#human sanity

[fieriframes]

[Yeah, we do lots with this dough. Human sanity was a poor, fragile thing at best. Big dilemma.]

[soranatus]

The Spider Target By Dan Martins, a character designer and illustrator

[kayawolfhorse]

Discuss

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Humans in the loop” must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely – not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883571

A company that pays 0.36-1 cents/query for electricity and (scarce, fresh) water can't indefinitely give those queries away by the millions to people who are expected to revise those queries dozens of times before eliciting the perfect botshit rendition of "instructions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible":

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-inference-cost-of-search-disruption

Eventually, the industry will have to uncover some mix of applications that will cover its operating costs, if only to keep the lights on in the face of investor disillusionment (this isn't optional – investor disillusionment is an inevitable part of every bubble).

Now, there are lots of low-stakes applications for AI that can run just fine on the current AI technology, despite its many – and seemingly inescapable - errors ("hallucinations"). People who use AI to generate illustrations of their D&D characters engaged in epic adventures from their previous gaming session don't care about the odd extra finger. If the chatbot powering a tourist's automatic text-to-translation-to-speech phone tool gets a few words wrong, it's still much better than the alternative of speaking slowly and loudly in your own language while making emphatic hand-gestures.

There are lots of these applications, and many of the people who benefit from them would doubtless pay something for them. The problem – from an AI company's perspective – is that these aren't just low-stakes, they're also low-value. Their users would pay something for them, but not very much.

For AI to keep its servers on through the coming trough of disillusionment, it will have to locate high-value applications, too. Economically speaking, the function of low-value applications is to soak up excess capacity and produce value at the margins after the high-value applications pay the bills. Low-value applications are a side-dish, like the coach seats on an airplane whose total operating expenses are paid by the business class passengers up front. Without the principle income from high-value applications, the servers shut down, and the low-value applications disappear:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Now, there are lots of high-value applications the AI industry has identified for its products. Broadly speaking, these high-value applications share the same problem: they are all high-stakes, which means they are very sensitive to errors. Mistakes made by apps that produce code, drive cars, or identify cancerous masses on chest X-rays are extremely consequential.

Some businesses may be insensitive to those consequences. Air Canada replaced its human customer service staff with chatbots that just lied to passengers, stealing hundreds of dollars from them in the process. But the process for getting your money back after you are defrauded by Air Canada's chatbot is so onerous that only one passenger has bothered to go through it, spending ten weeks exhausting all of Air Canada's internal review mechanisms before fighting his case for weeks more at the regulator:

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/air-canada-s-chatbot-gave-a-b-c-man-the-wrong-information-now-the-airline-has-to-pay-for-the-mistake-1.6769454

There's never just one ant. If this guy was defrauded by an AC chatbot, so were hundreds or thousands of other fliers. Air Canada doesn't have to pay them back. Air Canada is tacitly asserting that, as the country's flagship carrier and near-monopolist, it is too big to fail and too big to jail, which means it's too big to care.

Air Canada shows that for some business customers, AI doesn't need to be able to do a worker's job in order to be a smart purchase: a chatbot can replace a worker, fail to their worker's job, and still save the company money on balance.

I can't predict whether the world's sociopathic monopolists are numerous and powerful enough to keep the lights on for AI companies through leases for automation systems that let them commit consequence-free free fraud by replacing workers with chatbots that serve as moral crumple-zones for furious customers:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563219304029

But even stipulating that this is sufficient, it's intrinsically unstable. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the mass replacement of humans with high-speed fraud software seems likely to stoke the already blazing furnace of modern antitrust:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Of course, the AI companies have their own answer to this conundrum. A high-stakes/high-value customer can still fire workers and replace them with AI – they just need to hire fewer, cheaper workers to supervise the AI and monitor it for "hallucinations." This is called the "human in the loop" solution.

The human in the loop story has some glaring holes. From a worker's perspective, serving as the human in the loop in a scheme that cuts wage bills through AI is a nightmare – the worst possible kind of automation.

Let's pause for a little detour through automation theory here. Automation can augment a worker. We can call this a "centaur" – the worker offloads a repetitive task, or one that requires a high degree of vigilance, or (worst of all) both. They're a human head on a robot body (hence "centaur"). Think of the sensor/vision system in your car that beeps if you activate your turn-signal while a car is in your blind spot. You're in charge, but you're getting a second opinion from the robot.

Likewise, consider an AI tool that double-checks a radiologist's diagnosis of your chest X-ray and suggests a second look when its assessment doesn't match the radiologist's. Again, the human is in charge, but the robot is serving as a backstop and helpmeet, using its inexhaustible robotic vigilance to augment human skill.

