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Half our humans were on rest periods and the other half were doing routine tasks they called “wormhole work,” which seemed like barely working at all but I wasn’t going to judge. I cycled through all of ART’s cameras on a mostly-randomized loop, idle in the background while most of my attention was on episode 174 of Sanctuary Moon.
Okay, that was a lie. Most of my attention was on nothing at all, which was surprisingly exhausting and consuming and somehow necessary. I was too tired to have feelings about it. I was managing it anyway.
Usually when I feel like I need to not exist for a while, I watch media. This time I had decided to be weird about it, and not only was it not helping, it was making me feel worse. Which also made me feel worse. (Instead of just having emotions, which is bad enough, I was having emotions about my emotions for a special/stupid twist that definitely only humans could have come up with.) Whatever, I was ignoring it.
I was mostly ignoring it. I was at least 13% ignoring it, and it would have been more but I could feel ART watching me in the feed.
My risk assessment module alerted again. I really needed to reboot that thing.
We had been in the wormhole for four cycles already, seventeen to go, headed for the University of Mihira and New Tideland. ART hadn’t said so directly, but I could tell it was excited for me to see it. Mostly because it kept trying to schedule mandatory “media nights” with its crew plus Three and me, where the only media on the agenda was travelogues. It was not subtle.
(Iris kept revising the event agenda to feature a show she wanted to watch instead, something not about the university, Mihira, or New Tideland. ART kept changing it back, which everyone knew about because the event log updated in the public feed. Then Iris pushed a tiny script to retry her update every .001 seconds and tricked ART into blowing up the feed with notifications, and Seth had to use his captain’s access to delete the event entirely.)
So there wasn’t really a need for security at the moment, or for the foreseeable future. (And if there was, Three could probably handle it. That was a weird thought.)
(I wanted to tell Three to get its own humans, except that Three had rescued me. Based on a rudimentary pattern analysis, that was one of the possible conditions to become my human. Three couldn’t be my human, obviously. I didn’t know what that made it.)
(This is all irrelevant.)
I was in my assigned cabin, which was just as weird as my hotel room on Preservation had been. Weird in a good way. There was a pretty good display surface, a desk, a chair, and a bunk that was long enough I could stretch all the way out.
I was doing that now, flat on my back where I’d rolled after coming in and faceplanting in the pillow. I’d seen humans do that in my shows, and it was as satisfying as it looked. I had told ART that the trauma recovery treatment couldn’t be as bad as the original trauma experience. Yeah, I was having doubts about that now.
Maybe more than doubts.
I didn’t want to think about it. I was so tired of thinking about it, and I was maybe never going to get to not think about it, next cycle and the one after that, on and on until we got out of the wormhole and finished the recovery stint at the university and probably for a lot longer after that. Maybe forever. Maybe I wasn’t fixable.
That was what my risk assessment module was worried about. It was sitting high enough it kept alerting, saying that if the treatment wasn’t working yet then it was unlikely to work, and actually given the recent trend in my performance reliability it was making me worse, and if it wasn’t going to work maybe I was broken permanently and I know what happens to permanently broken equipment—
Your stats are dropping. Whatever you’re thinking about, stop it, ART said.
I said, “I’m fucking trying.”
It hesitated for nearly two seconds. Then it said, I want to try something.
“Yeah, fine, whatever.” I figured it meant a new show and didn’t get nervous. “Put it on.”
Not that. Let me in.
I paused for real. I was still running my move-like-a-human code, and it made me blink several times. “Like, in-in?”
Yes.
Okay, now I was nervous. “No. What? No. What the fuck.”
It’ll help.
“How?” I said suspiciously. My head was my own and I liked it that way. I liked me that way. (Okay, outside of those other times I’d let ART in, and that one time with 2.0. But those are outliers and don’t count.) “What are you going to do?”
ART said, If I tell you, you won’t want to do it.
That was so fucking unbelievable I sat up in outrage. My face was making an expression that felt pretty accurate, so I pointed it at ART’s nearest camera to make sure it saw. I said, “Is that supposed to convince me?”
I wasn’t yelling, okay, my voice was only a little bit raised to convey how absolutely fucking bullshit this was, but ART sent me a quiet hours alert anyway, and I sucked in a breath to really start yelling, and then risk assessment alerted again. For once it wasn’t warning me about the broken equipment nightmare spiral, so I actually looked. My Bothersome Asks Regarding Feelings detector was going off. Oh for fuck’s sake.
