Chapter Twenty-Seven – Post-Traumatic Samurai Disorder

Chapter Twenty-Seven – Post-Traumatic Samurai Disorder

“Do you know how many artists there are out there? People putting their soul into things?

There are more creators–and I don’t mean someone drawing a doodle in the margins, but actual, proper, dedicated creators–than you can imagine. One in every ten thousand. They make and have made. And what they make? There’s a chance in a million that it’ll have the eyes of the world skim past it.

That means that out there, right now, are wonders and deep, complex, meaningful works that because of their obscurity, will never have any meaning at all.”

–The Smoking Bird, creator of Borboland, failed MMO project of the 2040s

***

“So…” I started as Nya continued to follow Lucy and I as if we’d just popped the tab on a can of wet food. “You going to stick with us all the way to our next class?”

“You have classes together?” Nya asked.

“Just this one,” I said.

Lucy nodded. “It’s a Pol-sci class. Of a sort. I think it’s a lot of catch-up, and they’re trying to squeeze in a couple of classes into one. I’m not sure how well that will work out. I heard from Noah that this class is being taught by an actual human teacher too.”

“Is… that not usually the case?” I asked.

“Nope!” Luc said. “It’s usually all AI-driven stuff. Which apparently sucks because the AI still makes shit up, but I heard that CIAL’s are pretty okay.”

I’d had an education with that sort of thing. For a certain definition of education. It had all been through these shitty donated tablets with a few programs that we were supposed to do every day. The teaching partition was done by these text-to-speech reading animated avatar.

The same avatars were buyable off some digital stores, and I was pretty sure there was at least one middlingly popular vtuber that used the same model, but I wasn’t sure who used it first, the shitty sixth party teaching gear or the vtuber.

Calling what you have AI feels somewhat insulting. It’s as though I pointed to a skin cell and waxed poetically about how human it is.

I snorted, then shook my head. I didn’t want to have to explain that joke to the others.

“I suppose Nya ought to leave, then,” Nya said. Rather than sounding sad about it, she looked kind of pleased with herself. She stood tall, arms folded behind her head. “Nya was told that if she was going to be in New Montreal, she might as well do some work, n’ya know?”

“Alright then,” I said. “It was… kind of cool to meet you. And no, I’m not joining your band.”

The woman smiled. “That’s not a complete no.”

“It really is,” I said.

We still shook hands before Nya just turned around and sauntered off, leaving me and Lucy alone on some quiet side-street between two of the university’s buildings.

“She’s a weird one,” I said before I started to walk again.

“I guess,” Lucy replied.

I gave her the side-eye. “You guess?”

Lucy reached over and grabbed my arm, hugging it close to her chest as we walked. “Yeah. I think that… maybe Nya’s been doing the samurai thing for a while, and it’s doing things to her in turn.”

“You mean, what, something like PTSD? Post-traumatic samurai disorder doesn’t make you go ‘nya nya,'” I said.