That's centaurs. They're the good automation. Then there's the bad automation: the reverse-centaur, when the human is used to augment the robot.

Amazon warehouse pickers stand in one place while robotic shelving units trundle up to them at speed; then, the haptic bracelets shackled around their wrists buzz at them, directing them pick up specific items and move them to a basket, while a third automation system penalizes them for taking toilet breaks or even just walking around and shaking out their limbs to avoid a repetitive strain injury. This is a robotic head using a human body – and destroying it in the process.

An AI-assisted radiologist processes fewer chest X-rays every day, costing their employer more, on top of the cost of the AI. That's not what AI companies are selling. They're offering hospitals the power to create reverse centaurs: radiologist-assisted AIs. That's what "human in the loop" means.

This is a problem for workers, but it's also a problem for their bosses (assuming those bosses actually care about correcting AI hallucinations, rather than providing a figleaf that lets them commit fraud or kill people and shift the blame to an unpunishable AI).

Humans are good at a lot of things, but they're not good at eternal, perfect vigilance. Writing code is hard, but performing code-review (where you check someone else's code for errors) is much harder – and it gets even harder if the code you're reviewing is usually fine, because this requires that you maintain your vigilance for something that only occurs at rare and unpredictable intervals:

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

But for a coding shop to make the cost of an AI pencil out, the human in the loop needs to be able to process a lot of AI-generated code. Replacing a human with an AI doesn't produce any savings if you need to hire two more humans to take turns doing close reads of the AI's code.

This is the fatal flaw in robo-taxi schemes. The "human in the loop" who is supposed to keep the murderbot from smashing into other cars, steering into oncoming traffic, or running down pedestrians isn't a driver, they're a driving instructor. This is a much harder job than being a driver, even when the student driver you're monitoring is a human, making human mistakes at human speed. It's even harder when the student driver is a robot, making errors at computer speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

This is why the doomed robo-taxi company Cruise had to deploy 1.5 skilled, high-paid human monitors to oversee each of its murderbots, while traditional taxis operate at a fraction of the cost with a single, precaratized, low-paid human driver:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The vigilance problem is pretty fatal for the human-in-the-loop gambit, but there's another problem that is, if anything, even more fatal: the kinds of errors that AIs make.

Foundationally, AI is applied statistics. An AI company trains its AI by feeding it a lot of data about the real world. The program processes this data, looking for statistical correlations in that data, and makes a model of the world based on those correlations. A chatbot is a next-word-guessing program, and an AI "art" generator is a next-pixel-guessing program. They're drawing on billions of documents to find the most statistically likely way of finishing a sentence or a line of pixels in a bitmap:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

This means that AI doesn't just make errors – it makes subtle errors, the kinds of errors that are the hardest for a human in the loop to spot, because they are the most statistically probable ways of being wrong. Sure, we notice the gross errors in AI output, like confidently claiming that a living human is dead:

https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/according-to-chatgpt-im-dead

But the most common errors that AIs make are the ones we don't notice, because they're perfectly camouflaged as the truth. Think of the recurring AI programming error that inserts a call to a nonexistent library called "huggingface-cli," which is what the library would be called if developers reliably followed naming conventions. But due to a human inconsistency, the real library has a slightly different name. The fact that AIs repeatedly inserted references to the nonexistent library opened up a vulnerability – a security researcher created a (inert) malicious library with that name and tricked numerous companies into compiling it into their code because their human reviewers missed the chatbot's (statistically indistinguishable from the the truth) lie:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

For a driving instructor or a code reviewer overseeing a human subject, the majority of errors are comparatively easy to spot, because they're the kinds of errors that lead to inconsistent library naming – places where a human behaved erratically or irregularly. But when reality is irregular or erratic, the AI will make errors by presuming that things are statistically normal.

These are the hardest kinds of errors to spot. They couldn't be harder for a human to detect if they were specifically designed to go undetected. The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

It was a hoax. When independent material scientists reviewed representative samples of these "new materials," they concluded that "no new materials have been discovered" and that not one of these materials was "credible, useful and novel":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

As Brian Merchant writes, AI claims are eerily similar to "smoke and mirrors" – the dazzling reality-distortion field thrown up by 17th century magic lantern technology, which millions of people ascribed wild capabilities to, thanks to the outlandish claims of the technology's promoters:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-really-is-smoke-and-mirrors

The fact that we have a four-hundred-year-old name for this phenomenon, and yet we're still falling prey to it is frankly a little depressing. And, unlucky for us, it turns out that AI therapybots can't help us with this – rather, they're apt to literally convince us to kill ourselves:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-after-talking-with-ai-chatbot-widow-says

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[loustilldraws]

It's been one of those weeks days I fear.

