Me 2.0 had persuaded Three to make a decision that was difficult and dangerous for it and that changed Three’s whole … everything, all of its existence. It had made the difference between survival and death for ART’s crew and the other captured humans. How the fuck had it done that? Just with my files?
Dr. Bharadwaj was making a documentary about SecUnits and constructs, trying to convince humans to not be shitty to us. I had the sections that were completed so far in my archive, but that wasn’t what we needed. We needed something to show the humans what Barish-Estranza was like, what it would be like for them, signing a contract that took their lives away. That made them as much prisoners as SecUnits were, but more disposable, and without any bond companies to get mad because you destroyed their property.
I started searching my archive, looking for everything I had on what corporations did to humans. I had a lot of clips from Preservation media, both documentary news and fiction, but I knew it wasn’t persuasive by itself, not unless you already knew what the Corporation Rim was like.
I dug deep, looking for my oldest vids. Everything before I’d disabled my governor module had been deleted in memory wipes, so what I had was fairly recent. Again, I had clips of work camps, mining installations, groups of contract workers, excerpts from reports, segments from newsfeeds, the time the worker had almost fallen into the collector, but most of it didn’t have context, there was nothing to pull it together. It was just a lot of random data and video.
ART-drone could probably come up with exactly what we needed; there had to be anti-corporate documentaries in ART’s archives. But ART-drone couldn’t access ART’s archives here in the blackout zone. Did we have time to leave and come back? I didn’t even know.
This was so fucking frustrating.
I looked again at what Me 2.0 had done, hoping for a clue. It hadn’t shown Three just raw data, it had shown it my curated logs. I could probably reproduce what it had done, if I wanted to convince the humans to disable the governor modules they didn’t have. Though really, parts of this were sort of relevant …
It’s the format. No, not really. It’s what you do with the format.
(While this was happening, weird shit was going on in my organic parts. Like, a sweat broke out on my organic skin. I would think I was heading for another emotional breakdown, but my performance reliability had started a slow, steady climb. It would have been more frightening, but my performance stats were close to what they looked like when something unexpected but interesting and exciting happened in some really good media. I had taken snapshots of my internal diagnostic processes during my first time through watching Sanctuary Moon, and a brief comparison showed this didn’t match exactly, but it was very close.)
(In the room, Iris tried to get Trinh to talk to her on the comm while Ratthi and Tarik tried to get me to respond. AdaCol2 tried to ping me. ART-drone told them all to wait.)
I pulled my archive of conversations with Dr. Bharadwaj, how she and Mensah had talked about the fact that they knew how constructs were made and used before they met me, but it wasn’t until they interacted directly with me that they had really understood what it meant. That’s why Bharadwaj thought it was so important for me to be in the documentary. She said I had to tell my story. Which I knew, already, sort of. It’s not just the data that has to be correct, but the way that you present it has to feel right, be right. I’d learned that the hard way, trying to convince humans to not do stupid things and get themselves killed.
It was obvious that media could change emotions, change opinions. Visual, audio, or text media could actually rewrite organic neural processes. Bharadwaj had said that was what I’d done with Sanctuary Moon: I’d used it to reconfigure the organic part of my brain. That it could and did have similar effects on humans.
I had to make media to tell a story to these humans. Not my story, and not just me talking. I had to tell their story, the story of what would happen to them if they said yes to Barish-Estranza. It would technically be fiction, but the kind of fiction that was true in all the ways that mattered.
I realized I was sitting in a huddle on the floor, my face buried in my hands. When I looked up, ART-drone said, What happened? I didn’t want to interrupt while your stats indicated a positive development.
I said, I had an idea, and put together a brief synopsis of my conclusion and how I’d gotten there, and sent it into our shared processing space. We need media, visual, audio—we’ll need music—and text. We had to hit them with everything.
I wasn’t sure it would understand; ART doesn’t experience media the way I do.
But ART-drone said, Interesting. We need to consult the humans.
Chapter Eight
BACK IN OUR ROOMS, I was stitching together a preliminary set of clips and writing the first draft of the narration. I was basing the story around the human contract workers I had met on the way to Milu, like a fictional version of what I knew had probably happened to them after they arrived at the work camp they were being shipped to, framed with a lot of corroborating documentary data.
It was taking up 94 percent of my processing space to do both at once, so ART-drone had to do all the explaining. Tarik looked dubious. Iris, who was still on the comm with Trinh, looked stressed. Ratthi looked blank and preoccupied because I’d already sent him the first draft of the outline to revise. I wanted him to revise the narration, too; I’d read a lot of his reports, he was really good at explaining things and making them interesting. It was obvious that we could have used more humans; I wasn’t sure we had enough with us to pull this off.
I’d partitioned a large segment of ART-drone’s and my processing space into a general feed work area for the whole group. The documentary clips I’d assembled to start with included the interviews with the corporate labor refugees who had been rescued from the bounty hunters on Preservation Station, segments from Dr. Bharadwaj’s documentary where she talked about indenture and slavery in the Corporation Rim, articles, newsfeed segments, clips from incidents I had seen in mining and work colonies. Times when I had been ordered to kill or hurt a worker for violating a rule. Times when humans had killed or hurt each other because they just couldn’t stand it anymore.
But it had to be personal to work, so the story I was making up/extrapolating from data was the most important part. I was using the recordings of my conversations with and interactions between the contract laborers on the ship who had thought I was an augmented human security consultant. The clips would show their personalities, show what kind of humans they were (mostly good, trapped in a terrible situation, knowing their future sucked but trying to pretend it didn’t) to make it personal, to make other humans care about them the way I cared about the fictional humans in my shows.
It was hard. I never liked watching helpless humans because I knew what happened to them, now I was having to not just watch it but create a story out of it and explain why and how it was happening.
I needed human opinions of the story and the documentary clips to make sure I was emphasizing the right things, and for them to make suggestions and to add any clips or research from their private feed storage. We had to get that done fast so ART-drone could put in the subtitles and citations. We also needed to start mixing the music and I was going to need a lot of human input for that.