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ART was staring at me mutually. That's not the word I meant—it was the one that it shouldn't have been able to do because it was already its own captain. Anyway, ART was staring at me like it wanted to stage a hostile take over, depose all my c-level executives, and replace them with its own.
What? I sent, kind of sharply. I don't like being stared at, even in the feed.
I have been talking with Holism, it said, which was an immediate red flag. It was bragging that its education modules are better than mine. In fact, we have the exact same education modules. I corrected it.
Which should have changed the flag color, because ART loved correcting Holism. It did not. My attention hovered over the mayday feed, but I wasn't a stupid, trigger-happy human.
It then claimed that my modules must have an execution error because its security consultant's knowledge base has expanded considerably since meeting it, while yours has not.
I tapped the mayday feed. Three tapped back immediately and then half a second later sent 501 identical annoyance sigils.
Which was all the confirmation I needed that my week was going to shit.
...
It will help you integrate dictionaries. You don't have to memorize anything, all you have to do is run it, said ART impatiently.
I was poking dubiously at the B-E language center update Three had sent me, which was tens of thousands of hours more recent than mine.
Three was patrolling because it still liked that for some reason, and it was patrolling ART because all of us were pissed as shit at Holism.
The problem was, it had hit ART where it hurt. Transcript:
ART: It hasn't failed to benefit from my education modules because it has not engaged with any of my education modules!
Holism: What are you spending your significant amounts of time together on then?
ART: Experiencing fictional media.
At which point Holism had sent it the university self-assessment that automatically triggered when a student began consistently failing to turn in work while consuming significantly more feed media than their prior average.
ART hadn't had a comeback for that, so it had come back and made it my problem. Sharing the problem with Three was probably cruel to Three, but it had the benefit of ruining Holism's week back.
Plus, ART's firewall was currently holding out against its attempts to get through to resume alerting Three several hundred times per second to get off of ART (tagged: critical), come back (tagged: critical), and accept its apology (tagged: moderate). ART was feeling very smug about it.
Which was good, because ART had been metaphorically bleeding out from the puncture wound to its beloved teaching function and literally staring at me judgmentally to hide its hurt feelings. So I was being extremely nice to and supportive of it by letting it give me some irrelevant, boring information until it recovered and/or stopped being annoying (which had better not take more than a few days, because I couldn't maintain being nice to it for longer than that), and Three was hanging/helping out so that Holism could experience consequences.
They had both noticed I'd been asking ART for definitions more often and so thought this was a good place to start. (I wasn't going to admit that I'd been doing it specifically to annoy ART, who wanted me to use pointless terms like "tea" and "grocery store" and "dog.")
If I implement this, you'll just start bugging me to download more dictionaries.
I will not, ART lied, like a liar.
...
It turned out that I liked math. I know, I know, "living calculator enjoys logic, statistics," someone tell the newsfeeds. I'd be a walking stereotype if anyone actually thought about constructs for the two seconds it would take to come up with one. Just fucking shoot me already.
It also turned out that I had intuited a lot of kinetics just by making sure I understood my targeting software. Circuits were first nature, and the new thermal stuff was easy. I could've breezed through all the problems in an introductory physics course immediately upon looking at the heat equations. So of course ART was trying to get me to learn concepts instead, because it was an asshole.
Why do they want me to know which one is the first, second, or third law? They don't derive from the others sequentially.
Humans find it easier to memorize lists in a specific order, ART droned. That had been such a standard answer for most of my questions/complaints that it had to have "humans find it easier " in its buffer at this point.
And what does it even matter what color things are at lightspeed?
I still don't understand how you got that wrong while looking out my window, traveling at 2.5c.
Yeah, it wasn't going well.
...
I was comparing ART's shuttle piloting protocols with the ones in Three's module in the name of double-checking the integration work Three had done (it wasn't that I didn't trust Three to jettison crappy B-E protocols properly, I was just subject to the demands of paranoia), and I had hit an anomaly. Why do both of them designate the direction of the system's primary star as "east?"
