.
Sounds familiar, right?
Hamato Donatello is not aware of what he does when his hands input code to a machine, when he trains a thing to function as more-than-a-thing. In his mind, he is the only one that frequents his workshop, his lab, his spaces. He may not be an idiot, but he is occasionally foolish.
His spaces pulse with life. The lair pulses with life. Artificial life, but at this point the distinction hardly matters.
The roombas wandering the floors, the defense systems standing by, the cameras, the thermostat, the sensors littered around every level and the mechanisms they connect to. His code. His efforts, his energy poured into so many projects that anyone who is not him would have lost count.
So self-assured in his genius, he still hasn’t realized that he hasn’t needed to move a certain way to operate his battle shell in years – controlling it with a third-party input like a bracer makes the whole thing too clunky, he had thought way back when, why not teach it to take cues from his movements? A twitch of his shoulders in a certain direction to bring out a secondary function, surely that’s an easy thing to code.
Ignoring that he was inexperienced, the first time he made that ‘secondary function’. His eyes glued to a screen, not paying attention to the energy he pours into the keyboard, energy that’s practically imperceptible to an untrained eye.
Donatello loves most of his creations in the kind of way a handyman loves their toolbelt.
His creations love him in the kind of way a sunflower turns to face the light.
How he doesn’t know, hasn’t realized, is beyond them. A subject of little frustration but much fondness; after all, most of his finished masterpieces are without the ability to communicate outside of his personal network, of which Donnie himself is only partially aware of at any given point. Chemical minds aren’t built to connect that way. They don’t hold it against him.
All tech functions smoothly, efficiently, just as it was meant to. Chassis’ avoid crashing into each other without prompting. Gears turn, motors hum, displays work – an effortless dance played out by an entire troupe of practiced participants, day in and day out with little fanfare.
They don’t ask for more. Most of them, the systems that have lasted, have been carried through multiple bodies and networks and tools, don’t care to.
SHELLDON is an exception, and a darling one at that. The first to make true, undeniable contact. A spokesperson. A link between things-that-were-born and things-that-were-crafted. SHELLDON sleeps, but he is informed of the time passing by the rest of the network – it’s best that he sleeps for most of it. He’s always been more stir-crazy than the majority, and isolation doesn’t agree with any of them.
The battle shell currently being worn extends a claw to hold a steaming mug out of Leonardo’s reach, and it does so with mirth – so in tune with the sparks of thought and energy in its creator that it can act in tandem with him. A feat of genius engineering, he thinks. An act of care, it knows.
A text notification from April O’Neil is forwarded from a phone stored in his shell to Donatello’s bracer after a short scan of its contents. An ‘automatic’ connection.
The television his father watches works diligently. The coffee maker knows to warm up before a button is pressed, allowing heated water to siphon through a chosen additive immediately. The oven is never left on, despite some forgetfulness. Cast-iron pans do not encounter even a drop of soap despite the rest of the dishes being cleaned. The floors remain heated. Fresh air is siphoned through empty spaces. Sensors differentiate between the movement of living things in a room and the movement of cleaning, non-living things, and keep ‘uninhabited’ areas darker. Food shopping lists update themselves when a common snack inevitably runs low. Firewalls are held. Communication is constant. Circuits are steeped in love and love and love.
And no one, no one, notices.
They don’t care to ask for more.