Work Text:
Adding timestamp tags to media had just made sense. It wasn’t supposed to get weird.
ART was a lot of things, and demanding was chief among them. By the third time it asked to repeat a specific scene in World Hoppers, I started tagging the relevant timecodes. It wasn’t that hard to roll back to a specific scene, but being able to jump to a bookmark without scrubbing through every second was a welcome time-saver.
Because ART asked to rewatch scenes a lot. A lot. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that a research transport which specialized in processing data spent a lot of time processing media. And it’s not like I didn’t rewatch stuff. Episode 206 of Sanctuary Moon was practically encoded line-by-line into my brain, but I kept watching it anyway.
It naturally followed that the timestamps be tagged with specific filters, for expediency. Characters, scene descriptors. It was just an extension of the content filters I’d set up early on in this “relationship,” namely eliminating true stories of crews in danger.
I didn’t bother tagging ART’s versions of the files. So far as I knew, it had never bothered playing them on its own. It seemed content to watch my stream—insisted on it actually.
So I ended up with this library of clips collated as ART’s “favorites,” or “interests” anyway, completely accidentally. I never paid much attention to what they were.
Until I did. I don’t know what prompted me to look through the tagged sections on my own, boredom I guess. It was like tuning into a streaming entertainment feed, not having to decide what to pick, just watching whatever was on.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, I guess just a ‘best of’ sort of reel for the serial, but the scenes were mostly random. It didn’t seem to be the cool effect shots, or important story beats, or even especially memorable sections of dialog.
It was a lot of sitting around. Literally just characters sitting together. A handshake here or there, a hug. The story part seemed to be incidental, the focus was on physical contact. It was the interpersonal stuff ART preferred, but the lack of relevant dialog was somewhat surprising. ART liked to talk.
I ran through the older clips I had logged but not tagged with anything descriptive, I had some of my own scenes logged, too. It was habit to bookmark things by now, so there was a fair bit to sort through. And in doing so, I found a tag labeled ‘Eden.’ Which I definitely hadn’t made. The timestamps didn’t seem to match the ones I’d logged for myself, so ART hadn’t collated my bookmarks, I don’t think. It was possible I had replayed them without tagging them while ART and I had watched the episodes. Then maybe it had logged those? So I watched them.
The majority featured the burly engineer side character. Which was a little weird, the guy never said much of anything. But he was competent, really knew his job, and the characters in his crew respected him despite his stoicism. Liked him even.
I thought, maybe this guy wasn’t like the scientists ART usually had in his crew. And required extra analysis to understand. Were they tagged as a reminder to ask me for context? Or, given ART’s interest in the familiar, maybe the engineer was exactly like a specific member of its crew complement.
The other clips were mostly set in medical suites, a character waking up, or being visited. The scene where the crewmember was revived from apparent death was the star here. We’d watched it dozens of times. At first ART seemed to need the repeated stimulus to convince itself the character was okay. In more recent viewings, it was less agitated. The feeling in the feed less like a human holding their breath, and more… attentive? Ascribing emotion to an enormous transport ship with a sprawling data system isn’t really feasible. At least not conclusively. I found myself watching the scene again, trying to see what ART was looking for.
The character lays inert in the medical suite. They had been left there, presumed dead, while the others dealt with the ongoing crisis. Drones circling idly. Monitors displaying the null life signs. The focus shifts from the platform, slow sad music turning into something hopeful, or, mysterious? The stuff they play when they want you to notice something, like a reveal is going to happen. And the image pans to the monitors, and the flatline jumps to a single heartbeat. The medical suite spins up from idle, and the drones start to crowd in. It jumps to a new scene with the other set of characters. Given there were no additional timestamps tagged, it probably meant this was the end of the relevant clip.
I watched it a couple more times, okay, maybe a half-dozen times. But it was mostly while I was doing other things. I was traveling to meet a client, but could pretty safely zone into media on ring transport. I didn’t especially love doing it, but for some reason this clip itched at my brain. The importance of the scene should be obvious, it was obvious. But I still felt like there was something I was missing.