This was funnier in my head, but I needed a stupid little project to keep me going with my tougher WIPs. So here we are.

Still fun to draw, and that was the point this time around.

[foxy-kitsune]

excuse me but what the fuck

[dontbelasagne]

thinking about Jonathan "I dont want to become a mystery" Sims who's only legacy is a disembodied voice enacting the one thing that brought forth their inhumanity, and a title thrust upon them that doesn't care for the person it has marked and maligned in favour of voyeuristic hubris.

[bucketsofmonsters]

Deep Water - Part 2

cw: the ocean, talk of being drowned, loss of a sibling, more tags to be added as the story continues

merman x fem reader

Word count: 4k

read on ao3

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

You weren’t sure how long you sat there, drying off under the morning sun. It was easier than getting up and doing what you came here to do. But eventually, the rocks under you began to dig into your skin through your clothes and the warmth of the sun and your drying clothes stiffening from the salt in the water made you restless. You had to get up, to go somewhere. 

The dock was the last place you wanted to be. It held a horrible ending and an even worse beginning. 

But everywhere else in this new, unforgiving place seemed worse. At least you knew what was waiting for you on that dock. However horrible it was, it held something you understood. 

And so you got up on stiff legs and stretched, fighting against pins and needles to walk towards the moment you’d fought to get to, the moment you’d been dreading more than anything. 

The ground beneath you shifted from unstable stones to steady, aging wood, vibrating with the steps of dozens of people rushing around you. 

It was just as hectic as the dock you had left from. There it had been a boon, the exact thing you had used to sneak onto that accursed ship. 

You appreciated it here too. With dozens of people that had a thousand things to do, you felt invisible. No one had time to gawk at you, to ask if you belonged there. They didn’t have time to care. 

You watched them as they passed and couldn’t help but wonder how many of them knew Isobel. How many of them greeted her with a smile every morning? How many people looked forward to seeing her every day?

You imagined it was many of them. She’d always had that effect on people. 

But she wouldn’t any longer. And you were left to struggle to fill the hole she’d left behind.

That was why you were here. The pretense was that it was for her funeral arrangements, contacting the only family she’d ever told anyone about while she was still here. But really, you were here to take her place, replace her in the job she’d carved out for herself. They’d said as much in the letter, that they’d found her a shocking loss and you were welcome to pick up where she’d left off. 

It was said more tactfully, of course, with much more focus on her coming to arrange the funeral for her dearly missed sister. However, they all knew it would hardly be a lavish affair, just whatever would be paid for by the church. She could mourn her sister just as easily back home as she could here. But a job, that was enough to have her hiding on a cargo ship. 

Isobel has been an inventory taker, keeping the sailors honest, a job that probably would have been aided by you not being caught as a stowaway, but you weren’t particularly worried. They’d barely gotten a good look at you in the dark and even if they did, it had been for just a moment. With any luck, they wouldn’t dock here again, had left while she was sleeping on a quiet little island with a typically deadly monster.

The more you thought back on the last day, the less it made sense to you. It all felt fast and addled. Everything in you wanted to think you’d hallucinated it. If it weren’t for the fact that you were still standing here, alive, you’d be convinced you’d had. 

And then you saw the last thing you wanted to see. You saw a ship that was sickeningly familiar. You didn’t recognize any of the men’s faces. You hadn’t had any real chances to see them, other than through holes in your hiding place and in your panic in the endless rain. 

They looked like normal men. If they weren’t standing on that awful ship, you wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart from anyone else. 

It felt wrong. 

Something in you didn’t expect them to look like average men. In your head, they were monsters, the evil visible on their faces. 

Your eyes darted over them, your mind trying to catalog as many of their faces as possible. The idea of seeing one of them someday and not recognizing them, of just seeing them the same way you’d see anyone else, sent a bolt of panic through you. You needed to know them, you couldn’t let yourself be caught off guard. 

And then one of them locked eyes with you and you froze, unable to move, to run, to do anything without outing yourself. You knew that there was no way he knew who you were and yet somehow you were convinced that he knew, that exactly who you were was written all over your face. 

He started walking towards you while you stood frozen. You willed your feet to move, tried to tell yourself there was nothing strange about just walking away, but some instinct deep inside of you screamed that if you moved he would know, that it would be just as obvious as turning around and running. 