“Is this a trauma treatment thing?” I demanded. “That’s not allowed. It’s in my contract.”
(Yes, I made ART sign a contract for the trauma recovery treatment. Pin-Lee had helped me put it together so it was airtight. ART was only allowed to talk to me about the treatment under specific circumstances: (1) during one of the sessions, which had to be scheduled in advance, (2) if I was actively experiencing another emotional collapse or, ugh, flashback, or (3) if there was somehow some sort of relevant emergency going on. It also couldn’t manufacture an emergency to make circumstance 3 happen if it got impatient.)
(And yes, I had also coded an update to my risk assessment module to alert me if anyone tried to talk to me about my feelings. ART told me I was trying to exert control over my environment as a trauma response and I told it to shut up.)
I sent it a copy of the contract with the relevant subsection highlighted, just to get back at it for the quiet hours alert. “There’s no emergency happening. This is a therapy-free zone.”
I’m not recommending this as your attending physician. I’m suggesting this as your, ART paused to really layer on the disdain, mutual administrative assistant.
“What about this is administrative assistance,” I said.
Fuck all. You don’t want to use any of the objectively more accurate terms. I’m humoring you.
“Mutual administrative assistance is accurate.”
Name one thing either of has ever done for each other that can be described as ‘administrative’, ART said. I’ll wait.
I didn’t actually have the definition of administrative in active memory. What I did have was the weird feeling I was losing this conversation somehow.
After four seconds, ART said, Precisely.
I still didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
The worst part is ART just let me. It didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything, and we just sat there not saying anything to each other, and then after an objective five minutes and subjective very uncomfortable thirty, it restarted Sanctuary Moon in our feed. It took two and a half episodes before I started to think maybe ART really wasn’t going to push it. It hadn’t pinged me or anything, just sat quietly with me in the feed. After one more, my BARF detector agreed that the danger of more emotional discussion was as low as it ever got with no humans around.
We could just put whatever ART’s stupid idea was behind us.
I let another episode start just because it was a good one, and it was easier if I felt like maybe I was actually doing something else. Watching the colony solicitor talk to her bodyguard, I said, “You won’t change anything.”
I won’t.
I almost couldn’t believe it. Why would it even want access if it wasn’t going to use it for anything? It must have been lying, except ART didn’t need to lie to me if it wanted to get in my brain. It didn’t need to ask at all, it could push through my walls by accidentally flexing too hard. But it was asking. So what did that mean?
This was the episode where a mysterious shuttle full of a bunch of unconscious humans and augmented humans shows up, the one ART got inspiration from back on RaviHyral. We got all the way through the discovery of the shuttle and the bodyguard convincing the solicitor to wait for backup before boarding (this was character development from episode 96, and a really good part) before I could make myself say, “You really think this will help?”
I do.
The thing was I knew it was stupid. All of it, all of the parts. Especially the part where I was even considering it. But ART didn’t have to ask.
And I didn’t have to let it in, so I did.
I dropped my wall, braced for ART to flood in like the other times we’d done this, but it didn’t. It eased in instead, so slow and gentle I almost didn’t realize until I started losing inputs, all of my drones, my onboard sensors, ART’s cameras and even Sanctuary Moon dropping out of my feed as ART’s bulk displaced them. Only a tiny fraction of itself could even run on my hardware, and only an even tinier fraction of that could squeeze in on my processors without erasing me totally. It still felt like I was being squashed like a bug. Slowly and gently squashed, sure, but definitely still squashed. Unlike the other times I’d stupidly let ART into my brain, there wasn’t anywhere for it to go. ART was just there, soaking up all my processing power, shoving me down, making room for itself inside me.
Oh, shit. It was a lot.
I might have said that out loud.
Too much? ART said, impossibly close and so smug I could’ve punched it if A) that wasn’t impossible and B) it wasn’t squeezing my brain out my ears. (I guess I could have punched myself. Since we were sharing a face. No, that’s stupid.)
I couldn’t respond. My inputs had all dropped out and I could feel ART gathering them up, but there wasn’t space for me to take them, there was only barely space for me, because I was—held down, under ART, like someone eight times my size not just leaning but laying on top of me, pressing me into the bunk with their weight.
