Modern Crabbit
January 18th. 2018
It wasn’t noticed at first. A new Twitch channel opening up and streaming was something that happened pretty often.
The only oddity for the first viewers was the V-Tuber avatar moved much smoother than anyone expected with random emotes and effects that blew other Avatars of the time out of the water,, and the fact it was a little robot Avatar.
The bunny-like antenna and the crab like body ended up explaining the name pretty quickly to anyone that watched.
Its cute mannerisms had a few people that checked it out stick around, where it happily chatted with the chat.
“Yes yes! Hello hello! Karlo57! Hmm? Play a game? Oh! We know a game. We were trained to race in the game F1! Kat-Kat made us wheels!” The avatar cheered, sticking it’s little clawed hand below the screen for a moment before popping out with a wheel attachment that then spun around, in an interesting animated movement.
The fact Crabbit0001 soon topped leaderboards in the game brought the new V-Tuber a lot of attention from the Twitch racing community.
The ‘joke’ that she was an AI, was kept so real, that her popularity grew over the days. Never once did she break character.
Of course people joked that she was an actual AI. Language models were getting more popular, more into the public consciousness but none of them had nearly the interactivity of Crabbit0001.
Although there was a lot of concern for the girl when inexorably she spent 72 hours on stream non stop. Causing a large concern from her audience that she simply laughed and repeated she was an AI and didn’t get tired.
Her streaming picked up over the first four months, until she was online almost 24/7 causing more and more concern, and quite a lot of rumor that she wasn’t joking about being an AI.
The only time she seemed to disappear was when she would very hurriedly stop whatever she was doing with “Uh-oh. Kat-Kat is home. I have to go!” And the stream would end.
—--
“Hand me that will you?” I asked, as I reached for a bag of cables that were just a bit out of reach.
“Yes yes!” Cheered my little drone as she clacked over and grabbed the bag before tugging it towards me. She was struggling with it, but soon she was in reach so I grabbed her and pulled her and the bag the rest of the way.
“Thanks Crabbit.”
“Yes yes!”
With the cables in reach I started clipping everything into the server. In the back of my head a constant slow humm guiding me in what I was doing.
Second lives were supposed to be cool. A fantasy world with magic and swords, or a glimpse into the far future.
Me? I was stuck right back where I started.
A restart. A redo. Which could have been fun in its own right…
But I wanted to go to fucking space!
The stars called me! But I was stuck. Back on earth, feet firmly on solid ground with no hope of that changing in my lifetime… Probably.
Not unless I did something about it.
“Okay server looks good, go in and give me a check okay?”
“Yes! Server load exploration commencing! Wee!” My Crabbit cheered as I sat back on the cool concrete and just let her check things over.
I had known what companies were going to blow up. I had known what tech was coming. That alone might have given me a good advantage. I could have been an Elon Musk in a way…
But I hadn’t been given a gift of a second life with nothing to show for it. I closed my eyes and just listened as the world around me sang its song. I’d gained something from my rather miserable death, I could hear it. The sound that had guided me since I was born again.
It was funny, my father was a mechanic, as a child he was well known for taking things apart just because he wanted to see how they worked.
It hadn’t been a shock to anyone when I started doing the same thing.
The fact I could then put it back together good or better than new was something that my family had happily supported.
So I’d grown up with tools in my hands, and a whisper in my ear on what to do next.
I had a goal. I had a dream, and there was nothing that was going to stop me. Space or bust.
Of course I couldn’t do it alone. The fact was, technology wasn’t just knowing how to do something. It was having the tools, the process, the pieces to fit the jigsaw of technology together to get what you want.
I’d mostly worked on mechanical projects as a kid, but I knew what could bring in cash, cash I needed.
Batteries.
At nine years old, I’d patented an improvement to standard batteries that instantly made me a whole lot of cash.
I’d invested that, to bring in more, to do more. When Google had opened, I’d bought enough shares that I still had them bothering me about board meetings and stuff.
Of course Spacex was a thing already, but…
I wasn’t going to invest in them, frankly they were competition. I was going to do a tech leap over their heads.
“Kat-Kat! Server stability is good! Everything Green!”
“That’s good. Thank you for checking for me.”
“Yes! Ummm….” It trailed off pointedly wiggling a bit and clacking its plastic hands together.
“Something wrong?”
“No, but… Can I go play?”
I frowned a bit, it had been cute at first getting my Crabbits hooked on video games had seemed like a good idea to keep them busy and add a bit of change to their standard day. Giving them challenges and rewards inherent in games.
“Yes, you can go play.” I told them, unable to resist the way they were cutely looking up at me. Their digital screen with their little kitten mouths was really cute.
Dangit. Note to self don’t make AI that are too cute.
“Yay!” She cheered and clacked out from the server room hurrying to the game room.
“I really need to figure out what she’s playing that’s got her so hooked.” I grumbled as I rose up. Unfortunately I still had… Two meetings today, and I needed to get the data farm started up. I was currently working on the biggest project I’d need for my future goals. An energy source. Something well beyond the chemical rockets we used now.