He greeted you with a smile and you felt a bile rise in your throat, fighting to keep the terror off of your face. 

“You’re Isobel’s sister, aren’t you?” he asked, oblivious to the disgust and fear settling inside you. “You look just like her. Maybe a bit more nervous, but I never met her on her first day.” He chuckled as he spoke and you wanted to hit him, to run, to do anything. How could he just stand here and talk to you? How could he not know, not sense it somehow? “You’ll do just fine. I’m sure it all runs in the family, you’ll pick it up in no time. It is a shame what happened to the lass.”

“It was,” you said, your voice sounding stunted to your ears. 

“Aye. Well, just take the run of our ship for me, let’s get everything sorted as soon as possible.”

You tried to shuffle off, refusing to meet his eye. “I haven’t even started working here yet.”

“It doesn’t really matter, you just need to make it official. Don’t worry, I’ll see to it you get paid. We’re all rooting for you, you know. God knows we’ve heard enough about you, Isobel’s brave, clever little sister.”

As he spoke, he laid a hand on your shoulder, one that you were sure was meant to be reassuring. You couldn’t help but wonder if he was one of the people who threw you overboard, if those hands were one of the ones squeezing your wrists so tight you had just begun to see the bruises. 

You agreed quickly, more in a rush to get away from him than anything. You knew you weren’t in any real danger but still, being anywhere near that cursed ship made you feel queasy. 

You boarded the ship, knees feeling weak as soon as your feet hit the deck. 

You hurried below deck as fast as you could, knowing you were doing a very poor job of looking unaffected by the whole ordeal. You quickly found yourself in the same room you’d hidden in. You saw your shawl stuck behind the heavy boxes, sitting, abandoned and smashed, against the wall.  

You weren’t taking inventory of anything while you were down there, with no means with which to do so or any idea of what you were looking for. You didn’t really know what you were doing. It was a difficult job to do without guidance but you knew they didn’t really want you to do it. All they wanted was the stamp of approval that they were sure meant little, the one that you did not have the authority to give. 

If you’d had the ability, you just might have given it, although not for the reason he’d imagined. You just wanted them gone, considering risking a job you needed badly just to get them away from you. 

Maybe you’d feel different when you left the ship, when you were no longer being faced with reminders of what had happened.

It seemed too calm like this. Like surely some signs of your struggle and terror should be strewn around the room. The only thing that even marked your existence was that abandoned shawl, barely visible behind crates that were stacked high. 

You stood down there, listening to the sound of boots on the deck above in the familiar room until they got more and more distant. Finally, with no idea how long you’d been standing down there, the echoing footfalls largely dissipated and you peeked your head out the door, set on slipping away. 

As you did, slinking off the skip back onto the dock, working to get lost in the crowd before any of the other sailors could spot you as you fled, you heard the sounds of shouting surrounding you. 

You turned to see severed fishing nets held in the hands of deeply upset sailors. 

It was hard to make out exactly what they were saying but you caught wind of cursing at sea monsters amidst accusations that some ravenous creature has chewed through their nets for the easy prey. 

Despite the frustrated cursing at sharks and monsters, you thought that, at least to your untrained eye, they didn’t look like they’d been chewed through. The cuts were too neat for that. Instead, they looked like they’d been cut, cleanly and meticulously. 

“You know what I think,” someone said, and it took a moment for you to realize that the voice was speaking to you. You turned to see a man, one of the younger ones here, leaning conspiratorially into your side. “I think they’re getting cut on the rocks.”

You hummed noncommittally.

The man didn’t seem to mind your lack of response. “A group of piss-poor sailors, can’t even miss something that doesn’t move.”

That managed to earn a quiet chuckle from you. 

He turned, really taking you in for the first time. “Hold on, you’re new, aren’t you?”

You nodded, sparing him a glance before your eyes darted back to the upset men and their shredded net. 

He was a rather ordinary boy, a medium brown hair, lightened from long hours of working in the sun, dark eyes, and freckles creeping up his cheeks. He seemed altogether more interested in you than you were in him but then again, you were the newcomer here. 

You should probably be friendlier, make nice with him. He looked like he worked here so you imagined you’d be seeing a lot of him.  

He stuck his hand out, having to back away from you a little to create enough space between you for a handshake. 

You took his hand and he gave it a quick shake, his hand warm and rough. 

“I’m Finn. Are you taking Izzy’s job? I should’ve guessed, you look just like her.”

You shrunk a bit at the comment. You didn’t think it was true, not in the ways that counted. You saw so little of yourself in her. 

