Ok, I have no idea if I'm even going to continue this, but the idea has haunted me for a few days now, so here you are, first scene of a potential Murderbot diaries/TTOU fanfic.
This isn't my "movie night/feed watch" idea - more of a "what if these two were the same universe" crossover.
Note that this has major TTOU end spoilers!
***
The research transport in dock at Preservation station was not ART, but according to Senior Indah, it was kind of an asshole anyway. So the first thing I said to Indah when I got to the docks was, "I'm not your resident research transport expert."
Senior Indah sipped her stimulant of choice and glared at me in that way she sometimes did at her junior humans.
Out loud, she said, "You are when said transport interfaces with the feed in a non-standard way. That ship tripped several red flags within a few seconds of coming into port, so we've cut it off for now and told the delegation to stay on board until we check what it was doing. Our initial assessment seems to have shown no evidence of deliberate tampering - it looks more like compatibility issues with our protocols. But we still need to know whether we can connect our guests to the feed safely."
I checked the feed. "We've cut it off" was definitely an overstatement. The barebones communication channel that was open between the transport and the feed would have been more than enough for ART to attack, and the bot pilot's presence (which it wasn't hiding for some reason) was at least as big as ART's, so if it wanted to hack the station, it probably could. But it didn't. It just sat there politely, waiting for us to finish talking.
I pinged it and it responded with a clear and calm voice that somehow made my threat assessment spike by 3%.
Security consultant SecUnit, welcome. I am granting you permission to come aboard.
Ok, now I agreed with Indah. There was something wrong with that transport.
I checked the feed packet she sent me earlier. The research transport had an incredibly stupid name. Thankfully, it also had a hard-coded feed address, 002x4. It came from a non-corporation world called Trellin, and it was the first time a Trellin ship visited Preservation station. It was here because it carried representatives for a meeting with PreservationAux leaders and there were talks about planning a joint research mission. According to Indah's notes on the standard packet, Trellin was itself part of an alliance of several worlds that were weirdly similar to the Preservation Alliance itself. Survivors of failed colonization attempts banding together, corporate sabotage, that sort of thing. They were pretty far from Preservation space, though, which probably accounted for why they were only talking now.
There was also a note from Preservation Alliance leadership, directed to Indah: "Priority red. If collaboration goes well, we might have a potential treaty."
The humans' meeting with PreservationAux was scheduled another six hours from now.
Ugh.
I said, "Transport and human feed interfacing, check. See if it carries any killware or something that can act as killware, check. Anything else?"
"At your discretion."
Indah stepped aside to let me do my job.
The transport extended a walkway. I said into the feed, 002x4, connection test start?
Request acknowledged, SecUnit, it sent. Implementation paused, and two initial corrections to our communications protocol requested.
Query?
My name is Dandelion. And it's "she." Not "it."
Threat assessment spiked another 5%.
I hated that bot pilot already.
Okay, so apparently I do have a plot. :3 And since I'm actually writing fanfic for two authors whose writing styles I struggle to imitate (I constantly have the texts open and trying to figure out If They Would Fucking Say That), I'm gonna do an unusual thing and post the rough drafts as I write them. If anyone catches style fuckups, I'd be grateful.
This is gonna be ch. 1 with a little edit at the end (which I wish I'd thought of before I posted it) and ch. 2. The fic doesn't have a name yet.
Chapter 1
The research transport in dock at Preservation station was not ART, but according to Senior Indah, it was kind of an asshole anyway. So the first thing I said to Indah when I got to the docks was, "I'm not your resident research transport expert."
Senior Indah sipped her stimulant of choice and glared at me in that way she sometimes did at her junior humans.
Out loud, she said, "You are when said transport interfaces with the feed in a non-standard way. That ship tripped several red flags within a few seconds of coming into port, so we've cut it off for now and told the delegation to stay on board until we check what it was doing. Our initial assessment seems to have shown no evidence of deliberate tampering - it looks more like compatibility issues with our protocols. But we still need to know whether we can connect our guests to the feed safely."
I checked the feed. "We've cut it off" was definitely an overstatement. The barebones communication channel that was open between the transport and the feed would have been more than enough for ART to attack, and the bot pilot's presence was at least as big as ART's, so if it wanted to hack the station, it probably could. But it didn't. It just sat there politely, waiting for us to finish talking.
I pinged it and it responded with a clear and calm voice that somehow made my threat assessment spike by 3%.
Security consultant SecUnit, welcome. I am granting you permission to come aboard.
Ok, now I agreed with Indah. There was something wrong with that transport.
I checked the feed packet she sent me earlier. The research transport had an incredibly stupid name. Thankfully, it also had a hard-coded feed address, 002x4. It came from a non-corporation world called Trellin, and it was the first time a Trellin ship visited Preservation station. It was here because it carried representatives for a meeting with PreservationAux leaders. They were planning a joint research mission. According to Indah's notes on the standard packet, Trellin was itself part of an alliance of several worlds that were weirdly similar to the Preservation Alliance itself. Survivors of failed colonization attempts banding together, corporate sabotage, that sort of thing. They were pretty far from Preservation space, though, which probably accounted for why they were only talking now.
