Chapter Text
It has been over 5 corporation standard years since I officially joined ART’s crew. There have been some ups and downs in there, but it’s been overwhelmingly more good than bad. So it doesn’t really make sense that I have started feeling antsy, like maybe I needed something more? I know I don’t want to leave, and I even enjoy my work (at least when no one is actively shooting at me), but sometimes I watch my humans when they aren’t working and get an emotion that I can’t properly parse (my tagging system calls it longing, but that sounds pathetic so I immediately delete the tag). To avoid these weird feelings I have been throwing myself into work more than usual. I think the crew has noticed but thankfully no one has said anything to me. Unfortunately, that has meant getting pulled into a university project about constructs.
I should give some background here. For the past few years, the university has been planning to create the next generation of machine intelligences. The ships from ART's generation (namely ART, Holism and a handful of others) still have at least 60 years of service life yet, possibly more if they are kept updated, but the university is interested in using MIs for other purposes. One of the options they are considering involves creating constructs with on board sampling and analysis tools. I argued that they already have bots for for that, but the university is interested in the "unique skills" a construct could provide. Personally I think those unique skills are mostly crippling anxiety and PTSD, but maybe I'm just a weird construct. Either way, it seems to be a project they are serious about, so I guess I am now too. (Three is also involved, as are a few of my humans which takes the pressure off a bit. I actually do trust them to make good decisions sometimes, but this feels really important, like maybe I should be paying attention.)
The project is reaching a critical phase where the team is actually starting to plan for implementation. The proposal is basically to "raise" these MIs in a similar way as ART was, by placing them with a family, training them to do their job, and then I guess, hoping they like it? I had some concerns with that last part, but I was assured that the university would be flexible and take preferences into account when it came time for mission deployment (maybe I was naive to believe this, but I was trying to be positive for once).
The goal was to create 3 new constructs, each with slightly different functionality and from different batchs of cloned material. They would be human form so that their identity could be hidden from outside groups (like ART anytime it had to pretend to be a bot pilot). Their processing power would be less than a ship given the smaller footprint, but significantly more than a SecUnit or even a CombatUnit due to advances in technology over the last few years.
The problem at the moment was finding enough families that wanted to adopt a construct. The team was able to find 2 families but was having trouble getting a third. After today's team meeting where this came up yet again, Three stopped me on my way out of the building. "Why don't you do it?"
I sent a confused query in response.
Thankfully it switched to the feed for it's next comment. You and ART. You would be great parents.
That caused me to start choking on air which was alarming and clearly worried Three, so I just sent back a quick, status = normal, and said, I have to go, before practically racing back to the docks.
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Why are your stress hormones elevated? Are you sweaty? The station temperature has not changed since your departure this morning.
Of course ART could tell. I don’t know why I thought heading back here was a good idea just now, but I pretty much ran here without thinking so now I was going to have to deal with that.
The project meeting was… complicated.
Are you still concerned about the constructs not enjoying their functions? I thought the university had built more flexibility into the contracts to resolve that issue. Do I need to reach out to the team leader again?
No, no, nothing like that. ART “reaching out” to the team leader was a nice way of saying threaten, so I did need to make that clear. I think I might need to figure some things out myself first.
ART sent back an acknowledge (it was actually getting better about not being a pushy asshole some of the time) and started up some media for us to watch.