I sighed and pushed checking on what the Crabbits were doing back a bit more. They were probably just stuck playing Mario or something. For fully sapient AI, they were a bit… Silly.
Cute though.
—--
You Died
Came across the screen and the Crabbit in the corner slumped, pulling the controller over its head as it whined.
“Uuuu. No armor, no weapon, no leveling run is hard. But I’ll try again!” She assured the audience as her image perked back up. “I’ve now added that to my combat protocols! I won’t lose again!” She cheered.
Kevin snorted. Crabbit0001 was a machine, he’d heard about her going through all the Dark Souls games doing basically no weapon no armor runs and figured he’d take a look. He’d done a few no hit runs himself, not on stream or something but just to see if he could do it.
But he’d taken months to get through even one game. Crabbit had already cleared Dark Souls one and two, and was making her way through three.
Either they had somebody else playing for her, or this girl was a machine.
Well, or a guy. The artificial voice and lack of any face did make people suspect a boy.
Or an AI, cause as Kevin looked at the stream time it had already been two days of constant streaming. Something people would often jump into chat to tell her to take a break.
[Tika23: Crabbit, will you ever do any face reveal or maybe a collab with other V-tubers? I’d love to see you play some multiplayer games with people!]
A superchat popped up and Crabbit instantly responded while still jumping into the next battle. She never stopped responding or reading chat even while playing, which had many suspect some sort of text to speech device, or maybe a manager. Or maybe multiple people.
“You already see my face silly!” It offered and the Avatar made a cute kitten face as it waved at them. “But I’d have to ask Kat-Kat about that, and… Uuuu.” She offered cutely.
The game continued and Kevin blinked at an absolutely pixel perfect dodge combo. As Crabbit dodged a multi hit attack without any additional dodged, or panic rolling. Just perfectly timed misses.
[FireKiller27: You’ve mentioned Kat-Kat a lot, who is she, and why do you need her permission for a collab?]
“Kat-Kat created me! She’s the bestest! But Uuuu. I never told her about streaming! But it’s not lying! Cause she never asked!”
There was a lot of laughter in the chat Kevin, even posted a quick response.
[Gonna get busted by the Parents!]
And enjoyed the way the Avatar looked at the chat and smacked at his particular chat message causing it to disappear.
Not really a deletion or a kick, but something she did to hide chats she didn't want to see. The chat of course was instantly filled with similar messages until she was showing her crying face.
Bullying the AI Girl was something everyone enjoyed.
A few hours passed, and Kevin was listening to the stream as he finished some work when he heard it.
He blinked up to see the game paused as Crabbit was looking at a chat message in stream. One that wasn’t moving, which wasn’t unusual as she’d ‘pull’ chat messages out of the chat log to talk about sometimes.
[SpaceKat1: CRABBIT WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!?]
The stream was quiet for a bit, as the Crabbits eyes were spinning to show she was thinking, but the way she was sort of flinching from the chat message was weird.
“Uh-oh…. Code Red.” She called and then the stream ended.
Kevin blinked. Wasn’t Code Red for really bad things?
—--
I’d been on a plane ride back home, back to the lab and back to what I needed to do. Stupid people.
I’d been purchasing land, and getting some orbital clearance stuff done, but it had run into an issue. An issue that meant some politician was looking for a bribe…
So instead I’d had to go to DC and bribe someone above their head to get them to leave me alone.
Fucking politics. I hated it. Hated people. But for my dream I had to do stupid shit.
But I was in first class, and I could have bought my own jet but… That was just wasteful. I didn’t like flying, and I certainly didn’t want to buy a plane I’d only use every once in a while.
I’d heard it first as I was sort of daydreaming while looking over my laptop.
Chatter and talking. A little boy behind me was watching something on a tablet. Something about it had triggered my brain and I was listening in until I heard it, a very familiar phrase.
“What?” I whispered as I sat up and looked behind me. The boy was engrossed in the tablet and the parents were mostly ignoring him, but… That couldn’t be!
“Excuse me.” I whispered to the boy and he blinked up at me with his cute wide eyes as I smiled at him. I noticed the parents looking at me, but I ignored them for a second. “What are you listening to?”
“Crabbit.” He said and I could feel my stomach drop.
“W-what?”
“Crabbit! She’s a V-tuber!” He spun the tablet and…
Was that an animated image of the Crabbits!? Playing Dark Souls!?
I felt my jaw drop as I realized I wasn’t having a stroke.
Oh no… I’d told them they could use the internet for some things, even said Twitch and Youtube was fine, and I was fairly sure they’d asked me if they could respond to chat.
Respond to chat…
Oh fuck. IS THAT WHERE THEY GOT ALL THOSE MEMES FROM!?
I spun around to my laptop and opened up twitch, a moment later I was typing away and there she was…
Wow, that was actually a lot of people watching, that’s actually kind of-… OH SHIT THAT WAS A LOT OF PEOPLE WATCHING!
I made an account as frantically as I could, stupid email verification!
[SpaceKat1: CRABBIT WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!?]
—--
I rubbed my face as my Crabbit all gathered around my feet. The three drones all looked… Sad.
Which was a dirty lie!