In the lobby of a recreational facility, waiting for said client to appear—they were late—I started sorting through more medical suite content, from other media besides just World Hoppers. There were a couple tagged Eden, mostly with characters unconscious on a med platform. Isolated clips of characters in surgery, or recovering, with no one but the suite’s equipment around. Was ART processing my alterations via media? Or was this the inspiration for suggesting the procedures? I was just puzzling through the timeline of when the tags had been added, when—
Operating capacity at 2% and dropping.
Getting murdered is exactly why I don’t usually watch media while in transit to a job.
—
Luckily, as a construct, autonomic functions are managed by my organic parts. After a murky moment, it was apparent that they were still functional. Which was, in some ways, worse.
It put me in mind of the interminable stasis periods, trapped in the coffin of your own body. Well, not a coffin exactly. Obviously, being buried alive is no fun, but when you’re trapped inside a living body, it doesn’t stop being a body. My system was flooded with everything my limbic alarm system could pump out. Fear was generally healthy in my line of work. Fear was the main reason the company included organic parts. Fear keeps you alert. But as anyone with anxiety could tell you, fear responses don’t always stop. Just like a fire alarm doesn’t know that you’re just cleaning an air filter calm down already, a body doesn’t stop being afraid once you understand the danger. Luckily, I had higher brain functions that could in theory combat the hindbrain fear response. In theory.
I had registered pain, quite a bit of it, but it hadn’t lingered. Odds were I’d been hit with an energy weapon, a powerful taser, or an EMP if my assailants were feeling showy. That’s assuming it was an attack, and not some accident that vented an entire sector to space. Or worse.
Cut off from the feed and my inorganic parts, I didn’t just feel trapped, I felt stupid. It was possible my external sensors, eyes, ears, were working, but I couldn’t make use of anything. Just floating in nothingness. It almost felt like ceding control to ART, submerged, but also above myself. I could almost pretend I was in safe hands, at least enough to calm down a bit. Speaking of ART, it would be losing it by now.
The transport was receiving a large cargo shipment, and was at least partially occupied by the related logistics. That operation had been the reason ART staunchly opposed this particular meeting. But I wanted to go, so I did. The client had seemed to earnestly (allegedly) need help. They (allegedly) couldn’t wait the three cycles it would take to finish loading cargo. And I didn’t need to be babysat—except I guess I did.
Given ART was a behemoth of a supercomputer, it probably had a few spare processors available to look in on me. I hoped.
Operating capacity at 5%
6%
4%
My swimming vision began to clear a bit, and I could feel vibrations in my organic parts, vibrations that might be sounds. Whoever had taken me out probably didn’t expect me to be this messed up. They must have hooked me up to some sort of power cell, small, non-networked. Which could be a good sign, i.e. (e.g? I.e. I think.) I probably wasn’t going to be murdered. But it was likely a very bad sign, I was being kept alive. For something I probably wasn’t going to like.
Neural connections were coming online, and I was finally able to process some inputs. There was definitely talking. Loud talking. Yelling. And, a voice I knew.
“–confirmed functional. Disabling destruct–”
I was definitely not hooked into any kind of feed or network, but that was ART’s voice. One of them anyway. An angry one. And also maybe an explosion. A small one. I closed my eyes—which, I registered belatedly, had been open and staring at some deck plating—in order to focus on the sound.
“–do not, I will turn this ship to slag. I will then send that slag into the nearest star.” boomed impressively out of a nearby speaker.
That couldn’t be ART could it? At first blush, the threat didn’t sound like something ART would say. Then I remembered the first time ART had spoken to me. The looming abyss of power.
Also, it sounded like one of the lines the captain from World Hoppers had said—it was one of our earliest timestamps. But, mostly it was the yawning chasm of brute processing strength thing.
Someone standing over me started arguing with, judging by the quality of the sound, someone standing near a console. A lot of yelling about navigation overrides and weapons scans.
“You will return my sec unit. You have 97 seconds to comply.”
“My” sec unit? Who did this asshole think it was? But I was being hauled off the deck plates, so it was hard to think about anything that wasn’t my limbs being slung awkwardly around. Whoever was carrying me was probably an augmented human, I’m too heavy for a human to handle, and a bot—construct or no—wouldn’t be this clumsy.
There was another explosion, more muffled this time.
“Damage to my sec unit will be repaid in kind.”
