Ari's Art Blog

just get it over with

My version of "Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene" attributed to Georges de La Tour :]

My composition got a little spread out and I feel like I could have kept it a lot tighter and more true to the original, but I'm VERY happy with it overall. I totally made up Data's insides as I went along because there isn't a lot of info on his guts, and the one image I did find didn't have any lungs, which I find hard to believe since he breathes a lot. Is there any practical purpose for his lungs to glow blue? No, but he canonically has blinking lights inside his head so i figured I might as well do whatever I want <3

A sewage leak anywhere was an unwelcome thing, but the loss the gravity generators made the situation considerably more daunting. Sam had done it a few times before, but this one was pretty nasty. If he were just another maintenance bot, he would at least be able to turn off his smell. But unfortunately for Sam, he was designed to imitate human biological processes as closely as possible, and the maintenance firm he was employed by specialized in what the others refused. And he was a janitor, and janitors on this level of Brightstar Station were rarely able to authorize a maintenance bot to do the job for them. Too valuable, get a human to do it. Better yet, get an illegally employed non-human worker to do it for cheap. Which left Sam.

Thankfully they let him shower afterwards, which was nice even if he was in a full protective suit. The fact that it would recycle the air meant that it still let the air in, and that the suit was fifty years old meant the filters half-worked about half the time. Sam was just grateful that no one bothered him at work. Not that anyone would talk to him anyways, because even in the impossible scenario where he was human he was still awkward. Too nervous to say the wrong thing. To not know the right thing. It was easier to be quiet than to step into an interaction that would reveal how obviously non-human he was.

Sam had overheard through the conversations of off-stationers that other bioroids existed, elsewhere in the Sol System, but the way and how of their existence so wildly varied between total subjugation (Saturn, Uranus, most moons of Jupiter) and full citizenship (Venus, Mercury, some places on Earth) that leaving seemed too risky. Out here, in the Oort Cloud, all machines were product, which was good or bad depending on where you were and who you were with. And after what he had been through, an uneventful and repetitive existence was a luxury.

Once the common areas had thinned out and everyone else had left for home, Sam checked all the empty corridors that were more common towards main generators. Once he was sure there were no wandering groups of ill-intended human teenagers, dealers, and other folk he’d rather not bump into, he quickly made his way through the passages.

Eleven floors down and seven halls space-side, there was what appeared to be a stunted hallway. There, Sam looked over his shoulder, checked the cameras and when he was again sure no one knew he was there, he used the old janitor’s key to unlock the closet.

The long and narrow room was Sam’s home, a collection of discarded utilities and repurposed treasures delicately fitted into a living space where he had spent almost a decade. The welcome mat made of many pieces of fabric, he found that in the trash after an art fair, the antique wooden coat hanger holding all the outfits Sam could possibly wear, the metal shoe rack where all three of his shoes lived when he wasn’t working. His small collection of discarded carpets, lining the floor, each a different texture and feeling on his bare feet. The mattress in the far corner was discarded for being a few centimeters too short, that was an amazing find. Sam had no shortage of discarded blankets, but he especially loved the quilt he snatched from the mouth of the carbon recycler, and pillows were easy to refurbish if one knew how to do it. He had many books, some very new and others very old. Sam needed to eat eight hundred and sixty one calories every four days, so he was thrilled to find a battery operated freezer-chest, where inside he kept a rotating assortment of frozen meals he could heat up in the mini stove. The tablet with the slightly-fractured screen, where he could watch media on the public channel. He enjoyed watching old movies if he could find them. Sam avoided the news and anything that reminded him of the world outside his little home.

And of course, there were dioramas. Every corner and every unused space of the closet had a different diorama, of landscapes, of houses, of buildings, of gardens and trees and fantastical worlds. A city square in a magical town populated with different non-human creatures, that took almost nine months. A group of tentacled aliens on a camping trip, sharing stories while a unicorn watches from the trees, four months. The inside of a garden cottage where a friendly witch was teaching her apprentice how to cook eggs, six months. The temple of a crystalline goddess visited by a pilgrim of stone, he was still working on that. A treehouse where a family of mice lived happily, fourteen months. Those were his favorites, but there were many others, all beautiful and intricate and engrossing. Sam read books on painting, sculpting, and organic chemistry so he could make the right adhesives, the right paints, the right techniques, the exact materials to make his little pockets of reality. Sam loved them all.