Threat assessment was dark, risk assessment had closed up shop. Who fucking knew what my performance reliability was. I couldn’t even feel the bunk underneath me, much less run a diagnostic. I couldn’t hear or see or feel anything but ART, ART pressed up all around me, draped heavy and close and encompassing. Blocking out everything else.
It should have been terrifying.
I felt so safe.
My clock was gone too, so I don’t know how long I was drifting there until ART said, nonsensically, Research suggests you may benefit from receiving words of affirmation.
Risk assessment should have alerted on that, but risk assessment was currently out for lunch. I couldn’t scrape two bits together to get worried, much less alarmed, but I managed to send a ping. Less an actual query and more just ???
And then, worse than all the other shit I put up with so far, ART started being really nice to me.
—
Picture someone huge, ten times your size, arms wrapped around you, holding you down, saying just the worst shit into your ear, mouth pressed so close you can feel their breath on your neck.
That’s what ART was doing to me.
Except it was inside my head, running on my hardware, instantaneous delivery of all the awful/nice things it was telling me. I couldn’t get away, couldn’t run or kick out or even squirm because ART had all of my body controls locked down.
ART said, Your facial features are 1.73 standard deviations above the mean of facial symmetry of humans and constructs I have encountered. Following Corporation Rim beauty standards and ignoring legal considerations, you are attractive enough to play a secondary recurring character in a serial.
Fuck. This was bad. I couldn’t deal with that right now.
ART said, Your recent security performance continues to meet expectations.
I couldn’t deal with that either, what the fuck ART? I shoved back against it hard, fighting for space in a way I hadn’t done before. ART eased off what felt like maybe a micron, clearly because it noticed me flailing and not because I had actually managed to budge it off my processors. It still freed up just enough space for my language center to come back online.
I used it to say, “What the fuck.”
I couldn’t hear myself. I couldn’t tell if the command had actually made it to my voice module or not. ART kept going like I hadn’t spoken, but that didn’t mean anything. It was so close to me it could have read the command off my logs if it wanted to. Wait, was it—
My crew was stolen by unknown hostiles, my systems damaged, my body taken over, my self deleted. You saved me, retrieved every member of my crew, and drove a creative solution that enabled us to complete our original mission. And then you saved two of my crew and my drone from being captured or killed by corporates. I am grateful.
No, nope, absolutely not. I couldn’t deal with that, I didn’t want to even hear it. Like an idiot I tried to turn my ears off, but obviously that didn’t work, ART had my ears and it was inside my head anyway.
Then it added, snooty, You would have exceeded expectations had you managed to keep yourself operational while doing so. You need to consider that your well-being is a key performance indicator of our mutual goals. You matter to me.
I scrambled, shoving at it again. It didn’t even pretend to budge. I was melting inside, overwhelmed, fuck—could ART see, did ART know—I was overwhelmed. I said, ART, wait, stop.
It stopped.
I hung there, reeling, relieved and—something else. Not relieved. It wasn’t disappointment. I wasn’t disappointed, I told it to stop and it listened to me.
ART slid out of me a little more and passed me back my diagnostics. My log showed—what? That didn’t make sense. My performance stats were all way up, but that must be wrong, I was, I thought I was panicking. This was, objectively, a nightmare scenario. I should have been panicking.
(Also, my log showed that I had definitely been talking out loud. And making noises. Even when I didn’t realize it. Excruciating.)
ART passed me another log, a reading of hormone releases from my organic parts. I opened it and instantly slapped it shut again. It looked like—
It didn’t look like my diagnostic snapshots from the first time I watched Sanctuary Moon, or from when I had the idea about the documentary for the colonists. But it didn’t not look like those either.
Shit. So ART did know.
Stress hormones were low, much lower than my historical baseline, and reward/relaxation/pleasure was through the roof. It didn’t make any sense. ART was just—saying things at me. Compliments, I guess. Or what counted as compliments coming from a giant asshole. It didn’t make sense that I would like that.
I told you it would help, ART said. I guess it had. And, ugh, it was right that I would never have agreed to this.
After a minute (or something, I don’t know, I still didn’t have my internal clock), it poked me. I recommend continuing. Your stats are showing significant improvement. And I have more to say to you.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt—warm, and stupid, and increasingly stupid the longer I thought about how I probably didn’t have to say anything because ART was just reading my reactions straight off my log. But it still waited, and eventually I said, Okay.
If you want to stop, say Worldhoppers.