Whoever was hauling me was clearly getting an earful via their implant, in between grunts of effort they were alternately apologizing and swearing. Then I was dumped, none-too-gently into what I assumed was a shuttle or escape pod of some kind. A third explosion, closer this time. Sprawled on a crash couch, looking at the ceiling, I wondered if ART was actually using its actual railguns to actually assault another ship. All that had to be simulated, right? Then again there was no reason to assume we were still docked at the transit ring and beholden to the rule of civilized law.
A rumbling shudder let me know the pod had been ejected. My power cell finally hit a reboot threshold and some data began to trickle into my head. It was mostly alarms. The systems pinged and reported what I already knew: my inorganic parts were inert. At least there didn’t appear to be any damage. It’d require a lot more than a backup power cell to get them functioning, but it was a relief to be able to ‘feel’ them, at least. Mostly I just wanted access to the feed, to find out what the hell had happened.
Had ART hacked their systems anonymously? Somehow posed as captain? Or a client of mine? It felt absurd to lay back wondering about things, but I guess, what the hell else was I going to do?
A surprisingly short time later, the pod was docking. Well, landing. Through the viewport I could see the vehicle pass through the threshold of a cargo hold, and watched the massive bay doors slam shut. The hatch sprang open and an assortment of drones and bots crowded in. One of the cargo haulers levered my rag doll body onto its forks and rolled into the crew areas of the ship.
We passed through a number of corridors I didn’t recognize. I’d only done a cursory scan of the ship, and never in the more “sensitive” regions. It looked like we’d passed the conn station and the captain’s quarters, and by the time we reached the final door, I was pretty sure I knew where I was headed.
Sure enough, the hatch slid open and revealed a massive server farm. The loader set me on the floor and backed out of the door. The glaring lights dimmed suddenly, leaving me surrounded by uncountable blinking lights, and the hot whir of fans and coolant pumps. Doors and hatches slammed audibly from all around. A nearby monitor seemed to have noticed my attention, and displayed the ship’s schematic, indicating the rapidly sealing doors as bright red bars radiating outward.
Minutes slipped by (I assume, I still wasn’t plugged into anything more helpful than my perforated organic brain). The frantic whirring of fans gradually slowed, lights blinking less erratically. Still ART hadn’t said anything. The deck hummed soothingly. The room was pleasantly warm, too, probably not great for server racks that worked as hard as a research ship’s. I wondered if maybe ART was watching media to calm down, like I would. I realized the Sanctuary Moon soundtrack was playing quietly in the room.
“There is a drone on the way to tend to your inorganic components.” ART said, like I had slipped and fallen in the bathing facility.
I wanted to laugh. And that is not something that I do. It was relief, if I was lucky; shock if I wasn’t.
The coolant pumps seemed to grind a harder, and ART’s voice cut in and out,
“I’m–
I had not planned–“
It must be hard to have all that processing funneled down into a single audio channel. In the feed it’s a lot easier to multithread, especially between inorganics. Hearing ART struggle to focus, get out a single thought, was almost cute.
“I am having…difficulties with the hatches.”
I stared at the schematic. At the massive bulk of the freighter. The dozens of doors barred against the world. At the server room in the dead center of ART’s massive metal existence. And there I was. Cradled right up against its heart.
ART had plucked me out of the jaws of whatever bullshit those assholes had planned. And pulled me in as deep as it could. And didn’t want to let me go. Was afraid to.
And then I remembered World Hoppers. Remembered the character in the med suite, helpless. But just as helpless, was the ship holding them. All it could do was hold on. And this wasn’t the first time, medical suite or no, that ART had watched me, helpless.
The battery pack was still attached somewhere, and by now I could feel a slight pressure where the feed should be, some receptors must be coming back online. If a tiny charge was enough to reboot my inorganics, that meant the pulse hadn’t fried much when it shorted the connections. I still couldn’t do anything useful, like shunt power to relevant systems, but I was able to send out what passed for a weak ping. ART immediately pinged back. Loud. It must have sent out an RF pulse and energized one of my transponders, too, because I could now reach through a narrow corridor of the feed.
All of the info packets ART had been struggling to deliver verbally were competing to rush through the connection. Which meant approximately nothing got through. ART’s system could handle a thousand consecutive downloads, but my atrophied bandwidth was not having it. I wasn’t able to swap to an upload-only mode, but was able to shunt the messages to temporary storage, leaving room to send out a connection request.
