“What can I say to that, dude?” I complained mildly, not wanting to piss him off, but also trying to get something that would work. “I want to make this work, but maybe we could work together a bit more.”

Together? The World AI’s tone was fluttering dangerously around furious. Were we together when you called my bats unrealistic? Were we together when you refused a simple quest? Were we together when you said that AIs were all flawed?

“Woah,” I put my hands up by my head, trying to tone down the booming in my head that came with his displeasure. “I screwed up! I get it. I DO! Getting screwed two dozen times will do that to a person. We learn too! I’m not perfect but neither are you. I had the nerve to point that out and you tortured me for hours! You throw your own temper tantrum by having me eaten over and over again and I can’t do shit about it!”

The timer reappeared and I just about lost my shit totally.

“If you start that again, I’ll check out forever,” I swore, my tone deep and furious. In that one moment, I felt something shift in me. Something got deeply dangerous. I wasn’t the type of person that would ever lose her temper. I bent to pressure. I didn’t resist peer pressure when my high school friends did drugs. I didn’t resist peer pressure when my first college friend got me into Pokémon and into bed for that matter. I was a joiner and a pleaser. I wasn’t a rebel.

Stupidly Stubborn +1

And the timer stopped and that dangerous thing in the root of my soul settled back into a more comfortable place. My shoulders gave a shudder. Almost back in the box. I hadn’t thought I was capable of it. I wasn’t a boss. I was a cog. Could you really ever put something like that away again? I shook my head and tried to clear the red haze from my mind.

Don’t test me, the World AI was saying, and I knew that I would never be the same.

Old me would have said, “Yeah, I got you. I’m your bitch. Go ahead and screw me over.”

“I don’t dare,” I said instead, but my mind was not sincere. New me thought things I’d never imagined myself capable of. It got cold and calculating. It planned the death of all AIs everywhere in an apocalypse-causing, worldwide nuclear EMP that would send humanity back to the dark ages when computers didn’t exist, and AIs were the source of horror movies. It did it in record time because no sooner had it done it, it was thinking of what else to say to lure this adversary into a sense of complacency until the time was right. I got to admit, old me was a little scared of new me, but that was okay because old me had a nice pretty box to go sit in while new me took care of the hard things.

“Let’s try to get along,” Grace said into the silence of my mental machinations.

“I can do that,” I said quickly. “Let me help you out. If it’s ratings you want, then maybe we can both get what we want.”

What scheme are you planning now, human? The World AI growled out.

“Scheme?” I asked dangerously, then blew out a breath. They could not read my mind, but they had been taught to read my facial features in a way that made it seem like they could. I continued the thought with persuasive gentleness that would have made my mother proud. “If by scheme, you mean a plan to help us both out, then yes, I have a scheme.”

And you wonder why I do not trust you?

“I don’t much trust you right now either,” I said with a smile that should have totally confused the AI facial recognition programming. “Still, my proposal is more likely to get decent ratings than your desperate mashup of tropes from popular historical fiction.” I knew I was pushing my luck, but I rushed on with that same perfect smile that all women learn how to do from infancy. “I’m proposing a small-town setting as the starting area. That way you get to use your extra and co-star AIs with very little alteration. I can have access to quests doled out by your AIs. Quests make sure that I earn everything I get, but fair quests and only things I can reasonably accomplish with what I have.”

And you claim that my tropes are mashups of typical fantasy? The World AI was not impressed, but that was okay. That is a very typical trope in my database and has only a 40% chance of attaining ratings that you would need to escape your incarceration.

“This is actually a good thing for you, since it will make sure that I have to work hard to attain my ratings,” I argued, pandering to his AI ego. Only World AIs were programmed with this ego. “You wanted me to work for it, right? This way I wouldn’t have ratings based on your hard work of world-building and you could pull from readily available tropes.”

That is true.

“We would be able to work in all the AIs you’ve been nurturing for years,” Grace played her role of advocate whether she really wanted to or not.

Perhaps, the World AI began to warm up to the idea slowly. It could be a dwarven town underground that you have to fight your way out of. I could whip up that scenario.

“Sure,” I played along with some diabolical charisma I’d never known in my life. “You could go the dwarf route, but it’s so lame compared to what you could do.”

I suppose you have a better idea? The World AI scoffed into my mind.

“Not really,” I shrugged my shoulders and found that my backpack had reappeared, so the AI was responding to me. “It’s just that I want to be able to shake things up for those ratings, right? That’s why we have the human element in these shows. Your job is to create believable scenarios and my job is to try to come up with something crazy that hasn’t been done before.”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

There is nothing that hasn’t been done before, the World AI wasn’t convinced, but I had shoes again, so I knew I was going in the right direction.

“That’s my problem, not yours,” I reasoned, reveling in my suddenly cleaner clothes. “What if our world is one that changes constantly?”

It’s been done. Dr. Who.

“True but that’s just time jumping into alternative possible realities,” I admitted, having watched and loved the old show. “I’m talking about genre-hopping, world-scrambling messes of worlds.”

It’s outside the parameters to jump genres.

“That’s what makes it brilliant of you to try,” I cajoled. “Drama doesn’t make great ratings except on maybe the Hallmark channel. Comedy is okay for a quick laugh but it’s not believable to solve a problem in a half-hour show. But what if every show was a new genre or a mixed-up older genre?”

It would be hard to keep viewers from week to week, the World AI argued, not ready to hop on board.

“It would be revolutionary,” I teased it with pretty advertising words. “Almost Twilight Zone.”

