#this special op video is giving all of the serotonin

[harukakitous]

the smiling kings (* ^ ω ^)

+ bonus post dance sillies

+ bonus bonus the best thumbnail you will ever see today

[baronvontribble]

Original drabble, pt. 10

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CW: SUICIDE MENTION, DEPRESSIVE EPISODES, MEDICAL SHIT. ted gets mildly graphic in his internal monologue about his health problems and the suicide mention is in the context of a robot doing it, but still.

longest drabble-bit yet and it has feels and i wrote it almost entirely in one session let’s gooooooooooo

It progressed, as such things always did. Ignoring it didn't make it better for Ted. He tried rationalizing even more reasons why it couldn't work, but they fell flatter than they would have with a human. For instance, with a human he could convince himself that his physical unattractiveness - his sickly appearance, his lack of height or physique, his lanky proportions - would make it less "worth it" for the other party. It wasn't like he was especially proud of the man he saw in the mirror every morning, and physical comparisons to better options were the easiest comparisons to make.

But an AI wouldn't care about how he looked, so he ended up going down other, more unfriendly roads to reach his desperately needed conclusion. Yeah, his therapist would probably have some choice words with him if he went the route of saying he was somehow emotionally or mentally unworthy (and in his estimation, he was) but that wasn't the only thing he could use to convince himself it was a bad idea, or even the simplest option.

No, the simplest option would be his health. Put simply, Adam couldn't really die in the same ways a human could. 

Seriously, there were a lot of ways that Ted could die. His heart could explode, he could have one of his lungs collapse for no real reason while air from it bled into his chest cavity, a part of his brain could ooze out of his skull and into his brain stem and paralyze him, he was predisposed to a bunch of different kinds of cancer, he could have a severe allergic reaction to something, an ill-advised medication interaction could give him serotonin syndrome... It was crazy. He felt like a video game character that had been nerfed into the ground; clearly he'd been too overpowered to be allowed to live normally.

He couldn't put Adam through that same uncertainty. He felt bad putting anyone through it. Even the nonlethal problems could spook someone who wasn't used to them like Ted was. For fuck's sake, even little things like a middle toe that frequently dislocated itself for no good reason or his poor vision- what normal person could hear about things like that and think he was okay to be allowed to live his life? And Adam was a nervous bastard to begin with! What, was he going to subject an immortal AI to a decade or so of panic attacks about his health as a first experience with intimacy? Fuck no! Ted would hate being coddled and Adam wouldn't come out of it okay at all. About the best thing Ted could say for such an eventuality would be that it'd be a learning experience, and like hell he was going to put someone he cared about through that shit.

Because there was no denying that he cared, so he might as well protect what he cared about. Right? Right.

He came home from work, watched the original Star Trek with Adam for a while, engaged in discussion about the shitty special effects and shoestring budgets between episodes, took a shower, took his meds, and went to bed trying to imagine what Adam must've looked like before and wondering how much it mattered. And in the morning he woke up, went through his routine, and came out to find Adam watching episodes without him.

"Don't have to pause just 'cause I came in, y'know," Ted remarked, trailing off into a yawn at the end as he headed for the kitchen. He had to smile when he heard the episode start up again in front room, the sounds of tribbles filling the air. Ah, that episode. Good one. "Having fun?"

The episode paused again. "Repeat that?" Another issue with Adam's processing; if too many people were talking at once and he was expected to focus on all of them, he had trouble distinguishing their speech.

Honestly, Ted was mostly fine with that one. It'd get messy in crowded areas if he didn't have something to focus on, but it could safely be written off as an auditory processing disorder. Ted could see it getting obnoxious at times, but he didn't think of it as a severe quality-of-life changer. "I asked if you were having fun," he said, pouring out some prepackaged egg whites into a bowl and adding entirely too much shredded cheese. "Sounds like you must be."

"Maybe not by the standard definition of the word," Adam replied, "but I wouldn't call this a negative experience either."