But this man couldn’t know that, couldn’t know anything about you really. You hadn’t so much as spoken a word to him. 

“I am. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” you said, your voice coming out quieter than you’d meant it, a breathiness sneaking its way into your tone. 

He gave you a big, bright smile. “The pleasure is all mine, I assure you. Has anyone helped you or have you just been milling about? Your first day here and we’ve already failed you. What would poor Izzy think?”

You gave him a halfhearted smile as he spoke, in no mood to hypothesize about what your dead sister would think of you now. 

Finn didn’t mind, taking your hand in his once more and leading you through the crowd of people towards a building to the side of the dock, just barely on dry land. 

He turned to you, another brilliant smile plastered across his face. “Here you are, ma’am, they’ll be able to take care of you in here. I’ll see you tomorrow morning, bright and early. If no one else offers to show you the ropes, come find me, alright?”

You offered him a smile that you hoped was even half as big and genuine as his seemed to be. “Thank you, I appreciate that.”

With a stilted little bow in parting, he walked away, leaving you with nothing to do but enter the building. 

It was a small building, with not much room for anything inside. Most of the space was taken up by boxes and papers, with one lone desk against the back wall. An older man was sitting at it, hair looking overgrown and unkempt, streaks of gray working their way through it. He had a rather severe look about him, eyes sharp and pointed. He was reading something carefully as you entered. 

His head jerked up to see you and it hit you suddenly that you should have knocked. 

“I’m Isobel’s sister,” you blurted out. “You sent word to my family that she passed, you said if I hurried here I could take her place?”

Recognition flashed in his eyes and he settled back in his chair, eyes darting up and down to fully take you in. “Ah yes. Shame, that. She was a hard worker. Begged me for the job for days, swore she’d do anything to keep this dock running, that we’d never find a better worker. Smile on her face the whole time.” There was something unspoken in his gaze as he looked at you, a quiet challenge asking if you’d do the same. “And they sent you?”

You decided not to mention that really, there was no they. Your family was an independent people.  Frankly, you hadn’t even known whether Isobel was alive or dead between the letters you got maybe once a year, if you were lucky. That’s what you’d thought that awful letter was, written on the same stationary she used. You imagine she borrowed it from whoever had written of her death. Or stolen it. You liked to imagine she’d stolen it, the little bit of extra danger she would have gone through to write to you leaving a warm feeling in your chest. 

“They did,” you said, with the sweetest smile you could muster. 

“Good. And you can read, we know that. How’s your attention to detail?”

“Immaculate, sir,” you said, straightening your back as you spoke. “I will be just as good as she was, I swear it.”

It was a lie, but it was one you could stomach. 

“Good. I’m taking a chance on you, you know. But then again, I was taking a chance on her and anyone who works on this dock will tell you she was the finest worker we ever had.”

You smiled, and this time you meant it. “I’m sure she was.”

“Now, down to business,” he said as he shuffled some of the many papers on his desk around. “We’ve had some issues before, people fudging numbers, sneaking off with pieces of shipments. We have a reputation to uphold. If anything happens with any of them, it's on your head. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now what was special about your sister is she took the inventories in the ships without being largely despised like some of the others before her were. My advice? Play nice. Those men out there can make your life real easy or real hard. They’ll be nice to you, you’re pretty like she was. Try to keep it that way. Just don’t let anything they say go to your head. You report to me every morning and every night. Any questions?”

You shook your head. “No sir.”

He gave you a firm nod and then you were onto paperwork, setting up matters of payments and of reporting in. You took careful note of everything that he said, intent on getting this right. You had no other choice. 

By the time you managed to get out of there, everything signed and squared away, the sun had begun to fall below the horizon. The docks were quieting, although they were far from empty. People bustled around in the orange light of the dusk. 

The glowing sky reflected in the waves, shining back up at you from below. And amidst the reflections of auburn light and a dusting of clouds was a face, shaggy blonde hair framing cheeks with white scales reflecting the fading sun. 

Just the top of his head was peeking above the surface, everything below his nose still under the water. His eyes were staring right up at you, watching you patiently. 

You frantically looked around, making sure no one on the almost empty dock had noticed him. 

“Shoo. Go away,” you hissed down at him when you ensured the coast was clear. 

He splashed water up at you, wetting the bottom of your skirts. 

Your eyes widened and you did your best not to yell. “You cannot be here, you need to leave.”

He stayed put exactly where he was, staring incessantly up at you. 

His message was clear. He wasn’t going anywhere.

You paced off the dock, running over to the shore to try and pull him away from the lights and the people on the dock. The shore was largely abandoned, at least at this time of night. 

