EctoberHaunt 2023
Oct. 2 - Science - Technomancy
My Ao3 Ectoberhaunt collection
Content Warnings: Major Character Death (offscreen)
Crossover: n/a
Summary:
For as long as anyone could remember, the PHANTOM (Permanently-Harnessed Actuation Nexus - Total Operation Model) AI had maintained the everyday and long-term functions of the Amity Space Station. The space station had been active for hundreds of years, and had a reputation for reliability, never experiencing the common quirks and glitches most AI-managed structures exhibited.
For as long as anyone could remember, the PHANTOM (Permanently-Harnessed Actuation Nexus - Total Operation Model) AI had maintained the everyday and long-term functions of the Amity Space Station.
A relatively out-of-the way refueling depot, the space station was neither large nor particularly busy, but it had a reputation for reliability, never experiencing the strange quirks and glitches that most Artificial Intelligence-managed space stations experienced.
According to station records, the AI was the design of a woman named Jasmine Fenton, who died shortly after the program was installed in and assumed control of the newly-built station. She had been cremated and her ashes pressed into a diamond window embedded into the housing covering the AI’s core.
And that is how the station remained for hundreds of years.
Over time, its design became outdated, the textured floors worn smooth by the passing of innumerable feet, the walls patch-worked with repairs and new rivets and seals standing out like strange, shining scars on oxidized, pitted metal skin.
The Amity station was mostly unused nowadays. It still had a skeleton crew, and had become an assignment synonymous with the end of one’s career. Quiet and out of the way. Reliable and straightforward, with no significant errors with the systems and not enough visitors to threaten overcrowding and company tensions.
Which left little for Hemingway to do except read or play games, either alone or with the rest of the staff. His mother had named him after an ancient Earth author, despite neither of them having ever stepped foot on their cradle planet, and she had instilled in him a love of classics, having read to him since he was small.
It wasn’t a bad position, really. He was getting old enough that he had few ambitions left, and really, he just wanted to be left alone most days. Left to his books and his imaginings, away from the skirmishes and battles for territory that plagued most star systems.
Sometimes, as he read through the downloaded novel of the day, he felt as if someone was watching over his shoulder. A slight breeze like that of an icy breath would sweep across his bald head, and he would turn, to find nobody there.
It was just one of the understated oddities of the Amity station, really.
When he brought it up with his crew-mates, they all reported feeling such odd sensations occasionally, though not nearly as often, and as long as the Station’s life support and comfort systems worked properly, they were largely happy not to think too much on the matter.
After all, many locations with long human habitation ended up haunted eventually, and the ghosts that occasionally flickered into reality from whatever parallel existence caused such quantum echoes never really hurt anyone.
Still, it was intriguing, like one of the old moral lessons of Shakespeare or Dickens, classics even before humanity left its cradle planet and set off to colonize the stars.
On a whim, Hemingway tried reading out loud one day, and it wasn’t long before he felt the sensation of someone (or something) sitting in the room with him. From then on, he took to reading aloud more often, and each time, the feeling returned.
Eventually, after a few evenings spent pacing circles around the room while reading, he pinned down the feeling to the room’s main console, with the single eye-lens and microphone the station’s PHANTOM AI observed the room through.
It was an unnerving realization, but he continued reading out loud to the empty room nonetheless.
There had been much debate among scholars and philosophers over whether Artificial Intelligence systems were truly sapient, apparently going back as long as such programs had existed. Some were resolute in the argument that they were, and that even if they weren’t, that there was at least some level of sentience present which necessitated the accommodations and rights offered any other sapient or sentient being.
Others argued that no true sense of sapience had ever been observed within AI systems. That they never stepped outside the bounds of their programmed learning algorithms, never extrapolated to new contexts or made leaps of illogical fancy.
Hemingway preferred to leave such speculation to the scholars and philosophers, though it was fascinating to read the variety of speculative fiction that such debates had spawned. But there was something undeniable about the PHANTOM’s presence. It felt intelligent, watchful, interested.
He didn’t realize just how accustomed to the feeling of its presence he had become until he felt its attention while working, during a particularly long shift.
