Chapter Text
I liked working with ART and it’s crew. Well, I liked it mostly. I liked it on the ship, when mostly I watched media with ART, and I didn’t mind it on stations. ARTs crew was sharp, and typically surprisingly willing to listen to me.
But god, I hated it on planets. Because they were theoretically a research group, ART had to, well, research. This seemed to me to involve going to the most musty, fauna-infested planets possible, and then standing there for hours scooping up tiny bits of mud into separate storage devices. Horrendous.
What was worse, the crew seemed to find this exciting. I just stood there, squishing myself as far into my armor as possible, and tried to focus on the surroundings and not on ART’s, Iris’s, and the crew's inane chatter.
If I wrinkled my nose, I would have wrinkled it at the latest unnecessary message Iris sent in the chat. (Well, I suppose I do wrinkle my nose now, and I did wrinkle it, but I had my faceplate opaqued so no one could see it, so it isn’t like that even really counts.) It was an image of a small wet fauna of some kind, with the word “scrungly” at the bottom. What did that even mean? (ART had recently snuck a dictionary into a media download package, but it would never stop crowing about its ‘victory’ if I stooped to opening it. I’d deleted it as soon as I’d noticed, anyway.)
I refocused my attention on the chat as another series of messages came through. One of the younger crew members had replied with SO TRUE, but Seth had thankfully sent a pointed note that the mission channel was to be used for survey related communications only.
It was nice, working with semi-competent humans. I returned my attention to hazard surveys for the remainder of the sampling expedition, but saved the supposedly “scrungly” fauna for further analysis. I did not know why.
ART had, predictably, insisted we watch more of its new favorite show, a Worldhoppers offshoot of some kind. And, equally predictably, halfway through the episode, when the crew members were attempting to pull a junior out of some muck they’d stupidly gotten themself trapped in, ART demanded we pause for a moment.
While I gave it a moment to compose itself (well, a few milliseconds, but it is an impossibly advanced, supercomputing machine intelligence, it could handle it), I sent it a packet of data. Well, a piece of data. A graphic comparing Iris’s small fauna, and the mud-covered junior crew member. It had popped into my head unbidden while watching, and I wanted ART’s take.
I felt it retreat to analyze the package. It took longer than it could possibly ever need. When it returned, ART’s composure was clearly back.
Iris? it asked.
I tapped an affirmative.
ART paused for a moment, then sent back another file. This one continued the comparison, but added a character from Sanctuary Moonn who was almost constantly in high-risk situations. After a moment of analysis, I sent back my approval, along with a suggestion to continue watching our new show.
ART agreed, and added the graphic in a chat we had with Iris, who it had managed to convince to start watching Sanctuary Moon and Worldhoppers, although at a humanly slow pace.
I couldn’t even be mad when, later, Iris sent me an updated version of the graphic with the unfortunate addition of my face.