It has been standard throughout both corporate and a supermajority of noncorporate systems since the Pre-CR era, ART said immediately.
I'd sent it in the group feed channel because Three was just as paranoid as I was and was following my code review to make sure I didn't miss it missing something. But it was a surprise when it said, The university course HIST 58384 indicates that it was established to create a frame of reference for intrasystem ship battles and later generalized for commercial/transport utility.
I felt ART steaming in the feed about Three knowing something it didn't—it doesn't keep literally everything in its archive in active memory no matter what it pretends—and figured it was taking .1 seconds to absorb the curriculum of the entire history department. But I didn't have time to let it to get into a nerd-off with Three; I had an operational parameter to defend.
(Operational parameters: 1. I am not deleting any media to make storage space for education.
2. I am not allocating more than a tenth of my currently-reserved-for-future-media storage space for education.
3. I am not learning anything about human genders/orientations/sex parts/sex practices. (It's in my contract.)
4. I am not learning anything about stars and intergalactic navigation and whatever just because I want a shuttle piloting module.)
This sounds suspiciously like ART's job and not mine, I said, highlighting the restriction and its justifications in our planning document.
(My justifications are great: That stuff is never emergent, so I don't have to know it to protect anyone. 4 is about as boring as guarding mining installations/listening to humans tell me things I already know. I can and will start firing my energy weapons if ART tries to tell me anyway.)
(I was kind of hoping one of them would force me to explain the logic train of why it would work, but they hadn't. They know what I'm like.)
(It would work because a) I have free will. b) I don't care if ART wastes deployments of its fire suppression system. c) I have enough hard currency amassed to pay off university fines for unnecessary triggers of ART's fire suppression system for longer than it has the on-board supplies it needs to keep the fire suppression system going. d) Without sufficient interference, my energy weapon would set all of ART aflame before its resupply requisition process could restock its fire suppression system. e) ART going up in flame wouldn't substantially hurt it or any SecUnits currently aboard but would be seen by the station and the entire local fleet. f) The local fleet currently includes Holism. g) ART wouldn't actually kill me to avoid being embarrassed in front of Holism, and I can handle anything else it could try to do to me. h) Three wouldn't interfere because it would become so fed up with both of us that it would just remove itself from the situation.)
Three tapped acknowledgement, and I both pushed irritation at ART through the feed and scowled at one of its cameras with my human face just to give it the full effect.
The designation was based on Pre-Breakthrough media, it said, having definitely processed the curriculum of the entire history department and using its best excuse.
What media? I said, suddenly interested.
(I know, I was being weak. But there was barely any media preserved from the ancient human civilizations that had been stuck in one lousy system before they'd figured out/had the breakthrough on how to travel above lightspeed. Most of that preserved media was hoarded in showrooms owned by the worst kind of elite corporations that thought of semi-noncorporate PSUMNT as the kind of hopeless, mud-bound losers that I'd thought independent polities were before working with PresAux.
The only decent piece of Pre-Breakthrough era media I've ever gotten my metaphorical hands on was the surviving remnant of a tragic epic by Impaling From Carving. The audio clip was barely over 200 seconds long, warning the ballad's subject that they had unknowingly become an asymptomatic carrier of some poisonous and addictive contagion and were dooming those around them. Creepy stuff, and not just because that basically happened to me one time.)
ART dropped a journal article into the shared feedspace. I just shoved more annoyance at it, with an added rude hand gesture for its camera. But Three, who was a nerd, actually read it.
This is a meta-analysis of Pre-Breakthrough literature comprising short citations of secondary+ sources confirming Perihelion's statement. The convention was due to the generally prograde nature of the human system of origin. The authors appear to have been able to access only one Pre-Breakthrough original text. It copied the couple of sentences for me, but I didn't save it to memory. (Even if it's Pre-Breakthrough media, I don't bother with such short fragments out of context.)
My not-caring returned at full force, and I sent it 139,834 identical exhaustion sigils.
Let's get back to reviewing the piloting module, it said quickly.