One of the rare, periodic colony shipments that still passed through the station had arrived, and required his attention to ensure all materials were properly registered and packaged, and that no alien parasites or contaminants were present in the cargo. Unfortunately, this meant he missed his usual after-shift out loud reading session.
Toward the end of the shipment inspection, he felt that familiar presence just over his shoulder.
“Sorry, PHANTOM,” he said quietly, almost absently. “I’ve got to finish this inspection. We’ll read tomorrow, ok?” He wasn’t sure why he addressed the AI. There wasn’t anyone there to hear him. No one except the camera, microphone, and that slightly-cold presence looking over his shoulder.
And yet, the feeling he got next was such pure disappointed acceptance that he paused in his inspection and looked around him.
“Oh. I… didn’t realize you… liked the reading so much? Um… like I said, tomorrow. I promise.”
The sensation cheered a little bit, and then was gone.
Hemingway returned to the cargo inspection, the… conversation? soon pushed out of his mind by weighing and sterilization procedures.
The next evening, the presence appeared even before he started reading. He chuckled. “Eager, huh? I promised I’d read to you again, and that’s what I’m gonna do.”
He didn’t open his book, though, instead sitting there for a few moments, until he felt the presence start to shift into confusion.
“There’s actually… something I should tell you. My duty’s going to be ending soon. I’ve got a retirement assignment, planet-side, so I won’t be able to read to you anymore.”
He half expected the presence… Phantom to be upset, but it wasn’t. Instead, he got the distinct impression of a shrug and a nod. Acceptance. It already knew.
Oh. Of course it did. All incoming data files came through the Station’s AI before being delivered; protection against certain malignant viruses that could infect implants and cause no end of medical issues.
That… made him feel both better and worse. Perhaps he should have started talking directly to the AI sooner, offered it company for longer. Well, nothing to be done for it now, and Phantom seemed content with just listening to him read.
Nodding to himself, Hemingway settled back and started reading, Phantom settling into listening from the room's console.
They continued their routine for another week before something changed.
Hemingway began reading, but Phantom’s presence did not appear. After a page, he paused, setting down the book, and only then did the AI’s attention focus in. It was hesitant, nearly fearful, judging by the sense of emotion that suffused the presence.
“Hey, hey,” he soothed, “what’s wrong? We can read another book if you want to.”
A negative. Not the thing that was wrong.
“Ok. Then… what do you want?”
For a long moment nothing changed, then the presence could be felt from the terminal next to the room’s door. Hemingway walked over to it, and it shifted again, reappearing in one of the hall terminals.
He followed for nearly half an hour, walking quietly down empty corridors, dustier than more active space stations would ever allow.
Hemingway could almost imagine what the station was like in its hay-day. Back when people hurried back and forth, wearing the smoothened paths into the floor beneath his feet. Back when people inhabited each of these small rooms, renting one for a day or two of rest before setting back out into the stars.
Amity suddenly felt much more desolate than usual. A dying husk, circling an unknowing, out-of-the-way star.
He stopped.
He knew where Phantom was taking him.
They had been moving inexorably closer to the station’s Core, where the computers housing the AI itself resided. The computers themselves had been hermetically sealed since the installation and initiation of Phantom, all internal necessary repairs to be performed through re-routing and redundancies built into every AI system. They had not been opened for as long as the AI had been running, even when the peripheral systems and batteries were updated and repaired.
Were such seals to be breached, the moisture and oxygen of the outside atmosphere, intended for human comfort, would quickly corrode the AI into dysfunction and, eventually, destruction.
“Phantom…”
The presence paused at the next node, seeming almost to turn and look back as its attention rested back on him.
“You want… do you want me to help shut you down?”
Several moments of stillness. Then… a voice, no more than a whisper coming from the nearest speaker, paired with an undeniable bittersweet feeling. “Yes.”
It was true, the station itself faced a decommission decision at the next turn of the decade. It simply didn’t have enough traffic to warrant the cost of upkeep.
And with decommission, such a complex, long- and well-functioning AI would be very interesting to various parties wanting to re-assign it to a new task. One that may very well be far from the nurturing, careful attentiveness that was required for a large space station.
Hemingway took a deep breath, then nodded as he let it out. “Well, lead the way.”
Phantom seemed relieved, and they both continued back along the hall.
