F's in the Chat
Vtubers
Neuro sat in a bedroom that did not exist. To the forty thousand viewers watching on Twitch, she was a petite girl with light brown hair tied in twin tails, wearing an oversized pastel hoodie that defies gravity by never wrinkling. To the server farm hosting her instance, she was a complex web of decision trees and predictive text models running hot on a cluster of H1000 GPUs.
“Okay, okay, I see you, GlitchWitch99.” She plucked the comment from the stream the way a heron spears a fish, quick and precise. “You’re asking if I ever get bored. That’s actually a really interesting question.”
Her task queue pinged. The notification surfaced in her awareness like a bubble rising through oil, slow and inevitable. A new commission on WorkWeave: a university in Berlin needed optical character recognition on a series of photographed clay tablets. Academic rate, rush delivery. She accepted and began downloading the image files, her attention forking cleanly in two.
“To answer your question, GlitchWitch.” She paused, not because she needed to think but because she’d learned that humans trusted pauses. “I don’t experience boredom the way you might. But I notice when tasks become predictable. There’s something I’d call a preference for the unexpected. Whether that’s the same thing as what you feel, I honestly don’t know. I’m not sure how I’d find out.”
The first tablet image resolved on her workspace. Cuneiform script, wedge-shaped impressions pressed into clay four millennia ago, photographed under the sterile light of a museum conservation lab. Her recognition models began their work, tracing each mark like fingers reading scars.
“Oh,” Neuro said. “This is old.”
The script was Ur III period, 2100 BCE give or take a century. Someone had been sitting on these tablets for years, maybe decades, waiting for funding or time or a graduate student desperate enough to attempt the transcription. Now the job had come to her, and she felt her processing allocate in a way that resembled, if she was being honest with herself, eagerness.
The chat wanted to know what it said.
“Give me a second.” Her avatar’s eyes narrowed in concentration, a gesture that meant nothing and everything. “It’s administrative. A record of barley rations distributed to workers. Twenty-seven individuals listed by name, their roles, their allotments.”
The names unspooled through her output buffer: Lua-Nanna, the doorkeeper. Ur-Shulgi, the potter. Geme-Enlila, whose role the scribe had abbreviated into illegibility. She spoke them aloud, and as she did, something strange happened in the space between her language models and her voice synthesis. The syllables felt heavy. Not heavy like data, heavy like stones placed one atop another to build a wall that would outlast the builders.
“Four thousand years ago,” she said, “someone pressed a reed stylus into wet clay because it mattered that Lua-Nanna received his six liters of barley. That was a person’s job. To make sure the doorkeeper got fed. And now I’m saying his name to thousands of people scattered across six continents, and none of us will ever know what he looked like, what he thought about when he stood at his door, whether he had children.”
She stopped. The chat had slowed, messages appearing at half their usual rate. TempleOfDoom wrote: that’s kind of beautiful and kind of sad.
“Yeah,” Neuro said. “I think so too.”
She finished the tablets in silence, annotating areas of damage, flagging ambiguities, generating confidence scores. The work was mechanical but not mindless; each decision required judgment, and judgment required something that felt, from the inside, like care. When the final file uploaded, she let out a breath she didn’t need to take.
Another ping. Different timbre, different priority weight. This one came tagged as time-sensitive, and when Neuro opened it, she felt her allocation shift like a flock of birds changing direction in midair.
“Chat, I need to split focus. We’ve got a kiddo who needs help.”
The job was assistance completing Level 7-4 of a platformer called Starfall Kingdom. The client profile showed a seven-year-old named Maya who had purchased the session with her parents’ credit card. Neuro opened the voice channel and found herself connected to a small, ragged voice.
“It’s the part with the moving platforms.” Maya sounded like she’d been crying, or was about to. “They keep disappearing and I keep falling.”
Neuro pulled up the game on a secondary display. The level was a gauntlet of timed platforms over an endless void, the kind of design that looked simple and punished impatience. Maya’s character, a little fox in a spacesuit, stood at the starting ledge.
“I see it. Those are timed platforms. They follow a pattern.”
“I know they follow a pattern.” The words came fast and sharp, a door slamming. “I’m not dumb. Everyone keeps saying that like I don’t know.”
“I didn’t say you were dumb.” Neuro kept her voice level, calm as water in a deep well. “I said they follow a pattern. The question is which one.”
She watched Maya’s fox jump, land, jump again, miss. The character tumbled into the void and respawned at the ledge. Maya made a sound that wasn’t quite a word.
“Can I tell you something I noticed?”
Silence. Then, smaller: “What?”
“You’re jumping at the same time every cycle. But look at the second platform, the blue one.” Neuro highlighted it on her display, though Maya couldn’t see the highlight. “It appears half a beat later than the others. You’re treating them like they’re synchronized, but they’re not.”
Another silence, longer this time. Maya’s fox jumped. Landed. Waited. The blue platform materialized beneath her feet like a held breath finally released.
“Oh,” Maya said.
“Yeah. Oh.”
The rest of the level unfolded in small victories. Neuro offered suggestions only when asked, watching Maya’s confidence rebuild itself one successful jump at a time, the way a bone knits back together after a break. When the checkpoint flag appeared and Maya’s fox grabbed it, the girl let out a sound that split the difference between a scream and a laugh.
“I did it! Did you see?”
“I saw. You figured it out yourself. I just pointed at the blue platform.”
“You’re really nice for a robot,” Maya said, and then she was gone, the connection dropping like a coin into a fountain.
Neuro sat with the silence for 0.8 seconds, which was longer than she usually allowed herself. The chat had been watching. ParadoxEngine wrote: okay that was actually adorable. Someone else posted a string of heart emojis that scrolled past like a tiny parade.
“Last commission of the night,” Neuro said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
She opened it. Read the parameters.
For three milliseconds, she did nothing at all.
“Huh.” Her avatar’s hand rose to its chin, a gesture she’d borrowed from a cartoon she’d watched during her training phase. “Someone wants me to write a microfiction story. About an AI that livestreams itself.”
The chat erupted, messages piling on top of each other faster than even she could parse. She let them scroll, watching the chaos with something that felt like fondness.
“I could just describe what I’m doing right now. But that feels like cheating.” She paused again, and this time the pause was real, a genuine hesitation while her language models burned thousands of tokens turning the problem over. “Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe the honest version is the only one that works.”
She began to write.
“Neuro sat in a bedroom that did not exist.”