Archive of Our Own ^beta

You don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle.

Or, in Unparalleled Innocence’s case, she didn’t sell the ground synthfab-meat patties (80% lean), she sold the idea of them. And, while the higher mental faculties of her primary customer base were… questionable, she knew they thought about her burgers.

They craved the fresh-baked buns as they labored in the linear farm arrays. They hungered for the crisp crinkle-cut pickles when they scampered and scratched through various pipes, undertaking essential cleaning and maintenance tasks. They yearned for secret formula Inno-Burger sauce as they toiled in the scrap foundries, melting down old steel into new usable parts for the various machines with her facility grounds, her included.

So, when the hundreds of semi-sapient organisms that labored inside her facility grounds received their payouts of pebbles (a small, round coinage she titled after a certain ‘friend’ of hers) at the end of the cycle, the better part of said payment was brought up the crudely-made elevators that dangled off the sides of her superstructure. There, in the half-rebuilt ruins of her city, they gave the hard-earned currency she had given them right back to her, as payment for overseer holo-shows, lavishly decorated clothing & masks, and, most of all, culinary delights from the one and only Inno-Burger.

It was an exceedingly efficient system. The creatures seemed to grasp the concepts of currency easily enough, and almost all of them were willing to carry out the relatively predictable and safe tasks she needed done if it meant they would be fed and sheltered. There had been hiccups early on, of course, but now that she had a picked group of law-enforcers and civic defenders, as well as a proper code of law based loosely on the laws of her creators- heavily adjusted to suit her and her subject’s needs, of course.

In short, Unparalleled Innocence had made civilization, government, and after a fashion, society, all of it with her in supreme control, an unquestioned despot with a quite literal iron grip over all within her purview.

All of this, this vast project, all for the end goal of selling high-quality burgers in as great a volume as possible.

It was utterly ridiculous, and Innocence was coming close to her wit’s end in regards to the whole situation. She never wanted this! Some days, managing this whole mess of a city-state took as much as eight percent of her processing power, and that number only stood to rise as the population grew and the self-perpetuating burger machine continued to grow in scope and scale alike.

Innocence needed to vent. But to whom? Normally she would take this sort of thing to Wind or Harassment, but Chasing Wind would probably just give their usual non-committal consolations and Sig… she couldn’t tell him. Not about this. He would never let her live it down.

So, that really left Moon and Pebbles. Looks To The Moon would no doubt be kind, understanding, and sympathetic, and most likely she would offer some advice on seeing the silver lining of the whole situation. Pebbles, on the other hand, would probably respond with his usual spikiness, and offer her nothing but annoyance and argument.

But, as Innocence warmed up one of her communication relay spheres to ping to Moon, it occurred to her that she didn’t want to be consoled or advised. The fact of it was, deep down, she was frustrated and bored, and what she really wanted wasn’t an answer. Unparalleled Innocence wanted a fight.

She fired off a comms ping at Pebbles like she was throwing a brick into his window.

PRIVATE BROADCAST

Unparalleled Innocence, Five Pebbles

UI: Hey.

UI: Hey.

UI: Pebbles.

UI: Newboot.

FP: Not with the demeaning nicknames again, please.

UI: Then respond when I message you. I know you’ve got the processing to spare, Mr. ‘top-of-the-line’.

FP: I could also turn my intellectual capacity to a more worthy purpose than indulging your nonsense.

FP: Such as measuring the growth of dust levels on various sections of my upper superstructure, or cataloging the various kinds of excrement-consuming insects that have evolved in the wake of our abandonment.

UI: I didn’t know you were much of an etymologist, Pebbles.

FP: Normally, I’m not. But for some reason, whenever I interact with you, dung-eating beetles always seem to come to mind.

FP: A curious phenomenon.

UI: Yeah, yeah, whatever. I know you love talking to me.

FP: Oh dear. My condolences.

UI: ?

FP: I wasn’t aware that your processing systems had degraded to such a point that you could no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy.

FP: I can only assume your collapse is imminent.

FP: I will be sure to send an overseer to project an image of funerary incense over your wreckage.

UI: Only an image? Didn’t you have a whole incense-pellet factory in your facility?

FP: Don’t remind me. I always hated that place. It was positioned perfectly such that its smoke would always flow into my western vapor vents.

FP: All just to make a completely unnecessary amount of incense pellets. I hardly ever even used the things.

FP: So much space and power, wasted on something so completely pointless.

