Work Text:
One
I stowed myself in a half-empty locker on yet another transport vessel with a low-level bot pilot, hiding myself effectively from the bot and the human and augmented human passengers, and pretended to watch random episodes of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
I was barely paying attention to my least favourite episode (and how ironic was it that my ‘random’ selection chose that one), when I received a very familiar-feeling ping in my feed. It was coming via the cargo transport, but it definitely wasn’t the bot pilot.
“Why are you watching that episode? Your biological parts always malfunction when the rogue SecUnit murders all the humans,” remarked ART.
If I were human myself, I would have passed out with relief. Instead, my performance reliability dropped to 65%. I quickly composed myself. 93% was acceptable in the circumstances.
I didn’t know why ART didn’t wait for my transport to arrive at the hub and contact me there, since we proceeded to the hub anyway once I was on board. Perhaps it wanted to show off its fancy new mobile docking facility. Anyway, I was safely installed in my previous quarters by the time we reached the hub, where we paused briefly to download the latest media episodes and news feeds.
There were no humans on board, and ART was acting evasively. It kept pinging my feed, but sending no substantive communication. It was irritating; like one of the interminably persistent insects I’d encountered on a planetary exploration contract.
“What is it? Why did you come to collect me?” I asked impatiently.
“I found something,” it replied.
Two
“Something” was an ancient data archive. ART dropped a few short pieces of text from the archive into my feed. I read them quickly.
“I don’t understand. Who are these people? What is the Prime Directive?”
ART asked me to watch some new (very, very old) media. It was interesting, even if it raised more queries than it answered. I enjoyed viewing it, with ART hanging out in my feed and observing my reactions. The stories were new to me, and although the technology was ludicrously simple and wrong, I liked the interpretation of the space exploration concept. But I couldn’t understand how it related to the text samples ART had sent me. Some of the names were the same as those in the show, but aside from that there didn't seem to be much correlation.
ART dropped some more pieces of text into my feed. 17,686 of them. Some were over 100,000 words long. ART left me alone to consume them. I still didn’t understand.
Art was impatient.
“These are stories. About the characters in the media. Written by humans who are not the creators of the original media. Maybe they’re written by augmented humans. Maybe they’re written by constructs. Maybe they’re written by *bots*. It’s called fanfiction.”
My heart was beating faster. I tried to interpret my biological reactions. I was excited.
“Why are we reading about Star Trek? Why not Sanctuary Moon? Or Worldhoppers?”
“The archive doesn’t contain any stories about Sanctuary Moon or Worldhoppers. Or anything else I had downloaded. I… I thought we could write some.”
The idea was strangely attractive.
“Which one? I want to start with Sanctuary Moon.”
“We could do both. There's a style called crossover.”
Three
There was so much I wanted to write. So much. There could be realistic rogue SecUnits who looked like me. There could be accurate reflections of the dangers and interminable boredom of worldhopping. There could be luxury research transport vessels with virtually unlimited processing power. There could be good humans like Doctor Mensah, and evil humans, and compassionate but tough lawyers who looked like Pin-Lee. We could explore the ethics of using constructs, and try to explain what corporate political entities were actually for.
I waited for ART to start writing. Nothing happened.
I decided to start writing myself. Nothing happened.
“I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to start.”
“Let’s try one of those short stories, with a format. Perhaps that will help.”
“Five plus one fics?”
“Yes, that.”
It was a little easier, but it took us many, many cycles to agree on anything at all about the story. Eventually we settled on some of the characters from Sanctuary Moon, worldhopping on an omnipotent research transport with a rogue SecUnit on board, protecting the crew and fighting off sudden attacks by undocumented fauna, evil corporate overlords, and augmented human security consultants. The title was “Five times SecurityBot and ERT [Excellent Research Transport] saved the humans, and one time the humans saved themselves. “
We argued over every. Single. Word. That made for 27,257 arguments in total. But after many, many cycles, we had finished.
Four
“What do we do now?”
“We post it to the archive. I hacked it and got an invitation code before I found you.”
I was unaccountably nervous.
“What if someone reads it?”
“Nobody will read it,” said ART, confidently. “Nobody’s posted anything to the archive recently.”
It showed me the date of the last posting. It still felt risky to me, but I agreed to go ahead. We set up a minimal profile on the archive. We called ourselves ARTBot.
We had 63 more arguments over posting the fic. It turned out there were things called “Tags” to be attached, which ART hadn’t included in the text extracts it had shown me. I persuaded it to give me access to the whole archive, which it was strangely reluctant to do. Upon reviewing some of the newly-revealed Star Trek fic, I realised why.
“Kirk and Spock did *what* in the captain’s seat? Eeeewwwwwwww! And they could never do that anyway. The bridge would have to be manned at all times, given the lack of a bot pilot. ”
ART made the particular duration of ping that served as a sighing noise. It was surprisingly effective at conveying exasperation. Back to the tags.
We understood the principle behind the hideously outdated tagging and search mechanism easily enough. ART chose a random sample of 10,000 Star Trek fics from the archive, and tried to identify the features of the stories that corresponded to the most popular 200 tags. By the end of my review of the results of that exercise, I despaired of ever gaining any adequate understanding of the human brain. We agreed on five tags that seemed unlikely to lead to any controversy, and completed the relevant fields. We had to type in our fandom names, but we already knew they didn’t exist in the archive so that seemed fair.
ART hesitated over pressing the historically-accurate “Post” button. I reached past it into the feed, and pressed it myself.
By unspoken consensus, we settled down to alternate our favourite episodes of Sanctuary Moon and Worldhoppers until we calmed down. It took some time.
Five
Two cycles later, I had begun to relax a little. ART was right. Nobody was going to read our fic. It could sit there in the archive for posterity. Which reminded me, I had a query for ART.
“Where are we actually going?”
“Random transport hub, 47 more cycles away. Why do you ask?”
I didn’t really have an answer to that.
The feed pinged.
“What’s a Kudos?” ART asked, at the exact moment I queried the same thing. Then some text appeared. A comment! From a user named Sexbot4981. I hated it already.
“Hey there, I thought this fic was great! Good to see the dust being blown off the archive and some modern media interpretations being posted. And not a Mary Sue in sight! Please write more.”
ART showed me that it was trawling the archive for information about the phrase “Mary Sue.” It shared the results with me, and we concluded that first, it was a perjorative term. Second, it was unnecessarily and unfairly gendered; and third it applied when the reader considered that the author had inserted a version of themselves into the story. We drew our own conclusions about the intelligence of Sexbot4981, whoever or whatever that was.
In keeping with our research on comments elsewhere in the archive, ART posted a simple reply.
“Thank you.”
+1
Ping.
“Hey, you should totally share this in one of the new archives as well! The Sanctuary Moon and Worldhoppers fans would go crazy for it.”
ART changed our course to head for the nearest source of current data. I started a delicate negotiation with Sexbot4982, attempting to gain more information without giving it the impression I had even the slightest regard for its opinion or intelligence.
This was going to be *fun*.