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So there I was, back with ART again. It didn't say out loud that it had missed me, which made me feel comfortable enough to do the same and just offer it my new media downloads.
It accepted and let me have a whole ten seconds to get settled in before pinging me to suggest we watch Worldhoppers, a proposal to which I was happy to agree, where for 'happy', read 'not unwilling enough to make a fuss'. I didn't think Worldhoppers was a bad show, but it wasn't my favorite and I did not look forward to ART freaking out on me again during the episode where the show tried to convince you it had just permanently killed off one of its central characters.
Maybe I'd have to find a way to skip that episode somehow. I knew which one it was, after all. I could simply jump forward to either the episode where the character came back to life or the one where at least the other crew members had stopped talking about the incident and being sad about it, and everything would be more or less all right.
It sounded like a solid plan to me, and I decided to work on it some more during some of the more boring episodes. While the show mostly focused on adventure, there were a few sex scenes, or at least scenes which suggested people were having sex, or working their way up to having sex, or signalling to someone else that they would be interested in having sex, only that someone either didn't get the hint for some reason or else they didn't return the interest but wanted to be polite about turning the other person down.
A dozen episodes later, I realized that I had a problem, or rather: that I had problem that was different from the problem I thought I had.
"This is wrong," I said.
To what are you referring? ART asked. It sounded sneaky, like it thought that it stood an actual chance of getting away with something.
Or maybe that was my imagination.
"This isn't what happened." The lack of boring scenes really should have tipped me off before, but, well, who wants to pause watching a show to complain about it not being boring enough?
None of the events depicted actually happened, ART said. It's fiction.
Sure, and what sort of bot would get upset at any fictional character fictionally dying under fictional circumstances? I'll give you a hint: not me. I had had plenty of real humans almost really dying in real circumstances.
Not that that had upset me or anything. It had simply been in my job description to make sure the humans survived, and I took my job very seriously.
"All right," I said, mostly to lure ART into a false sense of security. "My bad."
Your apology is accepted, ART said.
I didn't think anything I'd apologized in any way, shape or form, but I guessed it couldn't do any harm if I let ART believe that I had.
Surprise, surprise: by the end of the episode where one of the central characters was supposed to die, they were still very much alive and well.
On the positive side, that meant ART hadn't turned into a blubbering mess again. (Fine. I exaggerate. A little.)
On the negative side - that was a tricky one. Having seen the episode before, I knew that the episode I'd seen had been doctored in some way. If I'd bothered to try, I probably could have identified the bits and pieces ART had pasted in from other episodes, to make it so that the episode ended the way it wanted to, instead of the way the writers had intended.
Question: did I care? The story still made sense, or as much sense as it had ever made. I guessed ART had also cut the whole resurrection plot, since that had become superfluous. Instead of grieving for their dead friend, the characters now spent the next few episodes doing ship maintenance during their spare time and talking about how lucky they'd all been not to have gotten killed.
If I'd never seen the show before, I wouldn't have noticed a thing. I would have assumed that this was the way the show had always been, and I would have been fine with that.
Problem was, I had seen the show before.
You don't like the new ending? ART asked.
I wondered if I should be happy that at least it was admitting to what it had done.
"I'm indifferent," I said. That wasn't true. I might not know exactly how I felt about the new ending, but I knew that I wasn't 'indifferent'.
I decided I deeply resented ART for making me have feelings about things that hadn't happened on a show. This was not what I'd signed up for.
I think the new ending is very good, ART said. Logical, and much more emotionally satisfying.
Right. It had changed the ending to make it more logical. "You can't do that." I realized what a stupid thing to say it was almost the moment I'd said it.
ART didn't bother replying to point out that it had already proven itself perfectly capable of doing 'that'.
I didn't want to say that I'd liked the original ending better. That would be a lie.
Would you like to watch Sanctuary Moon next? ART asked.
Did I want to see what it had changed about my favorite show? Probably not. Sure, there had been a few plot points here and there that I hadn't been wild about, and maybe a couple of scenes could have been improved but. It was what it was, and generally speaking, I liked it that way.
"Maybe another time." Such as never. Well, or as soon as I got away from ART. I didn't think that it would have altered the episodes stored in my own memory. That would have been very rude. Then again, being very rude kind of sounded like something ART would do.
I could have asked, only I didn't want to give it any ideas.
You're being a bit silly about this, I think.
Try paranoid, I wanted to say, before I realized that it was still talking about what it had done with Worldhoppers. "I watch these shows for fun. I'm not interested in changing them or making them better or something. That defeats the whole purpose of watching them."
All right, ART said. My bad. Shall we watch the original episodes, then?
Unlike some bots I could name, I'm not an asshole. At least, I don't actively work on being one. "No. That's okay. Let's keep going. I'm kind of curious now to see what you did with that whole thing with the ghost planet and the pineapple."
I think you'll like it, ART said. It was a lot of fun to work that out.
I seriously doubted that first bit. Still, watching the episode should be less painful than continuing to talk about it, so there was that.