The initial core of this piece was the idea of the Foundation prioritizing containment over empathy. Not the most novel concept, but the YouTube-based thing was intriguing enough for me to get a greenlight despite having a severely overworked/overthought containment and anomaly process that really overburdened the initial draft.
Speaking to the final piece: the core here, really, is Gina as the central POV character. The problem she solves narratively is "how do you empathize with an anomaly that the Foundation definitionally doesn't understand" — my answer was to give you someone to empathize with, who in turn empathizes.
The logical train from here is to figure out what kind of person empathizes with an entity in a YouTube video. Hence: cats. There are multiple references to Gina's life with cats, whether her own or her family's, their older ages (and her older age) suggesting a life of learning to empathize with things that can't communicate as clearly as, say, other people. I'm hoping the details here do a good balance of this without making her feel like a "crazy cat lady" or otherwise overly isolated.
Cats were actually there from the start — I thought it was funny having this start from a mom forwarding an email, as moms are wont to do, not realizing that the cat that looks just like the old family cat actually is the family cat — but making it core to Gina's connection to the entity adds a lot of emotional force to the two cat images themselves, particularly having it laid onto the final video as 4361's expression of forgiveness.
Anyway: Gina's meant to be relatable, a high-level office drone with a good relationship with her usual coworkers and an amiable, casual-but-professional approach to the work. Likable and understandable in the initial posts so that you can willingly follow her down the emotional rabbit hole.
Markos isn't much of a character by contrast — he can't be, he's essentially the at polar opposite of our narrative point-of-view — but I tried to make sure that his acts are ultimately understandable from a Foundation perspective, even if he's also a little cruel and heedless about it. He's correct to prioritize containment, correct to be more concerned than Gina is about security, but there's a version of this story where he's not an asshole an an amicable partnership leads to a better understanding and a workable but more humane containment. Alas.
Some other details of note:
- Venti and Gina's various jokes re: his name was basically a total accident of my fairly arbitrary naming conventions for characters (i.e. I make them up on the spot without giving it more than a second's thought).
- The MD4 hashes in the video titles correspond to actual messages, but they're pretty basic and also legacy from an earlier iteration of the anomaly, so I didn't bother to explain them or suggest that they were relevant.
- Amblyopia is the medical term for lazy eye, which can often manifest as a vision problem that can't be easily diagnosed externally. i.e. you're going blind, but no one else can tell. fitting for how ambly.OP.ia allows the video to remain in its "innocuous" whited-out state.