THE TECHIE: Transcript Beneath the Cut.
NEWS BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT: Welcome to N54 News — I’m Gillean Jordan, and this is the latest from around the world. Arasaka’s devastating fall from grace on the international stage at the close of this decade is expected to usher in a shockingly explosive beginning to the 80s for the Megacorporation. Reports from the company’s primary headquarters in Tokyo have confirmed that in early February, recently ousted Chief Executive Officer Yorinobu Arasaka will stand trial for egregious crimes against the megacorp’s board of directors, shareholders, and investors, resulting in the loss of jobs and income for all employees outside Japan and billions of Eurodollars in damages worldwide. Some of the alleged charges against Yorinobu include but are not limited to: internal corporate sabotage resulting in the significant loss of profit and stock value, conspiracy to commit sabotage with outside known criminal parties, orchestrating the leak of Top-Clearance classified information concerning the company’s research into what is being reported as “The Mikoshi Project,” and spreading deliberate misinformation about the nature of The now-defunct Mikoshi Project both slanderously and libelously through established Media outlets. The biggest shock from this press release is surprisingly not the firing of an Arasaka family member or the corporation’s executive board pursuing justice through criminal liability trials, but the news that Yorinobu is also set to be tried for murder regarding the 2077 death of his father, Arasaka company founder, Saburo Arasaka. Saburo’s former Head of Personal Security, Goro Takemura, is set to travel to Tokyo and testify against the founder’s son after receiving a package of datashards from a former corporate-affiliated netrunner who procured security footage from the interior of Yorinobu’s penthouse in Konpeki Plaza the night of the elder Mr. Arasaka’s unexpected and sudden death. According to Mr. Takemura, for the past nearly three years, video surveillance clearly showing Yorinobu strangling his father has been stored in a highly encrypted data fortress belonging to the disgraced executive, hidden on private backdoor servers within the Arasaka mainframe to conceal existing evidence of wrongdoing, obstruct justice, and eliminate any potential threat of blackmail. Yorinobu’s attorneys have released a statement as they seek to dismiss the video from being presented in court, citing that the ‘supposed footage of a murder’ is AI-generated as an act of sabotage on the part of the board of directors who ‘seek to steal the company from under family control because they disagree with his controversial decision to localize employment solely in Tokyo and discontinue the Mikoshi Project. What they’re labeling as intentional destruction of the Arasaka corporation is saving investors hundreds of millions of Eurodollars long-term by eliminating unnecessary and largely redundant costs.’
DIALOGUE TRANSCRIPT:
MIDAS: One more replacement chip and a quick fuel cell top-up, then we should be ready to run diagnostics again. Sound good?
3JANE: Why do you do that?
MIDAS: Do what?
3JANE: Talk to me like I have actual feelings about anything. Why ask if it ‘sounds good?’ I’m not publicly performing emulations of humanity at this particular moment, so it seems… [she pauses, contemplating for a second.] pointless.
MIDAS: I don’t know — [He snickers] I told a vending machine to stop being a bitch and it wasn’t even one of the ones that had an AI attached to it. Doesn’t mean I genuinely think it gave me a cold burrito out of spite… It’s not that deep, alright? Just banal small talk while we do this to make it less awkward.
3JANE: Less awkward for you, you mean – I don’t struggle with the concept of awkwardness. It’s interesting that you’re in the regular habit of talking to electronics and common household appliances as if they’re sentient in the same regard, even though you know they’re not.
MIDAS: Your programming should’ve prepared you for a lot of human behaviors to not make any goddamn sense by the standards of some universally applied objective logic — people are weird and they do weird shit.
3JANE: I wouldn’t say your behavior is entirely without logic.
MIDAS: Yeah?
3JANE: You seek one-sided companionship with inanimate items and artificial lifeforms because you are either stubbornly unwilling or woefully incompetent in the task of performing socialization with other humans. [she smirks smugly.] It makes you feel awkward. MIDAS: I’m pretty competent at knowing where your Sleep Mode button is — stop being a bitch or you’ll wake up outside when the diagnostic’s over; you’re doing it on purpose.