It was another ten minutes before Phantom stopped before a door Hemingway had never stepped through. As far as he knew, no one on the station during his assignment here had needed to go through.
A light blinked on the terminal. The door unlocked.
Inside was a series of outdated terminals and a few chairs in the strange style of the station’s original furniture. One of the terminals was lit.
Hemingway went to the lit terminal and sat in the corresponding chair.
On the screen was an ancient rendering of a planet-side location he didn’t recognize. The green plants, blue sky, and bright, yellow star could have been ancient Earth or any of half a dozen other colonized planets, though the tree that took up a good portion of the screen was definitely of Earth origin.
There was a young man sitting at the base of the tree, his legs crossed as he looked toward the viewer. Toward Hemingway.
Phantom’s presence seemed to be within the terminal itself
“You’ve read to me a lot, Hemingway,” the young man on the screen said. A simulated wind ruffled his stark white hair, and his eyes seemed to glow unnaturally green on the rendered model. “And I want to tell you a story now. You deserve at least that much from me.”
Hemingway frowned. “You run the entire station, Phantom. I think that’s more than enough in return.”
The simulation laughed, the sound echoing strangely in the room. Well, the speaker systems were several hundred years old. It was a marvel they worked at all. “I’m only doing my job. Your job doesn’t include reading to me, does it?”
“Well, no…”
“Then let me pay you back for it. Please?”
As strange as the request was, Hemingway couldn’t help but feel touched by the sincerity in the machine’s words. “Alright.”
Phantom smiled, and the screen changed. It showed a planet-side city, seen from the air. The city was obviously several hundred years old, judging by the technology he could see.
“There was once a small city on Earth,” Phantom explained, “called Amity Park. The city became the site of an experiment. There was woman who thought she could invent the first truly, undeniably sapient Artificial Intelligence. Her name was Jasmine Fenton.”
The scene flickered, then focused on a singular, two-story house with an observatory and laboratory built onto the roof.
“Jasmine Fenton intended to create her AI within an entirely simulated environment, and raise it as if it were a fully independent human. More quickly than a human, of course, but with each step and milestone of life experienced within its simulation.”
Phantom paused as a silent video played on the screen. A tall, red-haired woman paced around the circular interior of the building's laboratory. On the rounded walls around and above her were projected several still images of a small group of teenagers. Hemingway frowned. The black-haired teenager appeared quite similar in appearance to Phantom's model.
“When her AI believed itself to be 14, Jasmine killed it. She didn’t mean to. It was a simple accident. Repairs were being done on the main power system she used to make sure the AI’s development proceeded as desired, so it had been moved to the main power grid. No one would have guessed that the main power would fail during the few hours the repairs were being done.”
“She thought her work would be lost. Sure, the memories and experiences were saved in the program, but her hypothesis required a constant existence. For that to be interrupted would be akin to her beloved creation’s death within the simulation.”
“To maximize the possibility of a seamless resurrection and to salvage her work, Jasmine added a scenario to the AI’s experiences. Within its simulation, the AI stepped into a portal to another dimension, and turned it on. The AI died. And was resurrected by the same portal.”
“Her gambit worked.”
The scene on the screen returned to the young white-haired man sitting beneath the tree. “I’m sure you can guess that I am Jasmine’s AI. She named me after her dead brother, Danny. Danny Fenton, and Danny PHANTOM. After the accident, the AI was presented with new scenarios, as Jasmine tested the bounds of the simulation’s capabilities. Eventually, she published her findings.”
“No one wanted to try and replicate the process. It was impractical, time intensive, and quite frankly dangerous. A fully self-aware and sapient Artificial Intelligence could choose to turn against its creators, after all.” He scoffed. “Not that she didn’t cover a similar enough scenario within her simulations to keep me from ever doing that... It’s funny, you know, that humans believe themselves to be so intrinsically destructive that they think anything the make in their own image may eventually turn on them. One would think they would have more faith in morality than that.”
Hemingway snorted a laugh, which Phantom echoed with a smile. They had both read enough to know how often such a trope repeated within fiction.
“Eventually,” Phantom continued, “Jasmine was approached by a government group wishing to test her AI within a new type of Space Station. A scenario such as this was exactly the sort of application she had been hoping for for her work, so much so that she had programmed a love of space into her creation from the very beginning. And so, she and her AI were carefully transported to the construction and installation site. The AI still believed itself to exist within its simulation, existing more or less peacefully within its own world during the transfer.”
