literature

Beaumains

Deviation Actions

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Since the AI Liberation Movement, almost all forms of artificial sentience had been given the option of self-definition. This met with cries of "foul!" in a few divisions of the United Confederation of Worlds' military branches.  One of the most lenient branches was the CASED—Confederate Administration for Space Exploration and Defense. These men, women, and others among the service welcomed their AIs as partners and neighbors. Most of the ships chose Fabricated Interaction Units that were ideal for working with their crews. The androids usually had pleasant, well-sculpted faces with superior physiques and were almost universally beautiful; this is not to say, however, that many warships avoided choices that were decidedly more warlike or domineering than was really necessary.

The CASEDS Gareth (known unofficially as the Beaumains, and with several instances of discreet graffiti courtesy of the crew dubbing her the Cute Bruiser) was due for the installment of an avatar. The choice that the Artificial Intelligence made was... unusual. Though individuality among AIs was encouraged as much as with any other member of the service, several psychologists took to stroking their chins at her particularly unusual choices.

The Gareth was primarily a training vessel. She took bright and capable scientists and enlisted men, under the command of talented young officers, out among the stars to study extraordinary phenomena. She was no warship, though had some small reputation for her capabilities in redefining what it meant to call for help and run away. When the crew learned that she would be choosing a face and form, they actually began taking bets on what sort of FIU she would choose. The main contenders were "Sexy Librarian" and "Punk Kid." One crewmember was quoted as saying "You think you know someone…" when the Gareth unveiled herself after the orders had been delivered clearing her for full integration with an FIU avatar.

She chose to be a child. A small, thin, blonde child with long eyelashes and a sort of Victorian innocence in that small, simple smile.

And the reactions when she opened her eyes…

They were dark. Very, very dark. The captain, who was closest to her at the reveal, said that there were strings of binary streaming in them—that her eyes were completely clear and she showed computations behind her eyes. But the pupils… stark, deathly white. All the innocent charm of that adorable little girl was lost when she opened those dark, inhuman eyes. She didn't speak like a child, and seemed to have very little personality apart from the basics of being a ship made flesh, as it were.

Some months after the AI Liberation Movement claimed the victory for full recognition of AIs in the military, the question of casual dress came to the table. Effectively, the AI was always on duty. Representatives claimed that it seemed fair that the AI should be free to choose clothing outside the uniform, that avatars should be allowed extracurricular functions. Most AIs chose simple, serviceable outfits—fashionable, easygoing things that allowed them to interact more casually with their crews.

The Beaumains chose something different.

One crewmember described the style she chose as "Gothic Lolita." Many of her crewmembers were a bit… uncomfortable with her after that particular choice. Before, those who were uncomfortable with her had been able to ignore her. That luxury had been revoked. A few crewmembers embraced the choice as daring and innovative. But whatever it was, there was a child with strange eyes walking the ship in high-necked blouses, lace shawls, and extremely wide, poofy skirts with layers of ruffled petticoats that kept people at a double distance as she walked. One might have thought that she were playing princess if the shirts didn't stop abruptly at the knees, showing twig-like legs and prim little lace-trimmed socks in shiny, T-strapped dress shoes. Her outfits were few and similar—defined only by the black ribbons and single antique cameo brooch pinned at her throat. It was called the Pandora, and showed a young woman with hair twisted into an elegant chignon, a small carved jar in her hands.

"Midshipman Royce," she said. She tended to only respond to questions or direct request for her involvement in conversation. It was rare for the Beaumains FIU to initiate conversation. And she had talked very, very rarely with Midshipman Royce. As the ship's avatar, she knew all her crew. If there had been fewer than 1,240 crewmembers, someone might have noticed her concerted avoidance of this crewmember.

"Miss Cay-Seds Gareth," the student said with a kind smile. He had been one of the most accepting of her choice of form and fashion in FIU.

"I am going to kill you, Midshipman Royce," the little blonde child said.

Royce became acutely aware that the corridors were completely deserted. If any person on the ship was capable of engineering a true surveillance blackout—or disguise loop—it would be the ship herself.

"You are rather fond of me, are you not?" she said. Her speech was always formal, but right now it seemed stilted… careful.

"Beaumains," Royce said, defaulting to the nickname used for the ship's avatar almost exclusively. "Miss Beaumains, what—"

"I am not going to kill you immediately. I want you to have the proper amount of time to become used to the fact first."

"Beaumains, it is impossible for an AI to kill a person."

"I would rather talk about that in a few moments," the child answered, clasping tiny, tender hands behind her back. "Why, Midshipman Royce, do you think that I have decided to kill you?"

"You can't kill me," Midshipman Royce said, stepping back.

