Post #541269

So, there are times when my glaucoma medication, the Rosea and my low level cataracts combine to leave me functionally unable to read because I can’t resolve letters any more. As something to do I have been spelunking around in some of the YouTube science fiction channels. So many of these stories are just male wish fulfillment with a side serve of loss of agency and some dubious consent. Sturgeon’s law applies. But every so often you get a story that is just crying out for a publisher and a chance at a short story Hugo. One of the sub-genres is the powered armour story. The armour can range from simple functional powered combat suits up through degrees of neural integration sometimes with at least semi sentience built into the suit. There are some really interesting and intricate stories that seem far beyond AI slop. AI story tellers are bad at creating endings, worse even than anime writers. There is a tendency for the AI to degenerate into waffling around in circles and you see a lot of stories just cut off abruptly. One particularly interesting story is a little vignette that would benefit from being picked up by a competent writer because it appears really difficult for an AI to stick a landing. An, at least semi sentient, armoured suit and its operator have come back from action and the suit is failing to stand down and release its operator. A mechanic (yeah that is a trope) goes to investigate. It appears that the operator has suffered strong mental/emotional trauma during the action and the suit has used a pharmaceutical intervention to keep the operator functional. The mechanic tries override codes but espionage is a thing and with the presence of a functional operator the suit rejects the overrides because the operator is unable to accept that this is a safe place. What ensues is the mechanic trying to be an impromptu trauma counsellor and a three way conversation ensues with the mechanic trying to talk down the operator to the point where they are calm enough that the suit can accept the override codes. The suit is helpful in the conversation, providing diagnostics and background that the operator cannot but it is fundamentally constrained by its operational parameters. This would make a killer one act play. It could be done really well by an author like CJ Cherryh although CJ would probably opt for maximum trauma and write the whole thing from the PoV of the operator (Helldiver, I’m looking at you).