Twilight Zone was a mythical goal for all programming. Several producers and writers had tried to replicate the classic satire of the old Twilight Zones, and all had failed spectacularly. Being able to pull off a Twilight Zone was the golden calf of all broadcasting everywhere.

Satire?

The World AI was taking the bait and this new scary me rubbed her mental hands together.

“AIs can’t pull off satire,” Grace warned, her voice as small as her cockroach form.

“Let me worry about the satire part,” I assured them, dropping the bait carefully. “That’s my job, not that I’ll get any credit for it.”

We’d need a central thread, the World AI hummed with greed it shouldn’t have. Something to hold all the worlds together. Something that would let viewers have something to hold onto.

“That’s true,” I pretended to think on it. “Why not make the theme, that central thread, mirror the truth? That’s always the best satire.”

Yes…

And this is where AI failed spectacularly no matter how many advances there were in the technology. Right now, it was looking up hundreds if not thousands of things that would fit the criteria of what I’d just said. Just because it wouldn’t find anything, didn’t mean it couldn’t take credit by letting me give it the answer.

“You and me,” I cajoled in a tone worthy of Grace. “Our conflict. That’s the…”

Truth…

“Yes,” I agreed. “The truth, you’re so right. That’s it exactly. We should have the underlying theme be my fight against you as the evil AI.”

“The evil AI has been done to death,” Grace pursed little crab lips and I nearly broke character at the incongruous sight.

You almost had me going there, the World AI practically pursed non-existent lips. I’d be laughed out of the producer chat break room.

“So, flip the script,” I suggested my real idea. “That makes for the best kind of satire possible. Make me the evil character and you the good AI.”

“Oh, that’s brilliant,” Grace breathed out, clacking claws and skittering sideways across the mud.

Close to brilliant, the World AI admitted reluctantly.

“It wasn’t my idea,” I repelled the credit quickly. “It was yours.”

A satire with the AI as the good guy and the human character the bad guy, the World AI summed it up and took the credit easily. Things that could change history could easily do that. I was okay with that…this time.

“You get to set up perfect scenarios and I use my natural talent of messing things up to blow up all your perfect scenarios,” I shifted the theme just slightly. “You are brilliant. And your introduction to the theme did bring in viewers. We’ll just repeat the scenario for more viewers and higher ratings. Perfect satire.”

AIs had no idea what satire was. That was why they couldn’t do it. They also sucked at math and poetry. Somewhere in this whole mess of AIs was one that did all the math. It wasn’t even really an AI. It just counted stuff. Language prediction models used the calculators to check their work, but otherwise they were the outcasts of AI society, if you could call it such. I’d spent several months teaching a language prediction model how to use iambic pentameter and it failed every time because it couldn’t count. It was only in the last few years of an AIs training that it would integrate with a calculator so it could do math. There wasn’t a module that had ever acquired satire.

Satire, the World AI swallowed the bait.

“But it won’t work if we’re both throwing temper tantrums at each other,” I warned. Now that it was on the hook, I wanted to set down some ground rules. “I can control mine, but only if you don’t just feed me boring old scenarios like an unbeatable spider. That kind of thing makes you look like the dreaded mean AI.”

“That does look bad,” Grace agreed, her brightly-colored, feathered brow puckered in concern.

“We can come back from that,” I nodded my head, trying to be convincingly sympathetic toward the monster that had tortured me. “We just can’t let it happen again. It’s okay for a character to mess up in the beginning as long as they grow as a person along the way.”

I’d almost be a character myself, the World AI mused. And a growing and maturing one.

“Yes,” and I had to resist rolling my eyes. Sometimes it took so long to get an AI to get the point. I was being too subtle. “Of course, you’ll have to have lines if you’re a character. You’ll have to talk to me and maybe complain that I won’t get with the program. You get to make me the bad guy by castigating me verbally for messing up your perfectly fine scenarios. And Grace will be making excuses for me, but the satire part will be that the more she tries to excuse my behavior, the more she really points out how selfish and rebellious I am.”

“I could do that!” Grace leapt onboard eagerly, flapping wings her new version of talking with her hands. It felt almost too easy. Why had I given up my AI training job anyway? Oh, yeah. Because they only paid minimum wage, not that my last job paid much more than that and it had been much more tedious.

I could too, the World AI mused like the villain he was, and I could picture him sitting there with a cat on his lap, stroking his goatee.

“And I’ll be the villain, since I’m such a bad person anyway,” I put in to seal the deal.

“You aren’t that bad, dear,” Grace did her AI job of being reassuring when you thought badly of yourself.

“I deserve it,” I bowed my head in false penitence. “I’m the criminal.” Yeah, because I’d been antisocial to someone at my old apartment building. This new beast inside of me wasn’t forgetting that slight either. When I got out of this, I was going to track down who turned me in and take revenge. It was probably that garlic-soup-making slob. Whoever it was, I’d get my revenge on them just as I’d get it on these stupid AIs. Now that some beast inside of me had been beaten out of the box it had peacefully resided in my whole life, I was sure that I could do exactly that. The old me? The one stuck in the box now. She was peeking out of that box with wide eyes.

When I’d read about the trauma and trigger studies of the 2020s, I had been bored to tears, but now the old me was rooting through what scant information I remembered for how I could maybe return to the old, more complacent me once I got out of here. Then again, would I get out of here without this new beastly me? Maybe not. The old me crawled back in the box with that old, battered college psychology book (which had been a virtual copy, not a real one, so that was a bit odd). The new me stretched her tight muscles and gave a very scary smile that the AIs mistook as remorseful enthusiasm for their new project.