u got a lil something

“Ah, ha-harder, Fox, fuck!”

“Yes, commander,” Commander Fox murmurs teasingly to his lover’s demand.

Sergeant Fox twitches hard at the honorific, and Fox presses his advantage. “Mmm, whatever you say, sir— would it be sir, is that neutral enough for you, my Fox?”

Fox groans at the interruption, writhing to encourage him to start moving again. “Rank, just rank’s neutral, come on, please,” they plead.

“Well then, commander, I suppose I can consider that a lawful order from a superior,” Fox says, dragging his fingers appreciatively along strong curves of muscle.

“Yes,” Fox says as authoritatively as they can. “Shift it, sergeant.”

He bites them for that, but it’s absolutely worth it.

<><>

Perhaps this could explain why, when Commander Fox’s comm chimed but he didn’t stir, Sergeant Fox had the grand idea to answer it with a curt, “Fox here; go.”

It was Thorn, and he needed his Commander in a matter of urgency. Sergeant Fox was still reluctant to wake their lover, so they carried on the ruse, one incremental step at a time until they had somehow donned the entirety of Fox’s Guard-red-painted Commander’s armor, ensconced themself in his office, and become embroiled in his diplomacy and paperwork. As long as they kept the helmet on, copied their lover’s mannerisms, and delegated any security access, there was nothing that would stand in their way.

And their Fox could rest. That was the entire point of this charade; what good was being clones if they never took advantage of their interchangeability?

It’d been long enough, hours, that they had begun to consider waking Fox when the comm chimed with an external code. They answered it with the Commander’s now routine clipped, “Fox here; go,” only to discover Captain Rex on the other end of the connection.

“Fox,” their actual commander said, “care to explain why my logs sergeant has cut off all their hair, streaked what’s left with silver, scarred their mouth, and picked up a Coruscanti accent and the …robust vocabulary that goes along with it?”

“No,” Fox said, just as helpfully and pleasantly as the Coruscant Guard Commander might, if it were indeed him speaking, which is to say: less than not at all. They mercilessly stifled giggles.

Rex sighed. “Torrent’s shinies are being well and truly terrorized, you understand. If you care at all.”

Fox strangled a laugh in their throat into a cough. It wouldn’t do to break character at this point in the game. “And?” they said, as infuriatingly as they could manage.

“And,” Captain Rex said pointedly, “our supply records are going to be unsalvageable in short order.”

“Sounds like your supply guy needs to be relieved,” Fox said, trying their damnedest to come off as serious and unconcerned.

Rex sighed even more gustily. “I hate you, tenten, you know. Both of you.”

“Love you too, Rex,” Fox said, finally losing the fight to contain all traces of their laughter from leaking into their voice.

As Fox disconnected, Rex threatened desperately, “Fix it.”

Fox regulated their voice back down to bored and imperious, then keyed their red bracer’s comm once more. “Thorn, dispatch a pair to escort a disorderly conduct from 501st supply, Captain Rex will have the trooper in question ready to turn over to your custody.”

“Yessir, —hey, isn’t that the shop your partner works from, Commander?”

“Yes,” Fox said, grinning under their lover’s helmet. “Yes he does.”

Sex

Things fanfic actually inserts into the source material:

Sex

Holding hands

Bizarre misunderstandings

Meticulous descriptions of food and clothing

The author’s unaddressed traumas

Found family

Plausible explanations for existing plot holes

Additional plot holes

Exciting new frontiers in speculative physics, economics, chemistry, biology, zoology, psychology, theology, and/or ontology

Tax evasion

Gender

ALT

And here are two more essays Chiang wrote about this topic:

ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web (2023)

Tumblr is not $30M in debt. You can’t get Tumblr out of the red by giving them $30M. I mean you can, for a bit, but Tumblr is operating at a $30M deficit. That means yearly, Tumblr is spending $30M more than it earns. 

None of this is to say we can’t have a Crab Day and try to get that $30M covered, sounds like fun! But that just means Tumblr breaks even for the current fiscal year. Tumblr has investors that want profits (or, well, I guess it’s Automattic’s investors, but regardless they want profit), so in order for it to continue operation, it has to either become Genuinely Profitable Very Quickly, or it has to do a fundraising round of some kind and get even more investors on board, which is really just kicking the problem down the road a year or two. 

And either way, the extremely slick and semi-alarming pitch Tumblr is making about all the changes it’s going to make to increase engagement and such is still going to be necessary, because that’s where the money is, unfortunately. I don’t like it either (my favorite bullet point from that pitch is that they will email people who have their notifications turned off, because sure, that sounds like it won’t annoy anyone who like me was already overly inclined to be annoyed) but like. Baby needs a new pair of shoelaces.