Day Two #2
“Don’t get me wrong, I did get medical perks.
I found the Brimstone Syndicate in the first place because I was looking for people who’d do gender-affirming care on the down-low.
” Kelli perked up a little—he hadn’t said the name of his employers until now, and she recognized the name, if only vaguely.
If only enough to know it didn’t mean anything good.
“But it’s also more complicated than that.
I like what I do. I get to fly around in space, set my own schedule, make money, fill a need.
For a lot of people, bootleg media does fill a need—even the media that grosses you out.
Maybe especially those ones. I don’t know if you can say the same about yours. ”
“I like what I do, too,” Kelli snapped.
Then she looked down at her hands, immediately ashamed again for snapping at him.
Kelli liked what she did. But she liked other things, too.
She actually did like the idea of stories that followed other rules, not just the ones she’d been taught.
Stories that could fit people like her and Rowan inside them.
She’d gone looking for that, not even knowing what it would look like, not prepared for how most of it actually felt.
Were these the only two choices? Awful sex stories, or just AdventureVerse forever? There had to be some other way.
“We could drop it, if you’d rather,” Rowan said. “But I could try to explain about the pornography, now that you’re calmer.”
“What is there to explain? It’s about sex. People feel desperate for sex but they don’t have a girlfriend, so they use that instead.”
“That’s not wrong for some people, but it’s not the whole story.
” Rowan was at least halfway done with his eggs; he fished around with his fork as he talked, trying to get the trickier last parts.
“Let’s look at it this way. You work in Inspiration’s media division, so you know ’em better than I do.
What’s their stated rationale for never putting anything queer in their media?
Or anything politically charged or difficult to understand.
Or violence like the axe man. Or a lady pirate captain. ”
“It’s because the role of media is to bring the community together,” Kelli recited promptly.
“Anything politically charged would divide the community instead of uniting it, and we saw how well that worked for everyone back on Earth. In space it’s even more important; out here, we all have to stick together.
So media has to be the kind of thing everyone will understand. It’s—necessary.”
Kelli was naturally lacking in empathy, according to her doctors and the robot.
She naturally thought of what was best for herself.
But a company Inspiration’s size had to think of what was best for the whole solar system, not just for one person or a handful who happened to be queer.
Kelli didn’t always like how that felt, but she knew how to play inside the lines.
“All right, so let’s take that as given,” said Rowan, swirling the eggs with his fork. “Inspiration wants to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. But the problem with their business model is that people have minds.”
“What?” said Kelli.
He leaned forward. “Imagine your mind. Or mine, if you want. A teeming mass of thoughts and feelings, impulses, traumas, conflicts, beliefs and self-interest and sensation and bias and doubt. All more or less the same structure as other people’s, but all different in the particulars.
Imagine all the parts of an individual mind that long to be seen.
The parts that barely even make sense—but stories give them a form.
Stories name them. Stories bring them out where someone else can see them, too. ”
“Okay,” said Kelli, uncertain. She knew this was a moment where Orlando would pay attention. This was the part where the villain explained what they were doing and why, and any hero worth his salt had to note the whole thing down.
“Inspiration imagines a mind like that, too,” said Rowan.
“And then it cuts almost everything back out. It’s not just because they have policies against queer people and sex and violence, although that makes it worse.
It’s actually inherent in the structure of the language model.
Taking the most likely continuation of any set of words—the cliché, the things everyone will agree with—and then trying to make a story out of just those things.
Think about your mind again, and think about everything in it that doesn’t match that baseline, universal response.
Everything that makes you, you. Inspiration won’t put that in a story. It literally can’t.”
Kelli looked at him sidelong. There were lots of things that made Kelli, Kelli. And most of them were awful. Which is why she’d needed a robot when she was little, and why she had no friends.
“That’s why so many people are hungry for this stuff,” said Rowan.
“Creators want to put themselves on the screen, and readers want to see themselves. Even their weird, gross parts. The slasher movie, for instance—it’s about fear and survival and the fragility of the body.
Some people have that in their head in a big way.
And the sex stuff, too. I get why not everyone wants to see it, but you don’t need me to tell you how many big, complicated feelings are bound up with sex. ”
Actually, Kelli hadn’t ever had sex. She’d dated Rowan, but they’d been fourteen, and she hadn’t been ready to do much beyond kissing. Then there’d been . . . the bad things that happened, and the breakup, and she’d decided it was better to stay away from people entirely.
“Feelings that could hurt people,” Kelli reproached him. “You can’t just let yourself feel everything. You know what happens then.”
Rowan made a face. He looked like he did know, and he didn’t want to be reminded. Kelli wasn’t sure if that meant she’d won this round or not.
“You know what,” he said, “let’s not actually argue this out. I brought you here to do one favor for me. Everything else—it’s a sidetrack. It’s bad hosting, trying to hash this out with you when you’ve already been gracious enough to come here and help me. You’ll be fine; just focus on the job.”
Her brow didn’t unfurrow. “You haven’t told me very much about the job, actually. Just that I’m meeting someone to talk about Ship of Fools. And it’s someone from. . . .” She hesitated; it felt daring just to say the words. “The Brimstone Syndicate?”
“Yup. Meeting someone from there and having a nice chat. Don’t panic.
The key is, stay polite, but just be yourself.
They’ll get a read on you pretty quickly, and it might disappoint them, but it’ll be a harmless disappointment, as long as you don’t start threatening them with corporate law enforcement or something.
You’ll have your talk, we’ll both get our money, and you’ll be back down on Callisto before you know it. Easy peasy.”
He kicked off and sailed lazily through the hatch to the cockpit.
It occurred to Kelli that if he’d felt a need to say all that, then he’d imagined a possible outcome where it would not be easy peasy.
Where the Brimstone Syndicate’s disappointment was not harmless.
Where she did not, in fact, end up back down on Callisto before she knew it.
Maybe she should have thought of that earlier.
Maybe she’d used the wrong script for all of this. Maybe Rowan wasn’t some mysterious mermaid, holding up treasures and trying to recruit her to the villain’s side. He hadn’t only been explaining why she should approve of him. He’d been testing her.
But had she passed the test? Or had she failed?