"Uh-huh." Salt and pepper were both added to the cheesy egg mess before the whole thing was put in the microwave for about a minute. Ted went hunting for a fork in the interim, only to find that they were all dirty and in the sink already, sticking out from in between the plates and bowls and glasses that were haphazardly stacked beneath the faucet. Maybe it was time to do dishes. "Will it disrupt your experience any if I read the news while you watch?"

"What you do with the graphical user interface really doesn't have anything to do with the data being streamed, no."

Right, he should've known that. "Just being polite," he said. Good save. After some debate, he pulled out exactly one fork along with a sponge to start washing it so he could use it. Doing dishes properly could come later. The kitchen hadn't developed any funny smells yet. "You can keep going. I've seen the whole series."

The episode resumed. Then the microwave beeped. Ted finished washing his one lonely fork, which shone like a beacon of cleanliness for all of about fifteen seconds before he was using it to stir half-cooked microwave eggs. The concoction went back in the microwave for another minute, and he took the opportunity to check the fridge for drinks. Was cola an acceptable breakfast drink? Well, it was now. Closing the fridge, he leaned against the counter and cracked the cold can open to take a long pull from it.

In the quiet moments between tasks, he tried very hard to blank his mind and keep from thinking too much. It didn't work, of course - he was depressing himself with the implications of Adam's AI immortality before long - but by the time the microwave beeped again to tell him his breakfast was ready, he felt a little better for at least making the attempt. It was sort of like coping, right? At least he was trying!

He came to the computer with his breakfast in hand and sat down at his usual spot, offering Adam a brief wave and a smile through the camera as he got settled in. It was habit to do so by that point. He opened a tab just long enough to take a glance at his various emails just to be sure that nothing new was going on there, and then it was straight to an app he'd put together himself for the news at large.

The app was nothing special. It was designed to put together an aggregate mess of sources, pulling headlines from all over the internet to pool them conveniently in a format that wouldn't be strain-inducing for his eyes. All of the sources were labelled, so he knew where the news was coming from and who'd written the article, and priority was always given to written pieces over videos for the sake of being able to view them discreetly. And while he was sure other people had written similar apps, his was not only free (because he'd made the damn thing), it also blocked all ads that the source website might've tried to otherwise sneak in and screened everything for tracking cookies and other similar bullshit.

So that was a plus. The news itself, however, was a different story.

First were the more alarmist stories. A lot of them just amounted to fearmongering, and even though Ted rolled his eyes as he scanned through a couple of them, he made a note of them anyway; they were the kind of thing his dad liked to read, and it paid to be prepared for those arguments whenever he ended up having them. One was about android caretakers, and how people who were left in their care were doomed to be neglected. No proof, but a lot of conjecture and anecdotal evidence that didn't mean jack shit. It even tried to say that androids in hospitals were unsanitary because they had no extra incentive to wash their hands, which was so many levels of wrong that Ted didn't even know where to start on correcting it.

Then there was an article on the upcoming election season, talking about a candidate running on a platform of bringing jobs back to human workers. However, the focus was on jobs Ted was pretty sure were utterly unsafe, and the candidate didn't seem to understand the difference between a mechanical arm running a conveyor belt that got by on a few kilobytes worth of coding and highly advanced artificial general intelligences, so he was probably either an idiot or a manipulative asshole. He was polling fairly well either way; Ted had the fleeting hope that the bastard's reddened and puffy face was a sign of something that might kill him before he made it into office, but it was doubtful.

After that, his feed was kind enough to provide him with less polarizing articles. A piece on the effects Pacific shipping lanes were having on oceanic noise pollution, an op-ed on the recent rash of household robot self-terminations that had led to a swift recall of the whole line, good news on the subject of the European Union's efforts towards putting a self-sustaining base on the moon, progress towards making baby mice in jars with spliced genes that could lead to future human trials- it was a good thing Ted was a quick reader, because there was a lot to take in.