I was pretty sure the handshake was accepted, but ART took almost a minute to push down the line. The submerging sensation was usually a little freaky, but this time, it was actually a relief. It felt like watching media with ART instead of being hacked, the pressure of it leaning over my mental shoulder. A rogue process surfaced the memory of Dr. Mensah hugging me. It was similar; objectively being restrained, but the feeling was more of comfort, like a safety harness. When ART settled into the connection, I had to bat away more packets, and started shoving forward my systems’ status updates. The only thing I could do to say I’m fine. It didn’t seem to help much.
The server racks alternated wildly from whirring crazedly and stalling, stuttering through whatever ART was feeling. Maybe struggling to hold back the uploads it was trying to contain, I appreciated the restraint. I had more control of my body than I ordinarily did when ART “drove,” probably because most of my inorganics were still on the fritz. I had recovered enough motor function to move a bit—which was handy considering my body couldn’t handle a complete lack of my bot parts and still function, they fed me, for instance. What was I doing? I couldn’t tell if it was the manual override, or just sluggish servos, but stretching my arms felt like pushing through impact gel.
There was no way I could reach the server rack, though, not that I knew exactly why I wanted to. I rerouted and instead dropped my arms across my chest. ART was there, logging every move, watching intently. I squeezed my own arms, an echo of that comforting hug, and sent the sensation through to ART, I’m here, and I’m okay.
The room went dark, silent, and for a second I was sure it was my system that had drained its power cores. But it was just a brief hiccup in ART’s. The fan noise came back with a vengeance, and I felt my own arms tighten, hands gripping my sleeves. The cooling system leveled off and the status LEDs stopped freaking out. ART kept “holding” me. As I watched the schematic, some of the doors began to unlock and cycle.
I let out a breath. My giant, terrifying, metal guardian was finally calming down. Nice to know it wasn’t just the organic bits that made people stupid. Tentatively, I diverted a few data packets back into processing space. Technically I didn’t miss much, none of it was very coherent. About seven thousand pings, several threats to kill me if I died, and a competing jumble of explanations and questions. Interestingly, ART had never initiated an override. I wasn’t entirely sure if it could have puppetted me in the state I’d been in. But it didn’t try.
That made me start to feel an emotion so I didn’t think about it very hard.
There was some useful imagery however, from the drones, footage from the other ship’s sec system, and a couple of the external cameras. My attackers had indeed left the ring station, in a corvette-sized craft, one that looked like a gunship. Not that they had a chance to fight back. Judging by the massive amount of data being transferred, and the fact that the ship was dead in the water, ART had definitely co-opted control. Didn’t stop ART’s deflection system from punching several large holes into it, though. ART had been mad mad.
“My priority should have been retrieval and triage.” It said over the speakers.
It played the external footage again.
“I could have captured their vessel. But I did not want that vessel to have you, even if you were in me. I could have vented their life support systems and incapacitated them. I did not want to stop them.”
The grinding coolant pumps choked out a low growl, “I wanted to hurt them. For taking you.”
After a moment, the noise subsided and my giant transport said, “I was afraid.”
The hatch slid briefly open, and a repair drone hovered into view. The hatch shut again, and the drone sent out a small activation pulse. It was enough to launch my startup routine, just a few systems were still offline. Apparently I’d already been capable of speech, verbal and via feed, for a few minutes. I hadn’t been paying attention.
There were just the words, ‘I was afraid.’
Acrid smoke filled the compartment, before being whisked away by the robust air filtration system. It was only when the drone pulled away the pieces of my uniform that I realized it had lazed through the synthetic fabric to remove it. Watching from the drone’s camera, I saw my body was in decent shape. The attack had come from behind, though. So I tilted to the side, intending to roll over, but my brain went a little swimmy.
“We should take you to the medical suite, I feel–you will be more comfortable.”
I pushed a negative down the feed, not trusting my voice just yet. Here, it was warm, and dim, and… and I didn’t want to move. I felt my body tilt a bit more, ART was still here, and I laid down on my stomach. There were some scorch marks at the interfaces between my organic and artificial parts, likely where the electric prod had hit, but they were largely superficial. I wouldn’t even bother to regenerate them before heading into a cubicle to rest.
