SecUnit, Ratthi said in the work feed, I’ve been working on a history of corporate colony abandonment and I have a lot of sound clips and transcripts saved in my archive. I think we can use some of it.
This wasn’t a surprise; I knew that was one of Ratthi’s side research topics. The humans who lived in the Preservation system now originally came from an abandoned colony, and would have all starved to death except for an almost decommissioned colony transport with a crew who had decided to rescue everybody or die trying.
Die trying. It’s not the worst thing that could happen.
I sent him an acknowledgment and a quick guide to our input tagging system.
Then he sent me a note back: So, you may not know this, but I read your letter to Dr. Mensah, the one you sent when you left Port FreeCommerce. I think you’re absolutely the right person to write this.
I can’t handle that right now so I’m just going to archive it for later.
Some of the better newsfeed material I was turning up in my onboard archive search came as text descriptions of events and transcripts. ART-drone could translate them, turn them into dramatic readings, and run the text on a black background while the audio played. I know it’s not the most original technique, but it’s fucking effective. Also it would save a lot of time and our graphics-building queue was already too long with all the research data ART-drone had just dumped on me from its onboard archive.
ART-drone was also helping me organize our growing list of persuasive, emotional scenes from the fictional and nonfictional media we had in our archives. These were clips that weren’t relevant to the subject, but that we needed to compare and analyze to see how they did what they did. I know, this was why we needed the humans. Just copying the technical aspects was not going to get us what we needed, but it sort of helped to have them for comparison. Inspiration? Maybe it was inspiration. Anyway, looking at them made me feel weirdly encouraged.
ART-drone had also put up a list of guidelines, including: Think of this as a persuasive piece, like a presentation seeking funding for a research proposal. It does not have to compete with the commercial media composed by humans who know what they are doing.
Tarik, with an air of they can’t be serious, asked ART-drone, “How many human voices can you do?”
Since Barish-Estranza wasn’t pretending to play fair anymore, ART-drone had set up a listening device countermeasure around our area so the humans could relax and communicate without worrying about being recorded. My drones hadn’t detected any incursions; it was possibly an indication that B-E didn’t see us as any kind of a threat. Which, fine, do that, do whatever, B-E could go set themselves on fire for all I cared.
ART-drone said, Functionally, not an infinite amount, but as many as could be realistically needed.
“Any voices?” Tarik persisted.
“Of course any voices,” ART-drone said, aloud, in Seth’s voice.
“Holy shitting deity,” Tarik said.
I will be taking no more questions because our time is limited, ART-drone told him. You will be in charge of music since you have the most experience of those here.
Wide-eyed, Tarik put up his hands not unlike the way he had when he said he didn’t want to fight me. “I played traditional oud and bouzouki and danced a little when I was in school, I certainly don’t—”
Iris put the comm on mute, pointed emphatically at us, and said, “You need to interview him!” Then unmuted the comm again.
Interview him? Oh. Because Tarik had been in a corporate death squad. Maybe we could just steal the music from another show; it wasn’t like the colonists would recognize it.
Ratthi came out of his feed trance and said, “I’ll do it, but I have no idea what to ask.”
“Ah. That’s— Uh.” Tarik was thinking rapidly. ART-drone’s threat to put him in charge of the music had worked. “I think I know what we’re going for. We can figure it out together.”
Ratthi sent me an updated outline and I got to work assembling clips for ART-drone to start editing. The narration was going to be the hardest part. I started paging through the inspiration clips again. ART-drone caught me at it and said, Don’t worry about being persuasive. Just tell the story. We still have time for the humans to give their input.
You can’t slam down a comm, but Iris pulled the comm interface off her ear and made an aborted gesture like she wanted to throw it against a wall. (Been there, threw my whole body against a wall once.) My drones watched her set her jaw, frustration giving way to determination. She stomped over and dropped down onto the bed next to Ratthi. “The colonists agreed to watch our presentation, but they insist we leave by morning, when the weather is supposed to let up. That’s five hours. Where’s this music you need someone to work on?”
It took us four hours and twenty-seven minutes. We didn’t let Iris work on the music, because she was better at organizing and editing, and she had a huge supply of relevant text stored in her archive augment. She took over evaluating clips when Ratthi and Tarik were doing the interview. Also, she ended up reading the narration, though she didn’t think we should use her voice. (“I think they’re as sick of listening to me as I am of talking to them,” she told us.) So ART-drone converted her voice into Dr. Bharadwaj’s, which it had a good sample of from her documentary segments. (“This is absolutely not ethical, it’s the opposite of ethical and is explicitly against Preservation law, but I think she’ll forgive us under these specific circumstances,” Ratthi said.)
By the time we finished, we didn’t have time for the humans to watch the whole thing through, because it was 47.23 minutes total. So we divided it up into three separate segments and each watched one simultaneously. ART-drone processed the tweaks and corrections, and then we had almost no time left.
But when Iris called Trinh and asked to deliver it, someone else answered. They said only Trinh could speak to us and she was “unavailable until later.”
Iris closed the call very politely, and then sat there on the bunk squeezing her fists while we stared at her. She said finally, “Trinh didn’t trust me, but she didn’t trust Barish-Estranza, either. If she’s not part of the discussion anymore, that’s not good.”
I was sweating out of my organic parts again, we were so close. There had to be something we could do. Then Iris said, very quietly, “I will not give up.” She looked up at ART-drone. “Peri, how do we make them watch it?”
I don’t think force will be necessary, ART-drone said, and displayed the media directory AdaCol2 had shown us. I think we just need to make it available.
I should have thought of that, but after all that processing, my performance reliability was down. I needed a restart like nobody’s business. I called AdaCol2 and said, query: file upload permissions?
I didn’t know if AdaCol2 knew or understood what we had been doing. It had a connection to our feed but it would have had to get past ART-drone’s walls to see how high our activity levels had been. It said, query: file type?
I answered: video tag: entertainment, educational. It was really important that the entertainment tag go in first.
AdaCol2: query? It was asking me why.
We want your humans to see it, I said. Information, assistance.
It gave me an address and I sent the upload. ART-drone had a real-time view of the media list, but it hadn’t updated yet. It’s reviewing it, I told ART-drone.