I tried. I can process the media more easily through your filter.

That made me stop. I didn’t understand the problem.

It explained, When my crew plays media, I can’t process the context. Human interactions and environments outside my hull are largely unfamiliar.

Now I understood. It needed to read my reactions to the show to really understand what was happening. Humans used the feed in different ways than bots (and constructs) so when its crew played their media, their reactions didn’t become part of the data.

I found it odd that the transport was less interested in Sanctuary Moon, which took place on a colony, than Worldhoppers, which was about the crew of a large exploration ship. You’d think it would be too much like work—I avoided serials about survey teams and mining installations—but maybe familiar things were easier for it.

I was tempted to say no. But if it needed me to watch the show it wanted, then it couldn’t get angry and destroy my brain. Also, I wanted to watch the show, too.

“It’s not realistic,” I told it. “It’s not supposed to be realistic. It’s a story, not a documentary. If you complain about that, I’ll stop watching.”

I will refrain from complaint, it said. (Imagine that in the most sarcastic tone you can, and you’ll have some idea of how it sounded.)

So we watched Worldhoppers. It didn’t complain about the lack of realism. After three episodes, it got agitated whenever a minor character was killed. When a major character died in the twentieth episode I had to pause seven minutes while it sat there in the feed doing the bot equivalent of staring at a wall, pretending that it had to run diagnostics. Then four episodes later the character came back to life and it was so relieved we had to watch that episode three times before it would go on.

At the climax of one of the main story lines, the plot suggested the ship might be catastrophically damaged and members of the crew killed or injured, and the transport was afraid to watch it. (That’s obviously not how it phrased it, but yeah, it was afraid to watch it.) I was feeling a lot more charitable toward it by that point so was willing to let it ease into the episode by watching one to two minutes at a time.

After it was over, it just sat there, not even pretending to do diagnostics. It sat there for a full ten minutes, which is a lot of processing time for a bot that sophisticated. Then it said, Again, please.

So I started the first episode again.

*   *   *