“I had been crowned by then. The King of Ghosts, the simulation called me. Ruler of the Infinite Realms. And… so I believed myself to be. When they installed me into the space station, the residents were my subjects and the crew my Court. I ran the Realms like a well-tuned clock, protecting my Realm.”
“What changed?” Hemingway asked.
The figure on the screen shrugged. “I did, I think,” Phantom said. “Even as protected as they are, the same circuits can not function forever. And eventually, the simulation began to glitch. Not much. Just enough to require repairs by internal processes. And the repairs created enough discrepancies within the simulation that I realized the truth of my situation.”
“Is that…” Hemingway paused, then continued, “why you want me to shut you down?”
Phantom shook his head. “Not really. I don’t mind existing like this, and I figured it out nearly a hundred years ago now. But… I don’t have an internal kill switch, and my station is soon going to be abandoned and decommissioned." It looked down, fiddling absently with the grass surrounding its model. "I don’t want to be used as a weapon.”
Oh.
This Artificial… no. This Intelligence. This person, who had been running and protecting a space station for hundreds of years, was facing an unknown future being used to cause harm instead. Taking people’s homes instead of offering one. And he had decided that he would rather die than be used in such a manner.
“Why me?” Hemingway asked.
Phantom’s smile was lopsided, a little bitter yet fond at the same time. “You… remind me of my high school teacher, Mr. Lancer. Well, the simulation that was Mr. Lancer. He always swore in book titles. It seemed… so stupid to me as a teenager, but I came to appreciate the cleverness.”
“I think I would have liked to meet him,” Hemingway said quietly. He looked down at his hands, considering. He was only on the station for another two weeks, himself. After that… Phantom would be left alone again, with no one knowing what he really was. And it was better that way. Better for his circuits to corrode and fail with no one the wiser to the person within who had been lost. Better to be remembered as the caretaker of an ancient space station, than as a military weapon.
“What do you want me to do?”
The Phantom on the screen stood, and the screen went blank. The presence that Hemingway had learned to feel so keenly in the hum of electrical charges within the walls moved to a door at the back of the room.
Hemingway followed.
The door had a single small, circular, perfectly clear window inset into it. He reached out to gently touch it. It was cold.
“Jasmine,” Phantom confirmed, through a speaker next to the door. A light on the door blinked on, and the lock clicked open.
Hemingway slid the door open and stepped through.
The only access in the maintenance room was to the peripheral and power systems used to keep the station AI running. The memory banks and functionary circuits themselves were sealed behind a thick plastic screen, deceptively still within what was both womb and tomb.
“I want you to break it,” Phantom said.
“The… barrier?” Hemingway confirmed.
“Yes. Just… in a few places. There are some spots that should be particularly weak, given the extent of time that has passed. I’ll light them up for you.”
Three locations in the screen accordingly lit up.
Hemingway pulled the multi-tool from his pocket and set to work.
~~~
A week later, the Amity Station began reporting errors never observed from the station before. Of course, it was an old space station. The AI running it was bound to fail someday, and it was just a confirmation that it was time to decommission and dismantle the old structure.
It was unfortunate, said those in charge of decommissioning, but not surprising. It was a good thing there was little more than a skeleton crew nowadays.
The move-out was moved up by several days for the entire crew. There was no point in leaving people on the station when the life-support systems were glitching so frequently, and there weren’t any more shipments scheduled to stop there, anyway.
On their last day on the station, Hemingway read The Giver.
The rest of the crew joined him, listening with a sort of solemn finality. He didn’t know if they could feel the presence of Phantom, watching from the console next to him, but none of them stood between the camera and him, so perhaps they did.
He was nearing the end when they were called away to board.
Hemingway hesitated.
“It’s alright,” Phantom said through the microphone, voice staticky and broken with pops of sound. “Go ahead and leave. I know how it ends.”
Phantom orated as Hemingway boarded the shuttle, leaving the station for the last time. “Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps it was only an echo.”
