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Technically, the first time it happened was on RaviHyral when ART had to go through me to get control of the transport after the bot pilot died.
It felt like ART’s presence submerged mine under water. A heavy weighted blanket over all of my senses.
I was only a bridge for ART, but I didn’t hate the way it made me feel. And in any case I had to let ART in because it was the only way my clients and I, and a half dozen civilians wouldn’t get murdered.
I never bothered to reanalyze that particular choice or how it felt when it happened because I am not human and I try not to dwell on the past just to relive an emotion. There had been no other logical path for me, so reviewing my decision tree would have been a waste of time.
It wasn’t until this current moment of crisis that I realized that I had not really considered the decision point for ART.
ART had shown me what it was capable of only seconds after it had let me know it was there. ART could have pushed past all of my barriers. It could have broken through my walls even if I had not let it in.
But it had asked me for permission first.
And yes, okay, maybe I am an idiot because it took me so long to realize this.
I certainly didn’t consider it the second time it happened, when ART was saving my life yet again by getting rid of the infected alien code string.
ART asked for permission to go into my head even though at the time I wouldn’t have been able to put up a wall to block a corporate Ad message. But it had asked anyway.
At that point I had already trusted ART with everything that was me so my own decision didn’t even register as an event.
As we watched media together, ART carefully picked through my insides. Its presence a warm heavy blanket all around me, seeping into me.
And maybe I thought on some level it was really nice to be under that blanket while I was going through some stuff but whatever, I was barely more functional than a subroutine, and I didn’t think about it again afterwards. I just thought of it as a more (much more) intense version of ART in my feed.
Yes, I am a liar. I ought to write some code to govern when not to lie to myself without a more complicated decision architecture.
Because. Because… afterwards, I actively missed the feeling of ART inside me after being in the isolation box together. Of being surrounded and engulfed in something (in ART). I wasn’t used to missing feelings.
And while I was being honest with myself, I should also admit that I was afraid.
I was afraid to ask ART about how it felt about all of this because I didn’t want to know if ART hated being with me like that and it only did it when my life was in danger.
Even though ART also dropped its walls everytime I dropped mine, ART was too big and too complex for me to process it in a meaningful way.
Oh wow, that admission just sent my performance reliability diving. Moving on.
The third time.
Yeah, the third time it happened my life was definitely not in danger.
I had got a message through the wormhole from Amena telling me that Dr. Mensah had to have some emergency surgery done on her heart.
I don’t really want to linger on what I sent to ART over the feed when I had gotten the message but ART immediately came in through my walls at my request.
It didn’t ask clarifying questions. It didn’t try to lead me away from my catastrophizing. It just came through because I wanted ART to overwhelm me and pull me under its weight, and I wanted to not have an emotion in the way I was having an emotion.
And ART being inside helped. The blanketed weight of ART made the emotion I was having feel a lot less like drowning. (Yes I did know what that felt like, I needed some oxygen for my organic components.)
Yet ART’s firm steadying pressure all around me wasn’t suffocating. I wanted it there around me as it showed me all the research it had already compiled about Dr. Mensah’s condition and the credentials and records of her attending medical team that ART had already hacked for me because I was too much of a mess to do it myself.
At the same time we went over these data, it started an episode of Sanctuary Moon that was a filler between plot lines with absolutely no one at risk.
It took nearly six full cycles before we were close enough to another worm to get the message that Dr. Mensah’s surgery was a total success.
ART stayed with me the entire time and didn’t say anything mean enough for me to want it out.
After that, ART and I spent a lot more time together without walls.
In retrospect, I should have done some baseline analysis about this after the third time but then what would I have even compared the data to? I didn’t know any other AIs like ART and it’s pretty clear that Three and I were on the opposite quadrants of SecUnit behavioral spectrums. ART and I didn’t even have our own baseline interaction matrix. Our interactions kept on changing.
The point was that I didn’t think about it, and we didn’t talk about it.
Then ART took me to visit Preservation, and Dr. Mensah had recovered enough to come aboard.
I thought some additional diagnosis in ART’s medical suite was good and necessary redundancy for her health anyway.
And while Dr. Mensah was subjecting herself to that, she asked ART how we were doing.
Our relationship is advancing well. We are regularly penetrating each other’s walls. ART said, as if that didn’t sound like some weird human sex euphemism.
Dr. Mensah did a thing with her face that I knew meant she was trying not to laugh. She had done it a lot around some of the juvenile humans… and I maybe dropped a drone on Thiago by accident as he was coming into the room (he’s fine) as I ran away. And it was stupid anyway because ART was the entire ship and I was only running into a different part of it that its crew had decided was mine.
So now I was sitting in my room, on a bed I never use, trying not to have a lot emotion I couldn’t identify and stupidly wishing ART was with me inside my walls. And that thought just made my performance reliability drop another two percent.
SecUnits did not hyperventilate, but having watched enough humans doing it, I was pretty sure I was doing the SecUnit’s equivalent right now as my performance reliability continued on a downward trajectory.
ART pinged me gently after 60 seconds of steady decline. I didn’t even know it could ping me with so little disturbance…
My first instinct was to ignore it.
Except ignoring things was what got me into this in the first place. Urgh. Logic was hard sometimes.
I pinged it back.
Would it be easier if I was inside?
No. I sent back even as I lowered my walls and it came through.
I don’t understand why you are so upset. I know you like this as much as I do.
It was right of course. Which made me have more emotions. But I couldn’t tell what that emotion was or if it was positive or negative. This was why emotions were stupid.
I had started to run through all the memory files of what I was processing to show ART when I registered what ART actually said.
Yes, you little idiot, of course I like this as much as you do.
I hate you. I thought at ART.
No you don’t.
No, I don’t. Fuck. Was this what intense relief feels like? It felt nothing like when I had managed to save all of my clients from certain death.
I know you need time to process, but Dr. Mensah is waiting to check on you, and I can only block Dr. Thiago’s calls to Dr. Gurathin and Dr. Ratthi for so long before he realizes I am doing it. He may try calling Amena next.
ART flexed around me, and squeezed me a little tighter.
Come on, my little idiot, I’ll be here when you speak to them.
Fuck you, ART.
Yes, I think that is what they think we are doing.
Ew.