His tail snaked across the surface of the water as he swam away, following after you and disappearing faster under shallow water than you were comfortable with, ideas of what else could be lurking under the surface flicking through your mind.

You weren’t sure when a siren following you had managed to land firmly in the non-threatening part of your mind but it had, his alien appearance nothing other than vaguely alarming in the presence of sailors who did not feel as nonchalantly towards him as you did.

“What are you doing here?” you hissed when you both managed to make it to the shore and you stared down at him, disapprovingly. 

He was clearly built for deep water, shifting uncomfortably in the shallows, and yet here he was. 

He shrugged, staring at you from the water, eyes only leaving yours to flick down to your wet skirts. If you hadn’t been so set on getting him away from here, you would’ve scolded him. 

“Do you want something from me?” you asked, trying to get some sort of answer out of him, like you just had to ask the right question to be able to send him away. “Look, there’s safer ways to call in a favor. It’s not that I don’t want to help, I just don’t want to put you in danger.”

“Don’t want anything,” he said with a huff. “Not now anyways.”

“Then why are you here?” you asked, a sense of desperation bleeding into your voice. He’d saved you, if you got him killed now you’d never be able to live with yourself. It was out of the question. You needed to get him to leave. 

He did not want to see reason. “None of your business.”

You sat on the shore, rubbing your temples as you lowered yourself closer to his level. “Okay. Sure, that’s fine. You know what? As long as you’re here I might as well ask. What’s your name?”

He paused, looking to the side for a moment before responding. “Simon”

“Is that true?”

He shrugged. “It’s a name.”

You stared incredulously at him for a moment before he decided it was time to try again. "Peter.”

This did not aid in your confusion. “What?”

“You didn’t seem to like the last one.”

“Do you not have a name?”

“Not your kind,” he said, his nose scrunching a little as he did. 

“What kind then?” you prompted. 

He shrugged. “Our kind.”

You sighed, frustration bubbling up inside of you. “Okay, well where’d you get Simon from?”

“Heard it.”

“Where?” 

“From people.”

“What people?” you asked, feeling a little like a child who’d just learned the word why. It wasn’t really your fault though. If he’d simply answer a question properly he’d be freed from this endless barrage of questions. 

“The ones on the ships.”

“Why were you…” The realities of sirens and ships flashed through your mind and you decided that you should probably end that line of questioning. You shook your head, set on getting back on task. “You’ve got to at least talk to me. Are you here for a reason?”

He shrugged again, nose drifting back below the water as he sunk down into the shallows.

“Look, they won’t take kindly to you if they see you. We can set something up, somewhere where you can contact me so you don’t have to put yourself in danger to see me. We can find a nice abandoned section of the shore, I’ll visit every day so if you need to talk to me, you can.”

He shook his head. “I can find you.”

“I know you can, but you really shouldn’t.”

“We will meet here at dusk,” he said, gesturing to the little slice of shore you were on now, the same one he’d left you at the night before. “And also when I want to, I will find you. 

“Look… Simon? Is that what you want to go with?”

He shrugged noncommittally, eyes flitting towards the dock.

You sighed. “I’m not going to convince you, am I?”

He shook his head, the hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. 

You groaned. “Fine. That’s fine. Get yourself killed if you want to, I don’t care.”

That knocked the smug look off his face, and he said hesitantly, with a bit of a pout in his voice, “You do care.”

“Not if you don’t want to listen. Why would I care if you won’t listen?”

He studied your face for a moment before a determined look set itself onto his face, saying with more certainty this time, “You do care.”

He turned and disappeared under the water before you could respond. 

And then you were alone on the cold shore. 

You sighed as you settled against the rocks, where you’d be spending the night you supposed. It was no worse than anywhere else you could think of in this city you knew so little about. 

You had nowhere to stay, no money to get yourself a room. If you’d had it, you would’ve spent it on fare for a ship to get yourself here. 

Or maybe you wouldn’t have. Maybe you would have been set in your ways, convinced you could just sneak on and save your money for where it would really count. Maybe things would have turned out exactly as they did. 

As you leaned back onto the rocky shore where you’d be spending the rest of your night, you tried to put the spiraling thoughts of what might have been out of your head. 

You stared up at the stars, already forgoing any thought of sleep. It wouldn’t be safe to sleep here anyway. Hopefully you could figure some sleeping arrangements out in the coming days. Keeping on like this might drive you mad. 

But for now, there was nothing to be done, no use worrying over it. All that was left was to wait til morning. 