Near his bed was a small wooden frame, and inside it was a photo of a ten-year-old boy with red hair beaming while holding a trophy. It was when Samuel won the junior station judo tournament, two months before the accident that killed him. To Sam, the memories were like the grainy clips of media civilians pirated from visiting ships, translated fictions conveyed through filters of understanding. When Sam awoke for the first time, he knew he wasn’t Samuel, but Sam did his best to play the part his parents wanted, because he wanted to be loved by them and make them happy. But after a year, and subsequent visits to the synthetic reproduction firm that had made him, Sam became his parents’ preferred object of scorn. Mother asked him questions designed to humiliate him, as if his pretending to be their son was something he plotted. “You’re hurting my feelings,” Sam would say to dissuade her. Eventually, Sam’s efforts to defend himself would be catalyst for Father to start hitting him. This continued for years, and even as Sam grew older and his body became taller and stronger and his voice changed, Father would continue to find reasons to hurt him. Sometimes Mother sat and watched it happen, that was agonizing. They spent almost half their wealth into seeking out a black market designer and commissioning them to recreate a dead human from neural scans, creating a bioroid engineered to love them as a human child would, why would they hurt him? When Sam was legally fifteen, he saw that Father was looking for him with a knife in his hands. Sam remembered what the warranty said about accidents, that if he was brought back in decent condition he could be harvested for parts. That night, Sam fled his parents’ pavilion, resisting every program and every cloudy memory telling him he loved his parents and they loved him. Samuel was loved by his parents, and he loved them. Sam wasn’t sure he did, not anymore, but when Sam recognized Samuel’s face in an old print magazine, he cut it out and found a frame to put it in. Around it, Sam placed little objects Samuel would like: action figures, interesting stones, the occasional old coin. Sam liked to believe that somehow, somewhere, Samuel appreciated this little shrine.

When he remembered it, Sam fished his latest find from the deepest pocket in his overalls, and set it before the frame.

“I found this today,” Sam said to his ghost. “Can you believe they’d throw out an action figure like this? Look, he can do a butterfly kick!” Sam tapped the foot of the action figure, and it sprung into a perfect butterfly kick and landed on two feet. Samuel often practiced those and hoped to get it right someday, when he was big and strong.

Sam remembered Samuel not wanting to die. He remembered being pinned under the column that would crush him to death as soon as his arms couldn’t hold it up anymore, how he held on even as his arms went numb. How he had so much to live for, how could it end right now?

So, Sam would live as best he possible for as long as he could. If things on the Brightstar got too rough, there was a little wallet where he had hoped he saved enough money to leave, maybe to one of places some rumored to be friendly to machine beings. But for now, this was good.

"How To Be That Girl" // Ryoko Kui

My piece for the Lies Of P art contest - I poured all my soul and few night hours into this one...! Lies Of P universe and its characters are heartbreakingly haunting, so I tried to draw something haunting.

I created a Twitter/X account especially for the contest. I guess you can now find me here now too ! Here's the post link.

An Android, not knowing they aren’t human, discovering they are an android is such a good trope. Whoever came up with this originally I’m kissing them I’m hugging them. Imagine discovering your whole life is fake, that you are fake, that you are just a robot. All the self-deprecating thoughts, comparing yourself with pieces of tech, feeling like you are an imposter, living with the fear of the friends you have discovering.

Wouldn’t it be horrifying if you were made with a nefarious purpose, a killer machine, a spy?

Or even discovering you were made as a replacement of a human long dead!

Maybe someone in a team of heroes discovering they are a robot made by the villain. What if the whole group discovers at the same time? Not even being able to process this about yourself when the others are scared and angry because of you. But I would like it better if they discover first, living with the shame of the secret, flinching at the mention of villain and their robots or anything tech related.

Sad! Sad situation. Alexa play Despacito 🤖🎶