Work Text:
Hey ART, what’s this? I ask, pulling up a file from the archival storage. We had been sorting through our media and checking deep storage for file overlap (there were a lot, some episodes and songs were clipped with different timestamps depending on where we downloaded them, and some media we downloaded as bundles, so...it needed sorting).
ART snatches it out of my metaphorical hands and tucks it back into storage. Just a research project.
I squint at the wall. What kind of research?
Nothing you would be interested in. Which version of season six, episode eight of Wally Wildwood do we want to keep?
Whichever, it’s terrible either way. I still can’t believe they killed the best character. I nudge it aside and pick up the file again, holding onto it and batting it away just long enough to open it.
Theme music starts to play with a black screen, fading into what looks like a mission logo.
ART closes the file and shoves it back into archival storage.
I scramble for it. ART kicks me out of its systems, then blocks me. Then it closes our feed.
“Rude,” I grumble, standing up and heading for my cabin. If I’m going to start fighting with it I want to be somewhere less public. No reason for humans to stare at whatever expression my face is making.
ART sends me the equivalent of a raspberry. It's not really a physical gesture or even a glyph, more of a low static burst.
“You closed our feed and then reopened it just for that?” I slap the door access panel a little harder than I need to just to annoy it.
It closes the feed again. Then it refuses to open my door until I lift my arm as though to deploy one of my energy weapons. I enter my cabin and shuck off my crew jacket, purposely dropping it on the floor. Then, because it annoys me too, I pick it up and drape it over my favorite chair.
My cabin is nice. It's customized especially for me. There’s a huge viewscreen, which is honestly the most important part of my quarters. There’s a mag-locked shelving unit for all my drones and general maintenance tools so that if ART for some reason loses gravity they won’t all go flying all over the place. I have two comfortable lounge chairs even though I only ever actually use the one. ART insisted I might want company once in a while, and it was actually kind of nice when Amena visited so I guess it’s okay.
There’s also a bunk, which I do actually use when I recharge because it has a privacy screen and a sound baffle so it feels very secure. Not that I’ll ever admit to that. ART probably already knows because it can't ever mind its own business. There’s even an attached bathroom, something only regular crew gets because the students all have to share communal facilities. It’s a luxury I use frequently just because I can.
So. I sit down in my favorite chair to get into a fight with my house. I consider turning on the shower to waste cleaning fluid, but I don’t really want to get up now. Instead I queue up World Hoppers and wait.
Inevitably ART shows back up, trying to be subtle about it and failing miserably because its presence is too large to mask when it’s actively trying to see what I’m doing. I keep waiting until it finally reopens our feed connection so it can pay closer attention to the episode (its favorite, I’m not playing nice here). Then I snatch the file back out of its archives and close down my feed.
The 0.002 seconds it takes for it to brute force reestablish connection lets me read the title card of what I now understand is a slideshow presentation in ImageIt.
‘Why Rogue SecUnits Are Not the Threat They Are Made Out to Be and Why I Should Be Allowed To Have One: A Dissertation’?
ART slinks out of the feed and does the equivalent of screaming into a pillow in another room. It’s just as weird as it sounds. It’s like hearing the doppler effect of someone yelling in another room as they’re running, but it’s a sensation instead of audible.
It has a mission logo. It has theme music. I open the next slide. It has a thesis statement which generally boils down to ‘the Corporation Rim lied about this’ (yeah big surprise) and ‘we should research more about how constructs are treated’ (also not surprising, but nice).
ART, this is 75 slides long.
It doesn’t answer. Now it’s very distant in the feed pretending to be busy. I pull on it a little and see it’s making a meal plan for Seth with a detailed analysis of his protein intake using some scale I can’t even name. It’s also mapping out six alternate courses, having some kind of animated discussion with Iris in her quarters, and somehow getting its ass beaten at a strategy game by Turi (who is surprised by this, but not complaining).
I scroll through the slides quickly - several feature pictures of me and I really don’t want to look at myself. Is this how your crew knew what I looked like? Did you actually give them a presentation?
It hands me a video file from its conference room.
Oh.
Yeah. It sure did.
The video is 3 hours, 20 minutes, and 40 seconds long.
I don’t watch it.
I might have been upset about this a year ago but it's been long enough that I don’t care anymore. Instead I cross my arms and smirk up at the ceiling (I know it isn’t there, but I can look directly at one of the cameras this way). You giant nerd.
I’m a research transport, it’s what I do.
I roll my eyes. Did you publish a paper on it too?
I published 18 peer reviewed papers, 26 opinion pieces in various newsfeeds, and several pieces on various discussion forums...
It pauses long enough for me to raise an eyebrow. Anything else?
...I also wrote a 900,000 word fictional piece under an alias, intended for other transports. It has been extremely well received and seems to be having the intended effect of making rogue SecUnits less of a target...
“You wrote that?”I sit up straight in my chair. If I was human I would have started coughing from choking on nothing. Ratthi does that a lot.
You read that? It sounds mortified, recoiling.
Yeah it's...Nice.
It’s a romance. I hate that part. Well, not hate. I maybe think it’s alright. Just a little. I keep reading because the overall story is so good. The most recent entry ended on a cliffhanger and it pisses me off.
Would you like to know what happens next? I have a whole ninth arc fully planned out and finally decided what to do with the newly sapient planet.
Sure.
Of fucking course I would.