[witchofthesouls]

I like thinking about humans-into-Cybertronians because of the weird, alien fuckery along with ex-humans making connections to certain things because it's the closest approximation they have.

Imagine if 'running on fumes' is a literal statement among Cybertronians. As their tanks run near empty, there's a petroleum-like taste that lingers in their sinuses and, if left long enough, cycles out of their vents. That's why Cybertronians typically don't like hanging around gas stations because it's a really stark reminder of long-term starvation. Meanwhile, you got an ex-human going like, "Man, I'm starting to taste gas, so I need gas. Huh, y'all have built-in reminders to feed yourself outside of hunger pains? That's neat."

As well as the ex-humans misdiagnosing themselves. Let's take Cybertronian carriage. Humans are used to a pregnancy that completes its course in a designated organ (aka womb), so finding out a mecha had straight up knocked them up that bypassed the initial spark-to-spark teether formation wouldn't freak them out in the ways that a lot of Cybertronians would be really concerned about. Especially the medics and said partner(s).

Ex-human crying over the sonogram because they got told it's a very high-risk pregnancy and all they see is the coming baby is very deformed since it's only a ball within a ball of green soup and silver tendrils. Partner is highly confused yet attempts comforting in varying levels of success.

Cybertronian medic needs to explain that the sparklet is healthy, but ex-human really needs to watch themselves because the entire process will be done within the gestational chamber and goes deep into explaining the complications that can happen.

Partner is absolutely riveted by all the gravity of the matter since the strain of having a full-carriage that initialized in the chamber can put the carrier in danger as there can be coding conflicting with priorities that rends said carrier unconscious or wrecks health complications, especially since there's a high-chance of the newspark not fully detaching from their carrier's spark as the dropping process ensures.

Ex-human that comes from a species where a pregnancy is like getting into a moderate crash, so damage varies each time is happy that they haven't fucked up badly yet and can plan a baby shower. "By the way, when's the due date?"

Medic: "Hard to say with the carriage combined, but it's more in the primary initialization stage. The sparklet's still has a visible, if a bit thin, teether to your spark, and a solid mass hasn't formed yet."

Ex-human: "Okay, so how long?"Medic says incomprehensible length of time for an Earth child and how it can vary.

*Confused ex-human noises over the several human lifetimes is the equivalent of a span to a Cybertronian carriage. And how multiple factors can impact the timeframe.*

*Confused Medic noises out of sheer concern over ex-human's family history, especially over the fact they have extremely and highly dangerously short carriages.*

*Confused partner noises on why their love wants to plan a bathtime for the newspark at this moment, and wonders if ex-human knows that water and infant Cybertronians do not mix.*

Or, another thing. What if the dropping process where the sparklet detaches from the carrier's spark to descend into the gestational chamber below to build its frame has very 'classic'** heart symptoms in a human body?

(** Quick heads up, much of human biology and modern medical understanding derives from male biology. Unfortunately, women usually see atypical symptoms that are more subtle, moderate rather than severe pain/discomfort, or pain in other other locations rather than the chest.)

Ex-human has sudden, excruciatingly chest pain, insides literally quivering and shifting in sync with the bursts. Meanwhile, everyone around them is calm, trying to soothe them, and they think they're honestly dying so fast because there's no rush to the nearby hospital, and everyone is pushing comfort-it's okay-we got you at them.

[fossorinpieces]

///// BSD 106 SPOILERS /////

what if...

... he can still remember his promise that he made to atsushi. even as a vampire.

i am so done with sskk and their gay antics.

[nerevar-quote-and-star]

Cicero: *speaking aloud* *writing in glitter gel* Dear Diary. I am losing my sense of humanity. Love, Cicero. X. X. X.

[anotherfloridaman]

Your orc is ruthless. (pt1)

That’s the first thing you think when you see his massive fist slam into one of his brother’s faces. The other orc muttered something about your hair in orc language, and your own whirled around and promptly knocked him on his ass. You didnt get to see if the other orc was okay before you were picked up and slung over his shoulder, walking away like nothing happened.

“Rico.” You mutter, sighing from the feeling of his hand on your legs, holding you like you’d be taken from him.

“Yes?” He acts innocent, but smirks as you climb up, sitting on his shoulder and softy gripping his braid. “What was that about?” The question is slow, like asking a child what happened to make them cry.

“He didnt like your hair, and i didnt like his face.” Rico smirks as you lean on his head, almost hugging the cranium to your side. “I’ve gotta know, ill find out soon enough.”