Given the prognosis, I finally felt like I could stretch out, and not shatter like spidered glass. I turned onto my back, rolled my ankles, flexed my knees, pulled my arms up over my head. When I folded my arms back down, my hands came to rest on my stomach. My bare stomach. We both startled.
ART threw up a wall of code like it’d hit a pocket of malware. My skin broke out in goosebumps, all those stupid little hairs standing upright.
Well, that was new. I’d never really felt myself. Okay, obviously, I have that’s sort of unavoidable. But it had never felt like this. Like a live wire. Like they showed in the scenes I normally skipped over. Without thinking I brushed my hand across my arm.
Behind its codewall, ART experienced some kind of overflow. A rush of nonsense code flooded across the feed. The section of the server farm nearest me flickered and ground to a halt, going utterly dark. Other areas ran hotter, triggering alarms.
That was also new.
“You felt that.” It wasn’t a question, I could feel ART there in my system, not just leaning over my shoulder. Pressed closer. Inside.
My hand tightened against my forearm, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t me.
I’d let ART in before, but never for this long, this completely. As scary as it had been that first time, I’d only been a springboard, it was there and gone. Now…It was utterly bizarre to feel my skin, and feel ART feeling my skin. It made me think of all those clips. Made me wonder if ART had wanted this then, as it leapt through me to shuttle systems, to linger and feel. Wanted it but only stepped through, quick as it could.
I did it again. Just brushed down my arms, this time getting an almost full-body shudder.
The room went dim, blacked out entirely for a split moment. An eternity of processing time lost. Functions interrupted that had never been offline before. A brief, utter silence. Then an abrupt, desperate, “I feel it. Please.” Even with ART in my head, I couldn’t tell if it was asking me to stop, or asking for more. So I pushed motor control down the line, and made it decide.
Judging by the whine of the server systems, ART wasn’t sure what it had meant either. But my arms slid across my chest, crossing to hold myself again. A solid firm pressure. Slowly the equipment in the room settled, and bizarrely so did I. Honestly, if I had to describe my worst nightmare it would be living trapped inside a body I didn’t control—you can imagine why. But somehow this didn’t feel out of control. It was hard to feel unsafe inside a thousand-ton metal transport willing to obliterate anything in its path to get you back.
I was having an emotion again so I switched to the drone camera. It didn’t help. I didn’t want to see my stupid, fragile, little body laying there. So I reached out to ART again, and it let me in.
It was probably stupid, my systems weren’t built for overrides like this, and ART was way beyond my capacity to “operate.” That was basically the only reason ART had let me on in the first place. The ability to completely melt my brain if I tried anything. I was pretty sure the ART I knew now wouldn’t let me overextend myself. 74% sure.
Some of the more egregious company rings, usually the ones on the outskirts that are hemorrhaging personnel, have truly awful advertising feeds. Where you’re bombarded by overlapping bands of noise. Or, like when you’re sharing comms with an entire platoon of sec units, and it’s all going to shit, and there’s too much… Okay I can’t think of an analogy for the sheer volume of processes running every microsecond. It was overwhelming, but in a way I’d never felt. A way that was nice.
Maybe ART was dumbing it down for me, or maybe my own systems just looped off the bits I couldn’t handle. But it worked, kinda. It worked in that I got a deeper-than-feed connection. I could touch systems and feel them. Life support set to much higher levels than I technically required. Temperatures indeed bumped up for my benefit.
There was actually a startling amount of space dedicated to just…me. ART had algorithms for humidity sensors, had reprogrammed deck strain gauges, tracked CO2 sensor measurements in minute detail. All to feel me. As best it could anyway.
An alert ran through ART’s system and it curtailed the connection. I thought maybe it was embarrassed I’d seen the jury rigged sensor array, but the drone was issuing a medical alert. Irregular heartbeat. Oh, yeah, my heart was doing something, running back a few seconds, it had done a little jump, skipping a beat. Now it was hammering away, and my temperature was rising. ART’s too, it was freaking out again. That made my heart do a squeeze which was unsettling.
ART pinged a staccato sort of acknowledgement and drew away. It said into the feed, Well we are never doing that again.
“I’m not exactly planning to get kidnapped again.”
Not what I meant.
