Work Text:
Sometimes, accessing a station’s feed is like getting punched in the face. I should know. I’ve been punched in the face a lot, usually by clients I was trying to protect, and so I have a lot of incidents for comparison.
This was one of the face-punching stations. As soon as ART came within communications range, the station walloped me and anyone else looking at the feed with a fistful of advertisements.
Usually, I smacked all of them out of my awareness immediately, but I was bored (ART and I had gotten into an argument earlier over a serial we were watching, and I was still ignoring it), and so I looked at the ads. One for hooded jackets almost caught my attention, but I had enough hooded jackets for now and really didn’t want a terrifyingly neon one anyway. Wearing bright yellow or pink would make people look at me, and I hate when people look at me.
I slouched in my favorite chair and trashed all the ads for useless things like food and beverages. There were more ads for clothes, and then some for “job opportunities” aka shady contracts that would screw over anyone who touched them.
The reminder of that was just depressing. This was why I didn’t look at advertisements normally. If I wanted to be depressed, I’d watch a tragic serial or something.
I was just about to close the ads and go back to The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon when ART poked me. I could have kept ignoring it, but this had been a stupid argument anyway (ART thought that a human character’s response was unrealistic and I thought that it was perfectly realistic because most humans were idiots at least seventy-five percent of the time), and I was bored of arguing. “What?”
There are some interesting media trailers, ART said in a totally normal tone, like I hadn’t been ignoring it for three and a half minutes. I have already initiated downloads if you want to watch something new while my crew are on the station.
I wasn’t going on the station, because being near Corporation Rim humans still made me nervous and I didn’t need stupid shore leave anyway. “I’m downloading everything too.”
My download speed is superior to yours.
Of fucking course it was, but I wasn’t about to admit that. I picked a trailer at random and shoved it into our shared feed.
The trailer had lots of unrealistic explosions and people talking in low dramatic voices. Unfortunately, it also had a lot of kissing and arguing about feelings. (Ugh.)
ART pushed a different trailer at me. This one is tagged with “friendship” and “time travel”.
That sounded so much better than arguments about feelings (ugh) that I immediately put on the first episode without watching the trailer. The show was called The Emptiness Between Minutes, and while I couldn’t decide whether that was a cool title or a stupid one, I liked it.
At least, I liked the title. And I liked the first episode, which featured a band of plucky heroes (who managed not to be walking stereotypes) time traveling to stop a surprisingly interesting villain from unraveling the timestream. It kind of reminded me of Timestream Defenders Orion, a show that ART and I had watched several times. Only, you know. Different.
It was also different in a way that did weird things to my organic parts. Unlike a lot of the media that ART and I had been watching lately, this was produced in the Corporation Rim. Which meant that by episode two, the band of non-stereotypical plucky heroes were battling extremely fucking stereotypical evil SecUnits.
I felt ART’s attention shift immediately, a solid 73% of it focused on me and my reactions. ART is terrifyingly overpowered, and that was a lot of attention.
“Stop staring at me,” I snapped, trying to sound annoyed even though I was mostly upset/sad/angry/something. I fucking hate emotions, how the fuck does anyone know what they’re actually feeling? “I’m fine.”
Your face says otherwise.
“Stop analyzing my face through your stupid security cameras and watch the show.”
Instead, ART paused the episode. I don’t understand why you’re angry with me. You always check to see if I’m okay when crews are endangered in our media.
Yes, because I didn’t want ART to become emotionally compromised again if something terrible happened to a fictional ship’s crew. But that wasn’t happening to me. I was totally fine. I wasn’t emotionally compromised.
(Contrary to what ART thinks, I am aware of when I’m in denial. But being in denial is better than having feelings about something.)
“I’m not angry,” I muttered angrily, starting the episode back up. “I’m fine.”
ART didn’t pause the episode again, but it kept staring at me. And after we watched another two minutes and eleven seconds of SecUnits slaughtering their clients/wreaking havoc, I had to admit that maybe it had a good reason to stare at me. My organic parts kept doing weird things, especially my stomach, and I was starting to feel like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the compartment even though I had checked the oxygen levels five times.
I finally paused the serial myself, got up, and paced. But pacing reminded me too much of patrolling, and after watching bad SecUnit portrayals I was already way too reminded of way too fucking many things.
I huddled back up in my favorite chair. ART had resisted the urge to say “I told you so”, at least so far. Instead, it put on one of my favorite episodes of Sanctuary Moon and waited for me to talk to it with a surprising amount of patience.
I knew that ART’s patience, even when it was really trying, only lasted about five minutes. So after four minutes and fifty-five seconds, I paused Sanctuary Moon and said, “You were right.”
Of course I was, ART replied immediately. This serial’s portrayal of SecUnits is inaccurate. I am already formulating a negative review to post in discussion forums. Would you like to help me?
I couldn’t answer at first, because I was too busy having an emotion. I also couldn’t even be annoyed at ART’s smugness over being right. I was so overwhelmed by someone else actually caring about bad SecUnit portrayals that my performance reliability actually dropped.
Once I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to have an involuntary shutdown or something stupid like that, I said, “You’re writing a negative review because the serial is inaccurate?”
No. I am writing a negative review because the serial upset you. ART sounded completely calm, which meant it was dangerously enraged and would probably spend the rest of the day aggressively correcting anyone on the discussion forums who said something stupid. I don’t like things that upset my friends. Do you want to watch something else?
I knew ART well enough to recognize a lifeline when it threw one. The offer to watch something else saved me from having to figure out how/if to say something emotional about how it felt to have a friend who really cared about me. I still wasn’t used to that.
I put Sanctuary Moon back on. After an episode of that, plus ART hovering protectively in my feed, I finally started feeling more normal, and also angry instead of sick and vulnerable.
“Do you still want help with your negative review, or did you finish it already?” I asked.
I waited for you, ART said, and slid the partially drafted review into our shared workspace so that we could write it together.