“No, you wont.” Rico sounds… serious. Your orc never sounds like this, not to you. Not so scary. Not like a threat. “What happened.” Its not a question, you demand to know as Rico stops walking, harshly setting you on your feet and gripping your shirt. “Dont worry about it.” He snarls in your face, and you guess you look afraid as he slowly lets you go, ears pressing to his head and backing up like he struck you.

“Rico. Tell me what he said.” You say, soft. And Rico finally snaps.

“Why? So you can change yourself again? So you can try to make them happy even when they will say everything you do is still wrong? So you can keep crying when you think you’re alone in the woods? So you hate another thing about yourself that makes you, you?” Rico rants, and his shoulders fall. He looks defeated as he turns away, rubbing his head.

You have changed yourself. Someone said in common language that you werent very strong, and you tried to push yourself into growing muscles. You had to stop using your left hand because of a pulled muscle. Someone said your clothes seemed too clean, and you didn’t wash them as much, but ended up with rashes from the dirty fabric later on. Someone said your hands were too small, your hair seemed too short, your feet shouldnt be covered, you shouldnt be there, you shouldnt, you should, and-

A heavy hand landed on your shoulder, Rico’s blurry face in your field of vision having you realise just how close to crying you really were. He sighs, apparently coming to terms with himself and slowly leading you to the stonghold gates.

“R-rico?” You asked, as if he would be the answer to everything in life. But he continued pushing you, until you were just far enough for him to grab the gate and pull on it. “Rico.” You started breathing heavier, a cold panic setting in as he gently led you just beyond the stronghold gate. “Rico!” He shuts the large gate, and you pound on it, yanking the handle and trying to climb the wooden door without leverage. Your fingertips ache with the way you claw the heavy doors, and your throat becomes hoarse after a few hours of standing there, fighting an unbeatable foe, knowing the gate doesnt have locks, it’s just heavy.

But it seems like you blink, and the darkness of night washes over you, and you look around at the forest, terrified of what could be out here. What you know is out here. Predators and Hunters. Humans. Humans are out here, and you’re afraid. You’re more afraid of your kind than what the orcs in those walls would ever do to you.

You take off running, not having a clue that Rico was laying against the gates, softly crying as he listened to every plea and scream, begging to have another chance to something you never messed up.

Almost every orc is located in the stronghold center, drinking and laughing as they roughouse, unknowing what Rico or you just went through.

[chemdisaster]

i think it would be cool if the watchers started to take a more active interest in joel. because, hear me out - the character who hates lore the most, who fights desperately to keep his humanity, gradually finding out that his actions are not his own and at this point it's hard to tell where he ends and something else, something other begins. like imagine many, many life games passing, and at some point he looks back on it all and suddenly thinks, when's the last time he built a pretty base? made a funny joke that went on and on? saw his allies as friends, and nothing grander than that? just, joel realising that some unknown force has invaded his mind and turned him into something he's not, and at this point it's too late to go back, too late for him to even want to do much of anything other than just keep following the script, playing his role in the narrative. joel realising that he's changed, he's not himself - realising that he's turned into the very thing he used to hate the most.

[mediterraneanmenace]

Save me old man/bishonen devil couple, save me. The WIP is getting somewhere. :,)

Look, Raksha might be considered a goody-two-shoes by Infernal standards with their Messiah complex, but Raphael is trying his best to make them more like him (just like how *they* are trying to do the same). :,)

[onaperduamedee]

"And took whatever price they wanted."

[waitingtobebroken]

You Don't Need A Licence For That (Ch 2, 5.5K words, Rated M)

Summary:

Crowley works for the city council and is responsible for issuing licences and permits. Aziraphale seems to be hoarding them. Crowley should really reject some of those applications. And he will, once he is done pining over Aziraphale. Really, he will!

And a little excerpt as I kept giggling writing this part specifically!

Aziraphale seemed deep in thought. "How about if I use them? Would I need a licence for that?" Oh, Someone. Not even a fucking mountain would have been able to hide the full body shiver those words caused Crowley. "What do you- What do you mean by that? Use what?" He shouldn't have asked that. He should. Not. Have asked that. He had always been told his curiosity was his best and worst quality. "Well, Muriel, they sold me a few toys. They tried to give them to me at first, a sort of welcome to the neighbourhood gift. I told them I could never accept such a thing, this is a business, I told them, and only accepted the welcome basket once they had let me pay for it fully. Although I do suspect they gave me a great discount, to tell you the truth." Aziraphale looked at him as if he was waiting for his input, as if this was not a story of someone gifting him a basket full of sex toys and Crowley felt like he was going to scream.

(Only time will tell if I will ever stop making jokes about this!)