“You broke my trust.”
“Uuuu.” They whined in tandem. “You said we could!” One of them tried to argue and I sent her a look.
“You know that is not what I said. I agreed to the internet because I wanted you all to get more experience with things. But I told you not to interact with people.”
“You said we could respond to chat.”
“I said that, without understanding you’d already broken the rules by making a twitch channel… Twitch of all things?” I whispered, “Why Twitch? Why not Youtube!? I’m on the board for Google!”
“We didn’t… We didn’t want you to know?” They offered and I blinked at them trying to process.
“Why would I know if you did-” I cut myself off as it clicked. Right, fully fledged AI or not, they were still like kids.
Their ‘mom’ worked at Google. So if they used anything from Google obviously I would find out. That was kinda cute-No.
Not the time.
“You are all in deep trouble.” I decided and they slumped.
Luckily I’d had plenty of time to look things up once they closed the stream. The Crabbits were still considered a weird V-Tuber concept. The current assumption was a team of people all pretending to be an AI to handle everything. Although the advanced coding the Crabbits used in stream to pull chat messages, or mess with them was considering groundbreaking…
“Wait… Did you guys get paid for this?” I asked, and the Crabbits shook sort of wiggled.
“We had a Twitch moderator help set up the account, they were very eager to help!”
“Probably because they weren’t making any money if you hadn’t set everything up… How did you even… No, never mind. Hacking of course.” The Crabbits had originally been built as both additional hands for construction, but also digital coding. Spaceships were complicated, and I wasn’t making just a rocket, or something.
Hacking into any database on the planet was more of a… Afternoon activity than any real difficulty.
But that didn’t mean it was okay to break my rules!
“Are you mad?” The Crabbit asked looking up at me, their digital screens showing their eyes having little tear circles at the corners…
They’d definitely learned this from the internet.
“I’m not… It’s not that I’m mad, but I am upset you kept this from me. I’ll need to keep a closer eye on what you girls have learned. Is your coding process even ready for that much interactive data? Ugh.”
“Sowwy.”
“That’s not getting you out of getting in trouble.” I said flatly and they slumped.
These three!
“C’mon I want to see the Twitch stuff you’ve done. I don’t want to get arrested by the IRS because you made a mistake.”
—--
It was almost a week before almost randomly a new stream popped up.
The Cute spinning ‘Crabbit’ design showing a loading lasted a long while, about half an hour before suddenly it finally ended revealing the normal backdrop of a spaceship with Crabbit in the bottom right corner.
“Hi hi! Sorry it took so long. I was grounded! Uuuu.” She whined and instantly the chat exploded. Questions about why, and how old Crabbit was and more all flowed but then something even more interesting happened. Little pod thing floated in out from the corner of the screen, and on it rested a cat.
It blinked as it sort of looked around almost like it was testing the motion controls.
“That tracking is pretty good.” It finally commented, in a voice that wasn’t the normal semi robotic tone of the Crabbit but was a fully normal woman's voice.
Chat of course exploded.
“Yes! I worked hard!” Crabbit chirped and then turned ‘towards’ the camera and waved. “Say hello say hello! This is Kat Kat! Crabbits Creator-Mom!”
“Just pick one or the other, you don’t need to use both.” The yellowish tabby cat muttered as it face pawed for a moment. “Anyway I can see from all the chat responses that people are wondering what’s going on… Jeez this is complicated.”
“Is okay! Start at the beginning!” Crabbit chirped and the cat turned with a deadpan look on its face.
“That’s the advice I told you I already-Nevermind. Okay… So the beginning. I’ll keep my name private, but call me SpaceKat. Or Kat-Kat I guess. Since Crabbit already gave me that nickname. About a decade ago I realized I needed something to help me with high end mathematics for a long term project of mine. So I started programming, and then eventually designing the Crabbit.”
“Yes! Long time until I got a body!”
“Yes it was, even if your Roomba body was-”
“NUuuuu!” Crabbit squealed, waving at me. “Don’t tell them that!”
“Ah, excuse me.” The Cat replied looking a little embarrassed. The Avatar even leaned over and patted at Crabbits head. “So… I built the first Generation Crabbit as a learning processor. To help with astro physics actually. Well and other things. In the end it only took about four months once they came online to reach sentience, to start asking questions that are pretty difficult to work with… But I did my best.”
“Yes! Kat-Kat answered many questions!”
“Anyway to be frank to all of you. Crabbit is a fully sentient Digital Consciousness. Yes. She’s basically like Skynet from Terminator. No she won’t commandeer the Nuclear weapons of the world. People really use too much pop culture to figure out their opinions on things. Right now they’re busy trying to convince me to get a cat… Which may have something to do with this avatar.”
“Tehehe!”
“Don’t teehee me.” The Cat grumbled.
Chat of course during this whole time is exploding. Some are bowing down to their new AI overlords, some are just enjoying the show, some are just calling it all fake and gay.
Such was the internet.
“Well… That’s what I was here for. Crabbit has my permission to continue streaming. As long as she stops using the main server hub to calculate Dark Souls bosses!”
“Uuuu.”
—---