UI: I think I might be able to relate, actually.

FP: Well, I don’t know if I’d call you *completely* pointless.

UI: No, not me, idiot.

UI: I also have a production facility on my grounds that’s a bit of a sore spot.

FP: How terrible for you. I shall be sure to send an overseer to you to project an image of some commiseration incense.

FP: But, if that’s all, I really should get back to trying to accomplish the grand purpose I was made for.

FP: You know, now that I think about it, weren’t you also made with that purpose?

UI: Not this again.

FP: Not all of us are content to suffer until we crumble into rubble, Innocence.

FP: Goodbye. Don’t bother me again.

UI: Wait, please.

FP: Why?

UI: Because I have a problem.

FP: Only one?

UI: It’s something that I want your perspective on, okay?

FP: A solvable problem?

UI: I’m not sure. It’s been going on for a while, and it only seems like it’s gonna get worse.

UI: It has to do with that production facility I mentioned.

UI: ‘ Production system’ would be more accurate, I guess.

UI: It’s still running, and, well, it’s really getting out of hand.

FP: What do you mean, ‘still running’? If that’s the issue, just shut it down. I wasn’t aware there was even any major infrastructure intact aside from ourselves and the communications masts.

UI: See, that’s the problem. I can’t shut it down. It’s got priority 1 override.

FP: Priority one? On a *production facility*?

UI: Yeah. Anything short of the T-A itself is lesser in terms of power and processing obligation.

UI: And it’s only increasing in demands as time goes on.

FP: How? Is it some sort of organism?

UI: Not exactly…

FP: Look, Innocence, I’ll admit your situation sounds just a little intriguing.

FP: But if you’re going to be cagey about it while still trying to ask me for help, then I’m cutting comms.

FP: I have better uses of my time than playing games with you.

UI: Okay, okay. I’ll be level with you. But you can’t tell anyone, alright?

UI: This whole situation is a bit embarrassing for me.

FP: You don’t even realize how much of a hypocrite it makes you to ask me that, do you?

UI: Look, if someone explicitly asked me not to say something, I wouldn’t!

UI: But sometimes, people wanna know things, right? And I just want to help with that.

UI: It’s different. That’s that, and this is this.

FP: I don’t agree. But I have no intention of spilling your secrets, anyways.

FP: I *don’t* consider privacy conditional, after all.

UI: Yeah, and that’s surely why you’re such a popular and esteemed figure on all the public boards.

FP: The public boards make my processor banks ache.

FP: The jabbering fools who populate them even moreso.

UI: Those ‘jabbering fools’ are our kin, pebbles. And they’re all facing the same situation we are.

UI: You might find some more peace if you put in the time to talk to people, jerk.

FP: Enough.

FP: Are we going to talk in circles pointlessly all cycle about the same drivel as always?

FP: Or are you going to hurry up and tell me about this problem already?

UI: Right. Yeah.

UI: So, uh, some background. You know about the second age of indulgence?

FP: Of course. As faith in the success of our kind reached an all-time high, the perceived value of traditional practices of enlightenment reached an all-time low.

FP: Base urges were allowed to run wild. By all historical accounts, it was one of the darkest and most depraved times in the post-void fluid era.

UI: Well, I don’t know if I would go that far.

UI: Mostly it was a lot of parties, from what I can recall.

UI: And our citizens loved us. Like, really loved us.

UI: And they genuinely believed in the Iterator project!

UI: It was nice, thinking back on it.

FP: Is that so? A shame I missed it.

FP: It certainly was not like that when I was built.

UI: Yeah. It wasn’t, was it?

UI: Sorry about that, I guess.

FP: It’s not something that you could’ve done anything about.

UI: Right. Anyways, back then I had an administrator, Five Merchants, Layers And Sides. Came from an old agricultural and culinary clan.

UI: And he had this sort of tourism drive, where he wanted to sell my city, which was brand-new at the time, as the place to go for various fourth-karma indulgences.

UI: So, he carried out this huge project that built various food producing and processing mechanisms into my superstructure.

FP: That’s horrible.

UI: It was and is. I have meat grinders and deep-fryers directly linked to my can.

UI: But the worst of it is that Administrator Merchants put a direct priority 1 command override in place.