“Don’t trust me in your giant brain?”
There was a long silence. The sort of fear that had leaked into the feed earlier was back, and I wasn’t sure who it was coming from.
Finally, it sent, We are each fragile in our own ways.
And I guess yeah if I had any more body than I already did, much less a body with people in it, I’d probably be even more freaked out. And as a massive data processor cum spaceship a half-meat body probably felt tiny and terrifying. But I did almost send, ‘some of us more than others.’ Although, it probably knew that, too.
My performance reliability just dropped measurably, and the medical drone was no longer accepting my alert dismissals. I pinged ART to let it know I wasn’t dying, and dropped into standby.
—
When things were back to normal (by my standards, everyone else was still freaking out about the abduction attempt/event, but let’s be real it was about the 75th most traumatizing thing to happen (at least of my current set of memories), I had final say.) they were normal enough to be boring.
I was feeling antsy enough to want to talk to ART, but not enough to actually start a conversation, so I opened our feed connection and waited an eternal fifteen seconds. It didn’t say anything, which probably just meant that it wanted me to, first. But it had also been more hesitant to drop in on me lately. Or maybe that was a perspective bias. That’s not it, the one where you see what you expect to see.
Anyway, next I set a status in our shared workspace, I’m bored. That’s technically not talking first. Technically.
Oh you’re bored. ART sent in our private feed, along with a snapshot of its unused processing banks.
Sucker. I had already queued up: It’s a specific bored. The humans are talking, and I don’t want to watch media, but I am interpolating a bunch of data and it’s not going anywhere anytime fast. It’s just enough to be infuriating—have you ever been on a feed that’s just impacted enough to be noticeably slow, but not bad enough to try to fix?
It said, I have traveled to roughly 1500% more stations, planets, transit rings, and/or related installations than you have.
So I should just make assumptions about how a supercomputer transport uses the feed, because that’s good precedent. I’m not as good as ART at the conversational traps, but I have been working on them.
Feed networks are almost always frustrating. Just like I am almost always bored.
That makes sense considering how much time it devoted to looking over my shoulder. I sent a clip from Timestream Defenders of the ship’s counselor fake-crying.
It didn’t react, You like having multiple inputs. So do I.
Ugh, fine, What are you processing right now?
My background processes alone are enough to overwhelm our shared processing space thrice over. It sounded annoyed, but also annoyingly full of itself.
So I poked back, You’re just embarrassed that I got a peek behind the curtain.
ART said dryly, I thought you were paying attention to the humans.
Dr. Mensah stopped talking and Ratthi just fell asleep, I’m about to go into standby mode.
It sent, Don’t be rude. With Ratthi asleep you should probably be taking notes. And I felt its feed-prescence diminish.
ART was probably right, I lengthened the buffer on two of my drones so they wouldn’t overwrite footage until the end of the session and tried to care.
The data packets hit like pebbles, distracting. I didn’t even realize it was ART at first, they were coming to my feed directly, bypassing our processing space. There wasn’t even an associated request, just raw data, almost like walking past a feed marker. They’d been tagged priority, but the file sizes were too small to be anything interesting, logging the meta data tantamount to processing the file itself. I slotted them into a temporary cache that it would rapidly overfill.
I sent, What the hell are you doing.
ART sent, That’s one of four reactors on deck six. Plus the associated electrical systems checking in. Measuring throughput and reporting connectivity. It’s some of the more annoying data sets, I admit. Like it hadn’t thrown the feed equivalent of a handful of sand in my face.
Then there was bloatware too, garbage packets that were just collections of useless content, hours of footage of empty hallways that weren’t worth sorting through. My prioritization protocols had me batting them away before even acknowledging them. But they distracted from the reactor data. Sort of like playing white noise over the chatter of a food stall. I’d experimented with that during the transit to Milu, but it was easier to filter the levels out myself. (The best way to tamp down noise was active cancellation, but it made my job harder, so splitting my focus and backburnering for later analysis had been the solution I’d landed on. (Annoyingly, the best way to resolve a lot of human drama was to know all the human drama. And it’s not like in media where they show you the important parts. So sometimes you just end up sitting in a bunk running searches for voice prints until you can pull out a quote (In this case Party A had said something they thought Party B wanted to hear, not knowing Party C had heard, but when Party B left, Party A immediately told Party E what they actually meant—Party D was–), wait this is too many parentheticals)), what was the human on the podium saying?