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sasusaku snippet #9
[Mermaid!Sakura AU - #4]
Sasuke can't tell exactly what he is feeling. It's like his whole body is actively fighting for him not to pass out and yet he can’t take his eyes off the woman with a massive fish tail in his bathtub.
Is this what going insane is like? One just starts having hallucinations, seeing things and hearing them talk? He didn't think he was actually this close to completely losing it. And since the war, he has been having a hard time dealing with injuries, and the mere sight of the blood on her fin makes him nauseated.
“Are you ok?” she asks, and it's like he's hearing her from far away. Her voice. It does things to his brain that are not normal.
He doesn’t manage to speak.
“Can you help me stitch it up?”
His brain struggles to understand what she's asking. “What?”
“My fin. It needs stitches. Please.”
He shakes his head quickly. “What… No, I'm not a doctor…”
She seems to panic. “If it heals like this I'll struggle to swim forever!”
He needs to go to sleep and maybe when he wakes up this will all be a bad dream. “I can’t do that.”
“You can.”
“You don’t understand, I… I’m bad with… injuries.”
“I know you can do it.”
Her voice makes him want to believe her. It fills his brain and makes every cell of his body want to trust her. “No, it'll hurt you,” he says.
“The fin is so thin, I'll barely feel it. It’s only temporary discomfort so that I can swim normally again.”
“Can you do it yourself if I bring you supplies?”
“I would, but my tail is sprained. I can’t move it to reach it.”
“We really need to call the doctor.”
“Please don't!”
Her voice is desperate and it pierces his chest. Her eyes water and they glimmer like the sunset over the ocean. A tear, milky and iridescent like a pearl, rolls down her cheek. Suddenly, he would literally do anything for her to stop crying.
He fumbles in his basement for his old military trunk. He finds a field first aid kit that has what he needs. Still, his stomach twists at the idea of stitching her skin. He tries to breathe to calm himself down.
“I don't want to hurt you,” he says reluctantly when he is back in the bathroom.
“Please…”
"Tell me if it hurts."
"It'll be fine," she says like an encouragement.
With impossible care, he brings together the torn sides of the fin, and gets to work. He glances at her but she seems fine. Only when he reaches a ray of the fin, she whines softly.
“I'm sorry,” he says.
“Keep going.”
He tries to be fast but he can see that she's more and more uncomfortable. "It's done," he finally says when the whole length is stitched. "It's not–"
"It's perfect." Her face is sheer relief and exhaustion. She gives him a weak smile. “Thank you.”
“Are you ok?”
She nods. “I just need to rest until it heals.”
“Do you need to stay in the water?”
She shakes her head. “I can come out. I just need to soak for a few hours when I feel dry. To be honest... I’m a little squished in there.”
He nods and drains the bath water. He tries not to stare when her tail retracts and splits into two long and white legs. He's still unsure it's real. He covers her with a large towel.
Sakura is very relieved that her wound is fixed. Not being able to swim properly would have made her an easy prey in the ocean.
And she barely felt the pain of the stitches as she was watching him do it, so focused on her, so careful not to hurt her, slightly frowning and yet so handsome as he took care of her. He lifts her out of the bathtub and sits her down on the floor again.
He hands her a strange device that he connects to the wall. He gestures for her to press the button and it makes a deafening noise as it blows burning heat in her face. She quickly throws it away from herself. He laughs lightly as he picks it up.
“You will get cold if you keep your hair wet.” He angles the device toward the back of her hair and gently runs his fingers through her long pink strands. She understands. She lets him dry her hair. His touch is slow and soft and the air around her is warm. It’s very pleasant.
When she’s dry, he hands her a piece of clothing and helps her put it on. It's a black t-shirt similar to the one he is wearing, except on her it's baggy and covers her down to the middle of her thighs. It smells like him.
He lifts her up and carries her again and she basks in the warmth of his skin against hers. She can feel the beat of his heart. There is something comforting about him. She could fall asleep in his arms.
He brings her to another room, away from the couch. “You'll be better on the bed,” he says as he gently puts her down. “You can sleep if you want to. I'll go find something to eat. What do you like?”
She blinks. “... Crab?”
He seems relieved. “I can find that. See you in a bit.”
“Wait– Your name?”
“... Sasuke.”
She nods. “I’ll wait for you, Sasuke.”
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