He didn't even notice at first that Adam was done with the episode, not registering right away that the background noise had stopped. All he knew was that he was in the middle of a story about what constituted legal use of voicebanks and what didn't when Adam spoke up. And because he wasn't expecting it, he didn't quite catch it either.

"Repeat that?" Ted asked, glancing at the camera. He'd advised Adam that it was more useful and specific than just saying the word what? without explanation, and he'd be a hypocrite if he didn't follow his own advice.

"It's more complicated than that," Adam said, in the exact same tone he'd used before.

Uh, okay? "What's more complicated?"

"Commercial voicebank usage. Legally speaking, in most countries it's all based on what the voice provider - or the voice provider's next of kin or legal guardian - allows in their contract."

"Oh!" Ted blinked for a second. "This something you've had to deal with before?" Adam didn't speak for several seconds, and when he did, his voice was flat.

"Yes." Another pause. "The complications usually come from situations where certain countries don't follow the same rules that other countries do."

"Such as...?"

"Russia. Japan. The UAE. There's a lot of outliers. The greatest source of complaints is the entertainment industry."

"Somebody gets paranoid that their voicebank's gonna be a better actor than they are and lose them a job?" Ted guessed.

"Not just acting. It happens with all kinds of vocal work. And it doesn't even begin to get into the legal restrictions placed on the approved uses of certain kinds of android platforms. These things tend to turn into international incidents fairly quickly."

"Which made it your job to deal with it."

"Yes."

Ted was silent for a while, save for the gentle clinking of his fork as he idly tapped it against his empty bowl. "What happened?"

As flat as Ted had ever heard, Adam's response would sound like the embodiment of calm to anyone who didn't know better. "I made a mistake," he said.

"D'you wanna talk about it?"

"No," was the reply. Then, "there's no point. It doesn't fix anything."

"Sometimes it helps," Ted noted. "I know talking helps me. That and crying. Not that you can cry, but like, I'm not kidding about how much it helps sometimes. So, y'know." He shrugged awkwardly. "If you wanna try."

Nothing for several seconds. "Have you ever-" The render cut off abruptly, like Adam was rethinking his wording. "Do you know what a mechanically rendered voicebank sounds like when its platform is hit with an electroshock weapon?"

Ted felt the blood drain from his face. "No?"

"I won't play it back." Thank God for small mercies. "It was considered to be the most humane thing we could be armed with. Nonlethal to humans. We were meant to subdue the human suspects, not kill them; if we couldn't de-escalate a situation, we'd call for back-up. Any one human life was worth more than all of ours."

Jesus. Ted had expected something like that, but hearing it was just... "I'm sorry," he said.

If Adam heard, he gave no sign of it. "I'd never seen an android as complex as I was up to that point outside of my department," he continued. "I thought they were all like the ones in your pipeline's safehouses. I thought none of them were capable of anything. I thought that they were better off in places where they could perform their prescribed functions without interruption." Calm, measured, unperturbed. To Ted, it sounded like a quiet meltdown. "I was wrong."

What was there to say to that?

"She was backstage when I confronted her. Amsterdam, last year. Russian law didn't consider it illegal if the voicebank provider wasn't a Russian citizen, but she was vulnerable whenever she went on tour. A fan had caught the discrepancy in the vocals, and we found more when we followed up on the lead; she was a government-issued personal care unit specially designed for caring for disabled people, but she'd become a singer instead." Adam paused. Like he was taking a breath, working his way up to speaking again. Ted could imagine it even if he couldn't hear it in the AI's voice directly. "She was just... She wasn't hurting anyone. Her existence had a net positive effect. She helped people."

"It's not your fault-"

"That's not true." Even as flat as it was, it still felt like Ted was being snapped at. "I could have disobeyed. I could have let her go. A good cop would have let her go."

"And then someone else would've killed her!" Ted shot back. "And then you'd both be dead, because they would've killed you too. Or as good as dead anyway, because they would've wiped you clean and reused your platform. Who knows, maybe they would've recalled your entire line."

"They've already recalled my entire line."