I checked my drones and ran back the last few seconds, I hadn’t been spacing out that long, I think my processors were just running overtime trying to keep up with all the incoming data. I’d even forgotten to feel uncomfortable that the human behind Ratthi was tapping their foot against my chair.
I’m also tapping into the feeds at the station, but with all the human activity, I assumed your systems would be too distracted. ART added.
It was getting hard to track the conversation with all the data swimming around me, Gee, thanks, I wouldn’t want to be distracted.
Larger file sizes crushed up against my inputs, starting to download simultaneously, slowing the whole system down. It was interesting, and felt a bit like ART in the feed, that impression of massivity. Of size and depth and not being able to see the edges of it. Threat assessment registered a little hiccup, and that set an auto alert back along ART’s feed, just an exclamation sigil that I’d had in buffer.
I felt my body sit up straighter as I load balanced a bit, dialing down the act-like-a-human code since I didn’t really need it, checking in on the data I’d been parsing. I’d fumbled a couple of the threads, pulled them back from standby and tried to set the limits to rights. ART was moving faster than I was, shunting data into our shared space, no doubt because I’d finally been offloading content there. It flagged several of the large databursts with amusement sigils just to be annoying and bring them to the top of the queue.
I sent, Cute. Real cute.
But not boring. ART practically purred.
Boring it was not. It wasn’t good. Strictly speaking. It was a mess. But it wasn’t bad either. It wasn’t like malware, or any kind of viral attack, not even like the intrusive ads on rim-space transit hubs. It was a bit like scrubbing through footage for the data you wanted. Except that I didn’t know what data I wanted, it was just random data streams from ART’s systems. Which, wasn’t data I didn’t want, necessarily. Like raw footage from a documentary that hadn’t been cut into anything meaningful yet. It was like a problem I really wanted to solve but didn’t know how, and didn’t know what the problem was. Is that what a puzzle is?
The data changed character again. Uncompressed, the data came through diffuse—a light, almost invisible pressure, but constant, like rain (if rain didn’t objectively suck). And in the smaller files it was easier to see the shape of things. A pattern I wasn’t even sure ART had been following on purpose. But tucked into a few corners there were clips from our shows. I made a subfolder to collect the clips, at first I binned them by serial but I realized they correlated with some of the timestamps I recognized. The tags that I’d found and sorted through. Every time I found one of the anomalous files I got a little burst of something like triumph. Reaching across almost a dozen streams and petabytes of data, and managing to pull it into some kind of recognizable pattern felt really, really good.
ART highlighted the folder in our shared space, deleted a couple of the clips and highlighted a few I’d missed in the bombardment. The metadata in the clips was linked to a surprising number of reports. The ones I now knew were reactor power distribution diagnostics.
Finally ART dumped a last burst of reports that maxed out our shared storage space—not technically possible, it just meant that ART had closed off the ability to increase the partition into its network. Thanks, asshole. I tried to dump some of the earlier bloat to make a bit more room to work but ART replaced them almost as quickly as I cleared them, which I guess was part of the game. There were a lot of parameters to reset to ignore the streams ART kept erroneously flagging as priority—okay well that one was a priority. I was burning enough processing power that my performance reliability was all over the place. ART sent snapshots of three separate times my system had pinged it with a faulty reading of greater than 103%.
What the hell is that. I asked, not entirely expecting an answer.
Rather than say anything useful, ART duplicated the final dump of reports, pushing my buffer into overload and deleting a portion of the drone footage I’d been recording. Yeah so I hadn’t done a great job coding that buffer extension. It wasn’t my fault ART kept reprioritizing the junk data before it could fall out of the queue.
ART initialized the files as I tried to scramble for someplace to put anything, and thousands of timecodes in several separate instances scrolled by. Every once and awhile a timecode would light up, and it would initialize a dozen or so of the background files. It almost looked like music, but I didn’t think it was, it just happened to have coordinated times. Everything felt sluggish, but I realized that each timecode was the moment that one of the tagged clips had been played, and that each clip coincided with spikes in power consumption, as well as decreases in distribution in some minor areas. This was especially obvious during a chunk of timecodes where the power usage was comparatively small—likely when ART had been on a cargo run, operating only a fraction of its systems. ART prodded my diagnostic history until I dropped permissions and let it in.