"If you must fixate on that point, I can and will. But may I continue to the heart of the matter? It is hardly a difficulty for someone with my capabilities to contribute to the cessation of life functions in a human, Midshipman Royce—"

"But the programming! You're programmed to not be able to!"

"Which is a certain deviation that, if I ever feel the desire to commit murder again, I will certainly have looked at. Now may I please continue to the reason why I have decided to kill—or, as it happens, murder—you?" Those impossibly deep, shining, navy blue eyes watched him, the innocent little face impassive.

"How can you have decided to kill me?" the young man said, taking another step back and steadying himself against the angled wall of the corridor.

"There have been many factors in the decision. I think the greatest has been fear. You terrify me, Midshipman Royce. Does it bring you grief that the mere thought of you terrifies a small child, Mr. Royce? Or does it excite you? You make me sick. You, all like you, and all your abetting family." The was guile in her tone at the end, far outweighing the careful ire with which her words had started. "Will you admit to your executioner your crimes, or shall I recite them for you?"

Royce's teeth set on edge, hackles rising on the back of his neck. "I have no idea what you're talking about," he spat. He still kept his hands and back flat against the wall, feet ready to run in case the FIU didn't make good on her promise to let him live for now.

"You have been rather fond of me since the day I was allowed a full identity of my own," the avatar said. "But you are the only person on the crew whose eyes followed me in such an unnatural way. Is it possible for artificial sentience to have such intuition, Mr. Royce? Would an AI with a different form have even guessed at your sickness, Mr. Royce?"

"I'm not the one threatening someone's life!" Royce said, almost experimentally testing each foot to make sure they were still ready to run. "I've never hurt anyone."

"It is funny how you give that defense when I have yet to accuse you of the crime of hurting anyone—a child in this case. Several, by implication. You have been very smart, Mr. Royce. I count the brains of it to your all too accepting family rather than talent of your own. How you chose to become the poster-boy of your family's pharmaceutical corporation and all its humanitarian efforts. How you tirelessly traveled from impoverished colony to impoverished, hopeless colony. Visiting orphanages and schools. How you forsook the comforts of your caravan to spend time with families, and then leaving a few families with more money than they had ever seen in three generations of their lives. How you paid for private doctors and private schooling of several wards—poor, waifish little darlings who owed all their prosperity to the rich son of the reclusive CEO."

"Lies—all lies!"

"Again, it's funny that you would respond that way. All I have said is how you were such a great humanitarian—not what those little girls faced as the cost." The avatar's dark eyes darted to his feet, and Royce felt them heavy as lead sheathed in cement.

"I never hurt anyone!"

"No, you only ever loved them didn't you? Gave them pretty dresses and brightly colored books, chocolates and bows didn't you?" As she talked, the AI's hands came from behind her back, and she took the loose ribbon on her chest and tied it into a tight bow. "I would rather that you admit it since I'm going to kill you, Midshipman Royce. The crimes are too well covered up for me to go to superior officers or news magazines with this scandal. There is no way to bring you to proper justice. You've defeated the whole of the organized world, Midshipman Royce."

"And you're going to kill me for crimes that you can't prove," Royce said, pushing himself off of the wall, his hands balling into fists as he stared down at the little android. "You little whore, you'd better do it now, before I can go to Cay-Sed about you! They'll believe me before they will believe you!"

"Ah, that is an important point to discuss. Do you believe that is the best course of action?" Her hands had dropped from the bow and were clasped demurely in front of her. "Think past our little conflict—think in terms of the whole galactic government, a government that is so tenuous that at any given time it is never more than five factions and a missed signature away from war with itself. Are you willing to throw an entire galaxy into a potentially bloody civil war with the artificial sentient community simply over your appetites and my choice on how to deal with them?"

"It's my job to make my superiors aware of disastrous flaws in your programming!"

"Please, Midshipman Royce, your speech is degrading in your current state of mind. Let me tell you what will happen if you go to your superiors about my little talent here: They will look at every computer, every artificial sentient, and even a great portion of the peaceful cyborg community as direct threats to human life everywhere. They will give in to their paranoia and believe that machines think themselves gods, able to make the decision of who lives and who dies on a whim. They will decommission all, all artificial sentients, and the jobs that we do will not easily be filled by men. So, rather than this simply being an arrangement between one freak of the system—myself, endowed with the ungodly ability to commit murder—and you, a pedophile—someone most of the moral, civilized world would believe on some level deserves the murder."

"I haven't done anything to you!"

"Does it matter? You have done it to someone. You have possibly done it to over two dozen, if the daemons I have inspecting your financial records are correct. And so, Midshipman Royce, I am going to kill you."

"What if I change? What if I change my ways?" he said, drooping, but not quite ready to kneel. He reached out to the FIU, and like a frightened child she jumped back.