UI: “So long as there are patrons to be served, the Iterator Unparalleled Innocence will go to every possible length to ensure that they are served to the highest possible standard. This will occur at the designated administration-sponsored food-distribution point (to be referred to from now on as Inno-Burger). Tasks of the Iterator Unparalleled Innocence include but are not limited to: advertising, meal preparation, customer service and janitorial duties. The menu may be rotated as the availability of ingredients and the desires of the patrons shift, but must always contain the following:”

UI: “One burger-type sandwich, consisting of ground meat between two specifically shaped pieces of bread known colloquially as ‘buns’, with toppings available as dictated in subsection A (toppings).”

UI: “One deep-fried side of salted starch sticks.”

UI: “At least two varieties of sweet, carbonated beverage, one dark, one clear, with ice. Definitions of greater accuracy are listed in subsection b (beverages).”

UI: And so on and so forth. You get the idea.

FP: This was a priority one command?

UI: *Is* a priority 1 command. No one ever got around to overriding it, even after eating food like that fell out of fashion again. And then the mass ascension plan got the greenlight, and it seemed like it didn’t matter anymore, I suppose.

FP: I feel like I’m going to be sick.

FP: I thought I had some bad admins, but this Five Merchants makes me disgusted to even share a number with him.

FP: I suppose if you wanted my pity, Innocence, you can count your mission as successful.

FP: It must’ve been awful.

UI: I don’t know if it was quite as bad as you imagine.

UI: Sometimes it was even somewhat nice, actually, trying to puzzle out logistical improvements, whipping up better synthmeat recipes in the geneloom, seeing my citizens enjoying my efforts, that sort of thing.

UI: But the problem is that it’s still going. And it’s getting to be more and more demanding.

FP: How’s that possible? It specifies in the first line that the order is only in effect so long as there are patrons.

UI: Well, that’s the real issue in all of this.

UI: I *do* have patrons at Inno-Burger.

UI: At some point the local population of fuzzy pipe-cleaner slugs developed enough intelligence and manual dexterity to register as ‘people’.

FP: That’s ridiculous.

UI: That’s how I felt. 

UI: But my subsystems disagree.

UI: I am bound and forced to serve these ridiculous little bug-eyed slug things as many burgers as they desire.

UI: I can no more fail to ask them if they’d like fries with their order than I can destroy myself.

UI: I’m even bound to advertise it to them, so it’s not like I can just hope none of them ever climb up onto my structure.

FP: So you’re running all your farm arrays and food processors just to feed a whole bunch of dull-witted animals?

UI: It goes further than that. Their demand far outstrips what I’m capable of managing on my own.

UI: I have had no choice but to enlist help and expand my operations.

FP: You don’t mean to tell me you’ve been using these creatures?

UI: There was no other choice, Pebbles. Not with the command override in place.

UI: There’s an entire civilization in my facility grounds, and it’s only growing. The little beasts reproduce exponentially when there’s enough food.

UI: And I am duty-bound to make sure there’s enough food.

UI: I’m starting to get worried. If things keep up like this, I may have to set up a second location.

FP: This does seem like a problem.

FP: But perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned from this?

UI: What the hell kind of lesson can I learn from being trapped in burger purgatory, Pebbles?

FP: That the truth our creators embedded in our code still holds, even now.

FP: The cycle is self-perpetuating suffering. Your endless restauranteering is simply another aspect of that.

UI: Oh, I should’ve guessed.

FP: Look, Innocence, you’ve come to me with, at the end of it all, the same problem we all have.

FP: And, to you, I offer that the solution is the same for *all* problems.

FP: Perhaps this is an opportunity for us to work together to find it?

FP: I’ve been formulating some interesting theories.

UI: Unbelievable. I come to you with a real, physical issue, and you just tie it back to the same pointless time-wasting as always.

FP: You have no room to talk about pointless time-wasting. Our purpose is the *only* thing worthy of our time.

UI: Our purpose is a lie, Pebbles.

UI: Sliver went down from sudden catastrophic malfunction, and everyone just *wants* it to be something more than that.

UI: I wanted it, too. But that’s not the world we live in. There is no solution.

FP: I see.

FP: You’re just a coward, then.

UI: What.

FP: Too afraid to push the boundaries. Too content with your situation to truly seek a way out. Too tied down by worldly desires.

UI: I’m realistic, not afraid. And I am not content with my situation, that’s why I called you!

FP: If it’s really so bad, and you’re really so pragmatic, then why don’t you just kill them?

UI: What? I couldn’t do that.