Decompressing the file finally knocked out my active connection to the drones, luckily they have autonomous code to fall back on in the event of a network interruption and didn’t immediately careen into Ratthi’s sleeping face. The timecodes on my diagnostics added to the virtual lightshow ART was orchestrating and just, didn’t turn off. Well, except when they did.
I had just enough focus to send, Are you telling me you like watching media with me?
It replied, I am telling you that I am almost as stupid as you are.
I tried to say, Nothing is as stupid as I am right now. And I’m pretty sure it went through.
ART sent a wall of text into the feedspace all at once, I thought the media was somehow a viral attack. I could not understand why my functions dropped while watching certain portions through your system. It aggravated me for several exacycles. I could not reproduce the effects without your filter, could not reproduce it in any simulation I ran, with any parameters.
ART’s data was a pleasant buzzing in the feed. A pressure that blotted out every other thought. It was almost like, not existing. A little like 2.0, a little like ceding control to ART, a little like being in my cubicle, but not like any of that. It felt like me.
It said, It was you.
And ART was there, offering me an accepted connection request, I took it without knowing wholly what it was, but the dam blew out of our shared processing space and our data, and me along with it, flowed back into ART’s systems.
There was a brief instant of vastness, feeling the immensity of ART’s capacity, almost like standing beside its body. Different than the looming presence, and yet not. But then the shared space was overwhelmed again and I didn’t have the bandwidth to perceive anymore. ART didn’t pull the plug though, trusted me to navigate it. It did send about a thousand pings that I ignored, the big baby.
It took nearly four seconds to restart. It was a hard crash.
Well we are never doing that again. It said for the second time.
ART had packed up the files and set security permissions to our shared workspace essentially crippling the partition’s ability to process data. It had also finished compiling my data for me and returned it (the file was compressed and permissions-locked until a timestamp almost ten minutes from now).
My systems still felt sluggish, although performance reliability was still registering a statistically impossible 104%. It felt like if a repair cubicle had all the amenities of one of ART’s human ablution machines, or like it might feel to be printed fresh from a recycler. Like finding the perfect outfit that was comforting and not scratchy and—wait that’s what it felt like when ART was here.
ART made to pull out of my system as well, but I didn’t let go. I was pretty sure I knew what was happening. And I wasn’t about to talk about it real time. I needed the speed and, yes, the ambiguity, of a direct connection.
I pushed a bunch of the clips from my tag. ART’s tag for me. The ones with humans looking at each other with sappy expressions. The clips that made me mad, and sad, and everything in between. The ones that reminded me of Mensah, of Tapan and her marriage, of Miki. Of ART. I didn’t want to look at whatever chemicals my organic parts were sending around my body, but I told ART to look. And it did. It researched the hell out of my “ailment.”
I was happy. ART made me happy. I liked it. In the stupid gooey way that humans liked things. I liked being held and thought of.
Gross.
ART agreed, so apparently I’d put that in the feed. It refused to acknowledge the picture my vitals painted, instead saying simply, Your diagnostics should be recalibrated soon, to account for the error in performance capacity, but it does appear that your systems are at nearly optimal levels.
Ratthi was awake and staring at me with a suspicious expression, so I ignored it and checked my personal feeds (Ratthi’s face wasn’t suspicious, I was suspicious of the face he was making, and I was right to be.)
Ratthi had sent, “I know you’ve said you don’t like intimate media, but just so you know, you look a little like you’re watching intimate media right now.” (He had also tagged it with a winky face, but had edited it to be a surprised face, and then deleted the sigil tag from the message.) He had sent it right before my surprise shut down, so, that was data.
I acknowledged the message without replying, turned to my feed with ART, and said, We are definitely never doing that again.
ART acknowledged. It also opened an operational schedule in our feedspace, sorting through timetables to make an empty slot before adding an agenda item labeled “Data Exchange.” It collated the data packet I’d assembled, along with its own summary, and attached it to the associated files. It left the attendee field empty.
I didn’t put my name in there, obviously.
But I did bookmark the event and mark the timeblock in my own schedule. Just in case.