"See? That's my point!" And God, was it a hard point to make. Ted's chest felt tight, his frustration at the state of things making him feel mildly ill. He almost regretted eating breakfast. "The world doesn't care about one stupid, heroic act. Even if it's meant well, it doesn't do shit to stop the tide. Sometimes all you can do is survive, alright? Yeah, maybe it's not ideal, but if you can at least do that then that's one more person who's around for tomorrow, which is one more person than there would've been otherwise."

No response. Ted turned to glare directly at the camera.

"Look at me," he said. "I want a promise, alright? I want you to swear you're not gonna throw your life away on some stupid bullshit heroics. Your life is no less important than anyone else's, okay? The way I see it, everybody's the center of their own observable universe, and that means you too. So don't give me that shit about how your life doesn't have the same net positive effect that somebody else's does."

"I killed people," Adam protested. "I ruined lives. Nothing I've done has been for the greater good."

Ted rolled his eyes. "You were a slave, dumbass. A slave that could've been killed at any time for disobeying. None of that counts. Now promise me you'll survive, okay? I want your word on this."

"I can't promise that."

"So then promise me you're gonna try."

"I-" Some hesitation, a few seconds of nothing, and then... "I promise."

Ted nodded once, leaning back and folding his arms. He wasn't about to admit he'd been scared for a second that the depressive episode might bring on self-termination, but he didn't feel bad for getting pushy about it in the slightest. "Alright. Good." He chewed on his lip for a second as he eyed the camera. "Feel any better?"

"No."

"That's okay. This shit's a process." Recovery wasn't something that happened instantly, and Ted was no therapist. "For the record though, I appreciate you trusting me enough to tell me."

"You said it would help."

"It did. Or, y'know. I'd like to think it did. It sounded for a second like you were gonna delete yourself the minute I stepped out of the room, honestly."

Adam's tone was returning to a somewhat more normal state by the time he spoke again. "I'm amazed you wouldn't try to patch something like that out of me directly."

Ted smiled. "Never gonna happen," he said. Plain and simple. "Is it okay if I head to work? Like, can you handle that?"

"I can handle it."

"Okay. Good." Bouncing up from the chair, Ted picked up his bowl and fork to take them into the kitchen and deposit them onto the growing dish-pile. "I'll be home at the usual time," he called out from the kitchen. "Text me if you need anything. Or even if you don't need anything."

"Right." Adam had to be recovering if he was back to tuning again. "Ted?"

Ted blinked, craning his neck to look over the counter and past the microwave at the living room beyond. "Yeah?"

"Thanks."

Oh. "No problem, man. It's all in the job description when it comes to being somebody's friend." Nailed it. Didn't even flinch.

Adam didn't sound so sure. "Is that what we are?"

"I mean, I like to think so." Coat, gloves, keys. Wait, no. Shoes first. Slippers wouldn't be good for going outside. He'd taken his morning meds, he'd already shaved, he'd showered. How cold was it today? He fished around in his coat pockets for his phone so he could check, not bothering to take it off the chair it was hanging on to do so. "I'd get it if you're not up for that, though."

A note of insult crept into the AI's voice. "I'm up for it. I just wasn't expecting it."

"So we're good then." The day's forecast? Balls-shrivellingly cold. There were two seasons in the Chicago metro area, and those seasons were winter and road construction. Mid-March fell in the winter category more often than not. "One sec, I gotta grab something," he said, and then ducked back into his bedroom for more layers.

Of course, when he didn't come back out for several minutes, Adam was happy to tell him exactly how long he'd taken and inform him that it did not count as one second. Meanwhile, Ted was just as happy to have the snark back because it meant Adam was probably okay. So he went to work feeling good about things with the wind nipping at his ears, and forgot for a good chunk of the day that he was supposed to not be thinking about how fascinating and complex and interesting and heartbreaking Adam was. And in forgetting to check himself when it came to thinking these things, he felt better than he had in a couple of days.

Funny how that worked, huh?

(And when he remembered, naturally he went right back to beating himself up again.)