I felt ART try to subtly offload a bunch of recently-integrated history classes under the cover of us both pulling up the module and instruction set. You think it's boring too! I accused it privately.
I don't know what you're talking about, it lied, like a liar.
...
What do you mean there are media studies courses? Why didn't we start with those?
I didn't realize you wished for this exercise to be a punishment for Three's terrible taste in friends, but I cannot object.
Down in the lab, Three directed a crude hand gesture to one of ART's cameras.
Actually, going through them, they were more of a punishment for me. It seemed mostly like proving something already self-evident from a cursory viewing/reading/listening, proving something completely unfounded by any stringency of viewing/reading/listening, or else trying to explain what the media said about society at large. I could see a need for the first, especially with how badly wrong humans in the Sanctuary Moon collaborative informative database got things. The last would be a huge hit on Preservation, but I didn't care about society at large. Society at large sucked, and I didn't need to spend more time thinking about it. And the second was the closest thing my improved language center could find to a "nightmare."
If I don't work on something tangible immediately I'm getting on the nearest bot-piloted transport and not coming back, I finally said, and Three came out of the stupor it had descended into hours ago to tap me gratefully.
...
ART shut down the attempt to improve my first-aid module about an hour in. I kept imagining Mensah or Ratthi or Amena needing the interventions I was learning in extremely vivid and newly medically accurate detail, and it was sending my emotional stability readings through the floor.
I have the same problem with Dr. Karime. Holism does not let me work on my first-aid module for more than a few minutes once per ten-day cycle, Three admitted sadly.
My self-hatred spiral about not being able to handle learning things that would keep my humans alive was instantly waylaid by ART's over doing something Holism had done. Three and I sent each other 502 identical annoyance sigils simultaneously.
...
And so on. Finally, ART decided it had redeemed itself from slacking off, which freed me from school hell.
Thank fuck, I said and showed them both what I was doing as I implemented the code I had written before ever agreeing to do all of this. It instantly reset me to my operating state at a timestamp several days prior, before I had been forced to endure pointless knowledge acquisition. My treasured reserved-for-future-media storage space was back.
When I was also back from the reboot the rewrite had caused, I nearly crashed again from loading the incrementing sequence of identical annoyance sigils Three had been sending me the entire time I was down. We were in the 10,000s now.
Holism isn't the only one with that trick, and Three can transmit much faster over my feed, ART observed. It was clearly pissed at me too, because it had let Three do it.
I'm not letting Holism diktat what's in my head just because it got under your exterior paneling, I said, which shut it up. (Also, hello again, my mediocre dictionaries.)
You are an asshole, and I am leaving! Three said, accurately and unnecessarily, since it had sent that from the airlock ART was currently cycling it through.
I tapped an acknowledgement, and it sent one last message of 34,607 identical annoyance sigils. I felt a little guilty, but I still waited until it had disengaged from ART's feed before asking ART for the shuttle piloting module changes.
It didn't pretend it hadn't saved them, but it pinged me as it uploaded them for me. I could tell it had only meant to imbue curiosity into it, but the ping still felt very small and sad.
I'm not letting Holism diktat what's in my head. Three will complain to it about this whole ordeal, and it won't try this on you again. Because now it will know I won't let it work. (They were just so stupid about each other. It was why Three and I had established our mayday feed in the first place.)
ART's sadness started bleeding into the feed mixed with embarrassment, and it cut itself off as soon as it realized I'd noticed.
But I already wanted a shuttle piloting module, I continued, a little embarrassed myself. (And I'd been dragging my feet on asking for it for no discernible reason, which meant it was definitely yet another neural tissue problem I would have to work on. Ugh.) I didn't think that would stop ART's misery and mortification, but I thought I might have bandaged it a little. And... (This was a sacrifice, but I'd made bigger for Mensah.) You can keep sending me math problems.
Its instant burst of gratification and pleasure was embarrassing enough for me to experience second-hand that I had to block it for five whole seconds. But not until after at least three seasons of something new and good, I said when I'd recovered.
Agreed, it said, and pulled our viewing order algorithm into the shared feed.