There was a note from Preservation Alliance leadership as well, directed to Indah: "Priority red. If collaboration goes well, we might have a potential treaty."
The humans' meeting with PreservationAux was scheduled another six hours from now.
Ugh.
I said, "Transport and human feed interfacing, check. See if it carries any killware or something that can act as killware, check. Anything else?"
"At your discretion."
Indah stepped aside to let me do my job.
The transport extended a walkway. I said into the feed, 002x4, connection test start?
Request acknowledged, SecUnit, it sent. Implementation paused, and two initial corrections to our communications protocol requested.
Query?
My name is Dandelion. And it's "she." Not "it."
Threat assessment spiked another 5%.
Why do you have a gender marker?
It sent back an amused, Why shouldn't I have a gender marker?
You're a spaceship! You don't have sex parts!
Security consultant SecUnit, is your interest in my sex parts part of your professional evaluation?
Performance reliability dropped 3,5%. I hated that bot pilot already.
Fuck you.
You're not being particularly convincing about it.
This was going so fucking well that I opened my least favorite episode of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (it had really good parts at the beginning and the end, but it also had a very long sex scene) and fast forwarded through it three times, for the good bits, before responding.
Fine. Research transport Dandelion, gender marker she, connection test start?
Acknowledged, security consultant SecUnit. Connection test start.
Chapter 2
Between the two of us, we figured it out before I even made it to the end of the walkway. The problem was that the kind-of-an-asshole research transport--Dandelion, gender marker she--had feelings. And they gummed up the feed connection.
I sent her the evaluation.
Your performance reliability is unstable. That's the problem.
Dandelion, gender marker she, re-ran a few diagnostics.
Systems are nominal. The variance is expected and well within normal operating parameters.
Our bot pilot connections protocols don't account for variable performance reliability. If it happens, it usually means the bot pilot is fighting against malware.
Or being malware.
You were displaying even greater performance variance during our conversation earlier, she pointed out, bringing out graphs to support her claim. It annoyed me, but she was right. You're not getting flagged as malware.
I'm using construct communication protocols, not bot pilot protocols. They're different, to account for my organic parts.
There was about ten seconds of silence as she processed, during which the ship hatch hissed open. Dandelion said: I see. Then I'm assuming we need to adjust the protocols for my organic component as well.
You're a construct?
We should discuss this with my crew present.
Said crew was represented by two normal-looking humans and one short human with a full-body coat of hair standing in the hatch entrance. Dandelion, gender marker she, gave me access to a shared feed space so I could get their IDs (Captain Reed, gender brennan; Senior IT specialist Iceblink of Trellin, gender female; Chief Engineer Haze of the Fastidious set, gender none. All three were also marked as Tenacious cluster via hard-coded IDs). And except for the ID marker, they had no feed presence at all. Huh.
"Security consultant SecUnit, welcome aboard the Dandelion Tenacious," captain Reed said. "We apologize for the trouble and thank you for your assistance in helping adjust communications protocols."
"Hello. We've figured out what the problem with Dandelion's connection is. Now I need to troubleshoot your crew's."
Captain Reed frowned.
"What's wrong with our connection?"
"It's not there. Mostly. I can't check for potential problems in normal operating mode if you're using some kind of restricted threat mode."
Captain Reed shot a glance at Iceblink, who gave a stifled snort, then said: "That is our normal operating mode. We don't have a broader one implemented."
"Are you joking right now."
"No? It's a stupid thing to have. So we don't have it."
"Security consultant SecUnit, what sort of crew feed access would your systems require?" Dandelion said from a wall speaker.
I glared at the speaker. Why couldn't the Trellians just talk on the feed like normal ships and their people?
"Standard multi-channel support. At the very least you need the emergency station channels, global and local, but you'd also want news and mapping, not to mention means of direct long-distance communication."
It hit me that these people didn't even have entertainment channels, and that was just creepy.
"Dandelion, senior medical officer's assessment?" Captain Reed said.
"That fact of nature hasn't changed in the last several hundred years, captain Reed. Personal channels of communication, especially when used for a prolonged period with no rest, still take a toll on the human mind."
There was that instability again. I was going to have to report that a spaceship was being judgmental enough to mess up connection protocols. (ART would laugh so hard at how bad Dandelion was at this. It could be judgmental and talk at the same time).
Dandelion continued: "But so long as you keep it workday-length, it shouldn't pose much of a problem."
"Hmm. Can we connect our standalones to their emergency channels?"
"From a preliminary look, yes. Haze, I've sent the specifics to your work station."
"Then we can go take a look from over there," Haze said. "Please follow me, security consultant."