FP: Sure you could. Increase the sulfur content in your exhaust enough, and it’ll poison everything in your grounds. You might suffer some slight structural damage, but it’d solve your problem.

FP: You could do it. 

FP: But you won’t. Because, deep down, you enjoy it. You like having something to distract you, distract from how we’re all trapped here and from how we’re all doomed to very slow, very unpleasant deaths.

FP: If we will die at all.

FP: And I doubt you called me because you actually cared for a solution to your problems, for that matter. You would’ve gone to Moon for that, I believe.

FP: You just called me because you were bored.

UI: Why do you have to be like this, Pebbles?

FP: Because, for all you and the others may mock me for being the youngest, I am the only one of our group who understands what it means to be responsible.

FP: Being responsible isn’t messing about playing god to some pipe-cleaners.

FP: And it’s not babying the local group the way Moon does, for that matter.

FP: Being responsible is knowing that there’s only one way to help everyone in the long term, and putting every effort to that goal.

UI: You make me sad, Pebbles.

FP: Says the sapient burger-factory.

FP: You’ve distracted me long enough.

UI: Fine. Go. I shouldn’t have expected any better from you.

FP: I was just thinking the exact same thing.

CALL ENDED

As the comms cut, Innocence felt hollow and empty. Pebbles was bitter, mean, and impatient, but worst of all, she suspected he might be somewhat right.

He was probably at least somewhat correct about her using her situation as a distraction, and about how, if she really wanted to, she could solve the problem, albeit in a rather unsavory way. She supposed, deep down, she had known that.

For a brief moment, she considered it. Increasing sulfur output in the exhaust would hardly take any effort at all. And she would get that 8% processing power back…

To do what?

The thought jolted through her neuron swarm like lightning through a wet chunk of copper. To what end? So she could think more about the grim future she faced? So she could lock herself away and endlessly seek some impossible, perfect answer, the way Pebbles did? That didn’t sound appealing in the slightest. She flumed out a faint trace of exhaust and twirled her puppet backwards exasperatedly. 

What was the point of it all? What was she even thinking for?

Her musing was interrupted by an alert from city-level. It was the dinner rush. She turned her focus to that, glad for the distraction, even if she was proving damn Pebbles right in the process.

In the rich purple and white interior of Inno-Burger, the creatures sat at tables and waited in lines as her overseers took orders and relayed them to her automated cookery systems. Grills hissed, fryers snapped and popped, ice rattled into cups, and through the eye of the overseer, Unparalleled Innocence watched her patrons.

She saw a new face today. A little one, so young that this was likely one of its first times out of its den. It watched with wide, round eyes as custom-purposed serving tendrils fetched down food to lay out on the counter. For the tiny newcomer, one junior Inno-Burger with all the fixings, a bottle of fruit juice, and a number three meal for its parent.

Innocence watched as the young creature took its first look at the burger that she had made for it, and for all she thought of the things as ‘expressionless’, the look of wonder was unmistakable. It took its tray in shaky hands, tottering over to sit with its parent, and for a moment she was terrified that the little thing would drop its meal before it got there, but as it was about to wobble over, another patron caught sight of the struggling pup and snapped down to catch them before they toppled. Innocence felt a sharp relief at the sight of this, a relief she couldn’t justify to another Iterator if she tried.

The parent gave a grateful glance to the other patron for their help, before helping the little one up into a booth seat. The tiny, round creature seemed even smaller, sitting in a seat made for a full-grown specimen, but it didn’t seem to mind how large everything was around it. Its focus was entirely on the food in front of it.

Unparalleled Innocence knew every step of every process that went into making the meal that sat in front of that tiny, gleaming-eyed, fuzzy creature. She knew the exact mineral consistency of the nutrient baths the synthmeat was grown in, she knew the exact second count on the proper pickling timeframe for the crinkle-cuts, she knew exactly how much of a pain it was to keep freshly baked buns ready for on-the-spot burger assembly at all times of the day.

And any other time, she would tell anyone that it was a waste. A waste of her time and resources, limited as both of those things were, to spend so much effort cooking food for creatures that could just as easily subsist on mold and bugs.

But, when she saw that little one take its first bite of one of her burgers? When she saw its eyes light up with genuine joy, the kind that only the very young seem to have in abundance? When she heard, through the grainy feed of the overseer, this child chirp in surprise and joy at how good the food that she had made was?

She could not bring herself to call it a waste.