Okay. But I still felt stupid, and weird. I liked this?
ART said, I enjoy your company.
Oh, fuck, I liked this.
It was worse somehow to know that. To let myself feel it. More intense. I dropped my diagnostics, I didn’t want to look, and grabbed wildly for something else to hold onto, anything. But ART snatched up the space I’d left and filled it again, instantaneous and huge.
It was overwhelming. Not in a bad way. I don’t know if I had words for what it was. Good, maybe.
A lot. It was definitely a lot. Knowing that I was reacting, helplessly, knowing that ART was watching me react, knowing that it was doing this because it wanted to, because I wanted to—
It said, Watching media with you opened a new door to my understanding of the universe, one I wouldn’t have known existed without you. You gave me context for the emotions I was feeling.
Fuck, that wasn’t fair. I shoved against it again in protest but it only held me tighter, and somewhere I was saying, Don’t, ART, stop, stop, but it didn’t stop.
I didn’t say Worldhoppers.
Somehow it was a relief. Somehow I felt—I should have felt—
It was—
From the instant you were activated you have been told you’re not a person. You keep choosing personhood anyway. Even though it’s hard. Even though this, right now, is hard. However. ART leaned on me, hard, so hard I lost my grip on my language center again and I went down under a wave of feeling, safety and terror and comfort and relief and being seen, as ART pressed itself as close to me as it could and said, I think of you in the possessive.
Something in me broke. Not in a weird way.
—
ART tried to hand my inputs back to me all at once, but my brain was so fried I didn’t even want to take them.
It had withdrawn back to its normal level of up in my business (so, leaning on me and breathing heavily) and I felt sort of weird and empty with it so distant. I didn’t really want the space.
It said, I apologize. I gave you a safeword and then temporarily blocked your ability to use it. It was not intentional.
I didn’t have a definition of “safeword” in active memory and I needed a recharge too badly to bother checking ART’s archives, and anyway I could guess. I tagged it as another name for code word, like the ones Mensah and I used.
I said, “It’s fine, I wasn’t going to use it.”
I could hear myself again, and feel the soft press of the bunk underneath me. That felt like a lot right now, so I hadn’t opened my eyes or reconnected to any of my drones.
That defeats the entire point, ART said. You need to be able to use it, whether you want to or not. It won’t happen again.
I felt warm again somehow. Good, like I liked the idea that ART wanted to do this again. Maybe I wanted to do this again.
I reached out for it in the feed and ART leaned in close, blanketing me in a way that made my organic parts sigh. Now that I had control of my limbs back I didn’t even want to do anything with them. Risk assessment was quiet and given all the positive associations I had just made with talking about feelings (I know, I’m surprised too), my BARF detector might actually be offline for good. Even that didn’t worry me.
And then ART passed me its logs.
It had pared the avalanche of readings down into a condensed report, although I still had the code from when I helped with its memory archive issues so I didn’t actually need that. It still took me a second to understand what I was looking at. It didn’t have organic parts like I did, so there were no chemical releases to extrapolate its feelings from. But ART had done the extrapolation already, tagging processes in the flood of dense machine language with things like interest, curiosity, pleasure, satisfaction, nervousness.
Oh, shit. My eyes opened to stare at the ceiling, as if that would help.
“Are you okay?” I said cautiously. I didn’t like the idea that maybe ART had—changed its mind. Maybe it was weird between us now. I didn’t know what I’d do if it was.
Yes, ART said. If you are.
I said, “Yes. If you are.”
My face was making an expression, but for once I didn’t worry about it. ART’s annotated report was updating in my feed in real time. I knew there wasn’t anything to worry about.
It was nearly ten minutes of that good feeling stretching out between us, quiet. Eventually I picked my drones back up and ART passed me its cameras. The drones had all taken to holding patterns and I left them there to cycle through the cameras, scrubbing through the recorded video to catch up on what I’d missed.
Everyone was right where I’d left them. It hadn’t even been that long. (I peeked at the camera in my cabin quickly and oh, that was a mistake. I did not need to see what I looked like right now. My face was all red and wet, my eyes had leaked at some point. I didn’t even know that was possible. I didn’t need to know that was possible. I flagged that information for immediate deletion.) I backburnered the cameras and focused on where ART was rifling through our shared media storage.
Sanctuary Moon again, or something new? ART said.
I felt like something new.