misfiled as "Keet, Electric" @ElectricKeet@awoo.space

"This Sentence Would Have Been Nonsense Twenty Years Ago: Today I Had to Reboot My ______" #294:

bathroom ceiling fan

You can trust me – I'm within the margin of error!

Point by point:

• Airiam, a largely synthetic-looking humanoid, appears early in the first season of the show. A season and a half later, we still know absolutely nothing about her character besides her name. We don't even find out if she's a cyborg or a droid.

• In the previous episode, something digital from outside made its way into her system. Cybernetics, especially such extensive ones, open up so many interesting writing possibilities, so of course they go with the most painfully trite.

• She went cybernetic after a shuttle crash that killed her bog-standard husband on their bog-standard honeymoon. Because of course the only reason anyone would ever go extensively cyber is tragedy.

• She has to flip through her recorded memories like a photo album to purge unnecessary ones because her storage capacity is limited. Assuming a five-year mission, 24-hour uninterrupted awareness, and 8K 10-bit uncompressed video, napkin math says we're still talking less than 320 petabytes of storage. (We'll come back to storage in a bit.)

• The digital invader is an evolving AI that wants to eradicate all other sentient life. Because of course the first thing any developing intellect wants is to become utterly alone.

• The invader takes over Airiam's behavior every so often, waiting for moments when she won't be observed so it can force her to do its bidding. When she finally notices that something is wrong, she doesn't communicate this to anyone, instead opting to ask her friend and crewmate to stay with her while she performs a task she's already demonstrated she can do alone. This worries said crewmate, who then obliges and doesn't inquire.

• Then Airiam asks her to leave. This worries said crewmate, who then obliges and doesn't inquire.

• A few episodes back, a previously-encountered Font of All Knowledge stuffed millennia of collected data from all over the universe into the ship's databanks. The invader forces Airiam to download every single bit of that to herself. How much data would that be? More than 320 petabytes, for fucking certain.

• So she deletes all her personal memories to clear up room. Naturally, this includes the honeymoon memory from back before she had any kind of digital storage in her head. Don't worry, she makes a backup onto the ship's system.

• She joins an away team, beams into a derelict space station, and convinces the others to leave her alone so she has a chance to find a terminal in an airlock and upload all of that data to the waiting AI so it can figure out how to end all other sentient life. When the others on the team find out what's going on, there's an obligatory struggle after which she returns to the terminal, closes the airlock door, and continues to do her thing.

• In an attempt to snap her out of it, that worried crewmate replays Airiam's favorite video memory to her. This doesn't stop what she's doing, but she becomes able to explain that she's been possessed, can't stop herself from filesharing, and that the main protagonist's only option is to vent her out the the airlock. Because of course she has to die in the same episode as she finally gets some character.

• Airiam spends what feels like ten agonizing minutes begging the main protagonist to vent her out the fucking airlock.

• More begging.

• More begging.

• The rest of the crew join in, also begging the main protagonist to kindly vent the existential threat out the motherfucking airlock.

• The outer airlock door opens, somehow to the main protagonist's surprise.

• As she floats in a least peculiar way, the episode ends with the honeymoon memory playing back in front of Airiam's eyes before her video decoder glitches out and, one must presume, she perishes.

• Well at least there's no fucking end credits music. That would be awfully tacky after all that effort to emotionally invest us in yet another depiction of everyone's favorite story, "Beepy Thing Gets Hacked But Can't Self-terminate So They Invite a Fleshy to Kill Them."

...

Fuck this show. Fuck. This. Show.

sign: "Days since an app choked on a filename with parentheses:"

me: *hangs a zero, sighs* "Thanks, FontForge."

website of medical clinic: "Want to set up your first appointment? Use this email form to contact us!"

me: "Cool, I don't need to struggle past phone anxiety to get this rolling!"

email response: "Here's the same phone number as listed on our website. Give us a phone call to set things up."

me: *stays sick forever*