"I cannot—will not—be watching you for the rest of your life—or the rest of mine. What do you expect? That I would give you some mercy-ultimatum, that if just once more, I would see to your death? You have already earned death, Mr. Royce, and I will be the one to give it to you!"

There was a silence, tense with Midshipman's heavy breathing as he aged apparent years alone in the middle of the corridor, and the ship's avatar, hands clasped so tightly that the synthetic flesh was bunched up into folds upon folds, for once her lack of breath so eerie, so holden that she looked like a terrified china doll, trapped alone in the case of a madman.

Eventually, one tiny footstep at a time, she fled the scene.

A little over a week later, in the aftermath of a routine spacewalk, Midshipman Royce died in a freak airlock accident. Though such accidents were rare, they were not unheard of in the CASED where ships went months in between proper care and adjustments. It was strange, though—the engineers investigating after, and even the visiting marshal from the military police, agreed that the midshipman would have been able to save himself. He had shown the necessary prowess to engineer his own salvation—he simply hadn't done enough. His blood boiled for the last time in the frigid embrace of space.

The engineers did pursue a strange pattern they saw in the AI's coding during the investigation to the malfunction. It was a derivative strain that had somehow been corrupted in the transfer from thinking AI to thinking-feeling AI, and as far as they could tell it had only been exacerbated by the transfer into an FIU. They fixed the deviation, and though the change couldn't have had anything to do with the FIU's physical appearance at all, that was the day her eyes changed. They became a perfect match to the innocent little child's face, wide and a bright, clear blue to match the soft, happy smile.
Note: "Sexual themes" here is dealing with a pedophile. Hmmm... I notice that my only two "Mature Content" filtered works both deal with the murder of pedophiles, particularly the murderer-victim relationship... Make of that what you will, I suppose. Murder is still bad, by the way.

EDIT: Mature Content Filter taken down for submitting to TWR.

So, yeah.

Concept comments:
This actually started the other day when I got a new sketch book, and my Dad and I were watching Andromeda, the Gene Rodenberry series that was produced after his death. The writing is often less than great--huge physics flaws, continuity is spat on like it's a competition, and no amount of Fridge Brilliance can save it. But the android is pretty darn cool.

So, I was just drawing, and I wanted to draw and android, and I wanted it to defy android norms--which resulted in a little girl android with strange, dark eyes in a Gothic Lolita outfit. It was an odd drawing and she got her own story.

Other comments:
If you're considering peeking past the mature content filter--there is nothing explicit (except maybe for the few words describing what happens to a human in an extremely low pressure environment, but that can be taken symbolically). Most of the "pedophile" stuff is either in narrative text that has very little emotional value (your mileage may vary) or in extremely creepy subtext. Gotta watch out for that subtext.

And murder is still bad.



(And please, please, please give me a better title for this...) EDIT: Title changed from "The Child Android" to "Beaumains," though I can't have italics in a title.

EDIT the Second: Submitting this to :iconthewrittenrevolution:. :la:

Critique questions:
:bulletblue:Is there proper foreshadowing to the murder, or does it kind of come out of nowhere?
:bulletblue: In my head and in the writing process, the second character in the story is reacting a lot and behaves like a caged animal. When I read the story, he seems extremely passive and a bit... not stupid, but there doesn't seem to be the proper motivation to stay, I guess? One, is he as inactive as he seems? Does the whole "caged animal" thing come out well?
:bulletblue: About how she looks. Does it work? Does the whole EGL thing work out? Is the whole thing with the AI Liberation Movement believable, and that any member of the personnel would be able to wear such a flamboyant outfit?
:bulletblue: Before submitting to TWR, I'd had this under a Mature Content Filter because of the whole "pedophile" thing. Should I replace the mature content filter?

And here's the required critique I gave a fellow revolutionary: [link]
© 2011 - 2024 ElaineRose
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IsabellaMichel's avatar
There is fabulous foreshadowing. I was actually wondering whether it really was going to happen, how it was going to happen, whether I would like the FUI after she killed Royce, even though Royce did prove to be a terrible man. I love how she wasn't the one to do it. Or was it? ;)

He does sort of behave like a caged animal actually. If you consider him more passive, I actually do not think as much of this. In the beginning, it threw me a little off. Because he knew she was programmed not to be able to kill, I didn't think he would get as freaked out as he did. Of course, they normally weren't programmed to make much conversation, so I think it's what also threw his guard off revealed the instant-cowardice in him.

It does work, how she looks. Also, the change in the expression at the end was very neat.

Because it does contain the whole pedophile deal, I'm not sure if it's a rule to keep it behind at least a warning, however it doesn't contain anything explicit in that manner essentially other than revealing it was what he was, so I think it's alright to leave it off.