[ he lost it so hard he's back to grayscale again. ]

Thanks.

[ sits down and just. immediately takes the biggest fucking drink. ]

How does it keep getting so much worse?? I mean, how the— we fucking tied?!

[ from hot twink to greyscale in 24 hours it has been a day. ]

... Are you asking rhetorically, about how we tied? Because I can guess. As for how it keeps getting worse... I don't know. I hope it's not the ship or whatever's causing this escalating, just because it can.

Well, I know how math works, so yeah, I can guess too. It's just insane that we managed to get a perfect split when we wanted to do the opposite of that!

[ if they'd TRIED to coordinate he's sure someone would have fucked it up. ]

You think the ship's some kind of advanced AI that evolved to become a sadist or something, or that someone programmed shit to happen this way?

It probably wasn't difficult. Did you throw your vote?

[ somewhere along the line we will try to coordinate and mess up immensely and i look forward to that day. ]

Dunno. I'm not a techy person -- I do know they don't have brains of their own, no matter what it seems like. If something's gone wrong, it's in the programming, and it might not have been intentional.

[ shakes his head ]

It's not like a protest vote would help anyone — aside from in this one particular instance, apparently. At worst we could end up on some random person who had nothing to do with it.

[ like him, lmao. he kind of wishes he'd done that this time, though. ]

...I know some AIs, and they, like... even if it's supposedly all algorithms, it can get weird. But this kind of feels more like a deliberate human thing, I think. Especially since the company could just stop insisting on this trial shit even if they couldn't stop the actual murders.

That's what I mean though. If people had issues voting for Sheba or Shouxue, they'd have thrown the vote elsewhere, which means tying the vote might've come down to say, four people'c choices. I get it? But if it ends up with someone innocent being thrown into the holding cells, that doesn't help anyone.

[ blunt, but not incorrect. ]

Dunno. The algorithm might've decided that this was a logical course of action, and it's just acting based on that. In which case, we need to figure out how to fix it.

...Yeah. I think we're on the same page there.

[ he's so out of his genre here that it might not seem like it, but he is considered to be the calculating and pragmatic one in his own world. ]

It'd help if we had any idea where to start looking for what needs to be fixed in the first place.

... It also made it easier to tie their vote too. [ which, hoo boy. looks at today. ]

Yeah, we're just drawing a blank there. Unless we figure something out, we're just going to be repeating this pattern.