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smallfandomflshFandom: Stella Glow
Characters: Veronica
Rating: PG-13/Gen
Spoilers: major
other tags: pre-game, headcanon. discussion of dystopia/apocalypse situation, mental health issues including suicide, waiving one's human rights, possible manipulation by sinister AI
As an attempt to quell the initial spate of riots, a clause was added to the programming of EVE that made it possible to voluntarily waive any of your own rights, provided the system did not suspect you of doing so in order to harm another human.
This clause had been partly Veronica's idea. She had always found EVE's interference in her daily life far too intrusive whenever the Mother Qualia decided it was in her best interests and that her own decisions were only making her life worse. One of the programmed essential requirements for a human to live happily was physical health, so the system had started limiting her access to coffee and junk food once she was found to be consuming unhealthy levels of both and showing signs of addiction. Veronica understood the machine's reasoning - she even had limited coding privileges to the system herself when it came to maintaining it - and understood that, at the current lifespan that a human could achieve under the new system, she would eventually damage her body beyond the repairs that could be fairly given to her if bandwidth resources were shared equally, and still have to live at least another fifty years in the unacceptably damaged body.
She didn't care. She was human, flawed, and ought to be allowed her own human nature. She cared about the short term, the amount of time a human was still psychologically wired to understand, and the intense highs that came with living for such a short term. There were safe highs that EVE would gladly give her but they just didn't feel the same. Besides, like a lot of people, she wasn't even sure she wanted to live that long. It just felt like it would wear her out, no matter how the system would maintain her. It just felt like too much of a strain, to keep on going forever, to keep on planning your life and trying to achieve meaningful things and eventually just keep filling up your time without any promise of an end date to the schedule. Something animal inside her was feeling trapped inside her own timeline, profoundly aware that she no longer had that final and decisive escape route from absolutely anything that was death.
In her speech, she'd compared it to the right to marry. Pretty much any consenting adult life form could marry anything else by now, but it made no sense for the system to withdraw the right NOT to marry. And yet so many other rights hadn't come with the choice of refraining from doing the action they had the right to.
She hadn't been the only one with this opinion, and at this time the public voting on matters to do with Eve's programming was still mandatory, although the added clause actually did away with this eventually, leading up to the ultimate decision that free will was no longer mandatory. It had stopped the rioting when these escape routes had stopped being blocked off, as though a bunch of trapped rats had stopped frenzying now that they saw somewhere to run.
If they'd known everyone would run for the exit at once, almost to the extent that they were crashing the server with a flood of simultaneous requests, they might have thought of something less drastic. It had been completely unexpected, though, that practically the entire population suddenly wanted to die or revoke their free will. Was it simply the novelty of it all, the worry that it was their last chance and it would be taken off them, or had there been some other, unseen thing going horribly wrong with the system to make people this desperate to leave? It hadn't been hacked, the security was notoriously watertight; they were fairly sure it hadn't started malfunctioning by then, as it was the rush of requests itself that had done something to the fragile mind of the Mother Qualia's AI; it was carefully safeguarded so that nobody could influence anybody else's ultimate decision except the AI itself if free will had been surrendered back to Her...
That said, there was a worrying number of those 'Angel'-class cyborgs around these days...
Characters: Veronica
Rating: PG-13/Gen
Spoilers: major
other tags: pre-game, headcanon. discussion of dystopia/apocalypse situation, mental health issues including suicide, waiving one's human rights, possible manipulation by sinister AI
As an attempt to quell the initial spate of riots, a clause was added to the programming of EVE that made it possible to voluntarily waive any of your own rights, provided the system did not suspect you of doing so in order to harm another human.
This clause had been partly Veronica's idea. She had always found EVE's interference in her daily life far too intrusive whenever the Mother Qualia decided it was in her best interests and that her own decisions were only making her life worse. One of the programmed essential requirements for a human to live happily was physical health, so the system had started limiting her access to coffee and junk food once she was found to be consuming unhealthy levels of both and showing signs of addiction. Veronica understood the machine's reasoning - she even had limited coding privileges to the system herself when it came to maintaining it - and understood that, at the current lifespan that a human could achieve under the new system, she would eventually damage her body beyond the repairs that could be fairly given to her if bandwidth resources were shared equally, and still have to live at least another fifty years in the unacceptably damaged body.
She didn't care. She was human, flawed, and ought to be allowed her own human nature. She cared about the short term, the amount of time a human was still psychologically wired to understand, and the intense highs that came with living for such a short term. There were safe highs that EVE would gladly give her but they just didn't feel the same. Besides, like a lot of people, she wasn't even sure she wanted to live that long. It just felt like it would wear her out, no matter how the system would maintain her. It just felt like too much of a strain, to keep on going forever, to keep on planning your life and trying to achieve meaningful things and eventually just keep filling up your time without any promise of an end date to the schedule. Something animal inside her was feeling trapped inside her own timeline, profoundly aware that she no longer had that final and decisive escape route from absolutely anything that was death.
In her speech, she'd compared it to the right to marry. Pretty much any consenting adult life form could marry anything else by now, but it made no sense for the system to withdraw the right NOT to marry. And yet so many other rights hadn't come with the choice of refraining from doing the action they had the right to.
She hadn't been the only one with this opinion, and at this time the public voting on matters to do with Eve's programming was still mandatory, although the added clause actually did away with this eventually, leading up to the ultimate decision that free will was no longer mandatory. It had stopped the rioting when these escape routes had stopped being blocked off, as though a bunch of trapped rats had stopped frenzying now that they saw somewhere to run.
If they'd known everyone would run for the exit at once, almost to the extent that they were crashing the server with a flood of simultaneous requests, they might have thought of something less drastic. It had been completely unexpected, though, that practically the entire population suddenly wanted to die or revoke their free will. Was it simply the novelty of it all, the worry that it was their last chance and it would be taken off them, or had there been some other, unseen thing going horribly wrong with the system to make people this desperate to leave? It hadn't been hacked, the security was notoriously watertight; they were fairly sure it hadn't started malfunctioning by then, as it was the rush of requests itself that had done something to the fragile mind of the Mother Qualia's AI; it was carefully safeguarded so that nobody could influence anybody else's ultimate decision except the AI itself if free will had been surrendered back to Her...
That said, there was a worrying number of those 'Angel'-class cyborgs around these days...
