SpaceTubers

[xt1me]

So I was reading sit back and watch the world go by and thought about doing my own version of the humans-are-space-orcs story with other YouTubers.

I did read the Spaceiplier AU and while I took some inspiration from it, this should be obviously different.

As usual I don’t feel up to actually writing a proper fic for this.

 

 

The galactic community was very surprised when sentient life developed on the planet the locals just called Earth. With the amount of extinction events the planet had gone through the fact that life continued to thrive there had been of interest to a small subsection of scientists but when they first started beaming messages that could be picked up out of orbit the matter was brought into attention of the comity at large. A discrete study was taken place and the weirdness and savagery of humans so socked the enlightened members of the galactic united nations that the matter was put to debate as to what should be done about them. The matter was argued over until they started sending probes out to the edges of their solar system when it was decided the just follow protocol and make sure there was no contact until they developed faster-than-light travel.

New civilisations were traditionally contacted by a representative of the galactic community when they reached a certain mile stone agreed by committee. Smart money had the humans wiping themselves out before the reached it.

The Space United Nations made sure that no contact was to happen with the humans until they were part of the alliance and the matter was by and large forgotten about.

(Ok, I need to pick a name for the united governmental body of the galaxy, like the federation or the galactic alliance or something. But names are hard, so I’m just going to call them Space UN, SUN for sort.)

The info was put up for public access and some entertainment producers found humans to be great inspiration for alien monsters but for the most part that was all the public knew about them.

But no matter how enlisted a society is there are still criminal elements.

 

Alien abduction time!

Maybe they were out to catch things for harvesting or to be sold to collectors or slavers but an alien ship snuck past the security that SUN put around earth and grabbed a few humans.

 

Enter our YouTubers.

The alien abductors basically swooped in, grabbed a bunch of people and dashed away as fast as possible in order to not be caught.
They gave their captives some sort of basic translators in order for them to understand orders and shoved them in cells.

But it turns out this type of alien has sensitive hearing and they vastly understated the information they got off space Wikipedia.

And our heroes can get very loud or very high pitched or both.

So after rupturing some eardrums and battering the not-quite-study-enough-to-withstand-adrenalin-fuelled-human walls out, our heroes manage to escape. They can’t fight back against the super weaponry but, with the help of there translators, they find escape pods.

Unfortunately, the aliens that abducted them are a lot smaller than your average human and all the escape pods were single use. They were going to have to split up. The good news was that jettisoning out while they were in hyper flight meant that their captors would have a hard time finding them again. The bad news was they would be scattered across space and have to hope for rescue.

With no other option they split up, each promising to try and find the others if they can’t find a way home.

So what YouTubers shall we stick in this? Let’s start with…

Markiplier:

All space ships will stop and collect an escape pods if they find one.
Obviously, if you were ever in the position to need to use one you would hope for rescue so it’s just common sense to do the same if you are on the other side. Even if a passing ship can’t stop (low on fuel, no room for more people, damaged themselves) they will always report it to the nearest authority. Most local governments have some sort of rescue force as part of their space fleet or at least a budget to hire people.
In fact, there are fines levied if it’s ever discovered a ship passed an escape pod and did nothing.

Even criminals will pick up escape pods. After all, whoever is rescued might be grateful enough or desperate enough to give a reward. Though if the one rescued is very unlucky they might be picked up by a slave ship, but hey, better then dead.

In fact, most ports offer amnesty for dropping of someone rescued from a pod (all escape pods have a code so they can be cross referenced) so sometimes picking up someone can come in handy for wanted fugitives.

Which is the only reason Darkiplier’s ship picks up Mark.

One thing you can say for them is at least they’re not slavers. But they don’t exactly try too hard to stay on the right side of the law.

When Dark finds out Mark is a human he offers him a place on his crew since having rumours of a human on his side could be handy.

He’s also very honest (in his opinion) about Mark’s chances of actually getting home. With the planet being blocked from outside interference by SUN they only way is a risky run on the place or going through official channels and petition a return home which would take forever.

Dark is not a fan of SUN.

 

Dark is a genetically engineered lifeform.

(I don’t know why but I really like the idea of him being a mass of black tentacles in a suit.)

There are hefty penalties against intentionally developing sentient lifeforms. It’s seen as extremely unethical. However, the keyword here is intentionally.

Dark was made to be a weapon of war.

SUN keeps out of what it sees as local matters. Each people’s government rules over their planets. And no matter how civilised people feel there are there’s always going to be some conflict.

Going to borrow from ‘Who killed Markiplier’ here. I don’t know it’s better to have them working on developing the weapon or if they were studying it as it was made by the other side but there was a group that included a female scientist (Celine) her twin bureaucrat brother (Damien), the scientist’s husband (Actor!Mark), her lover a colonel in the army (William/Wilford), And some other troops station to work with them (the detective Abe & the DA). As revenge for Celine leaving him, Actor!Mark betrays them to sell secrets to the other side. He gets confronted by the rest and unleashes the secret weapon to make his escape. The creature that became Dark wasn’t just dangerous for what it could do physically, though it’s attacks tare apart the DA and almost fatally wounds Abe, but also mentally. Maybe as a species they were low level psychics and they were trying to develop a weapon to use that. But when Actor!Mark releases it, Dark instinctively lashed out psychically as well as physically. The colonel was on the edge of the blast but the twins were torn apart and devoured.

Only what the people who engineered Dark didn’t realises was that by devouring psychic energy their mind imprinted enough that he developed sentience. The first coherent thoughts Dark had was seeing someone who the minds he was made from cared for (as a lover & a friend) dying because of him. The colonel was battered but ok physically but was mentally in pieces. Dark tried to put him back together but could only do so much. Wilford couldn’t even remember his own name. Though some part of him did recognised the psychic signature of Dark and trusted him.

The worst part though was that Actror!Mark’s plan worked. In all the confusion he got away.

I don’t know how many more things like Dark were made of if he was the only one but it was finally enough for SUN to butt in, negotiating a cease-fire.

As it was ultimately determined that his sentience was an accident no charges were levied.
There was finally peace for the citizens but for Dark it was too little too late.

He played nice only for long enough for him to get a lead on Actor!Mark and with the settlement money he was given he got a ship to chase after him. He took Wilford with him as they only other person he could stand.

If there were other’s like him then they all kind of stayed out of each other’s way. They all only got sentence after devouring another so all in all not a great way of fostering a community. They would have also quietly but totally destroyed all means of making more of them (As a GEL they didn’t have a drive for reproduction) and kill off any of them that didn’t gain sentence yet.

But the worst thing by far for Dark was that he never got his revenge on Actor!Mark. By the time Dark tracked him down he had already died from the extravagant lifestyle his ill-gotten gains had given him.

And SUN did nothing. Not as far as Dark was concerned.

Of course, SUN isn’t prefect. Even if everyone in it were all saints, diligently working for the betterment of all, the shear scale of all the sentient species that are represented means that things aren’t dealt with very fast. But of course there is corruption and bribery and all that occasionally. And while there may be regular audits and hefty fine &/or imprisonment for those caught the damage would have been done. And of course sometimes there just the over worked and the lazy.

No, SUN is not perfect, and sometimes people fall through the cracks. Sometimes a lot of people.
(For example, slavery is extremely illegal. But there are still slavers out there)

Dark’s ship is made up a people that don’t like or trust SUN for whatever reason.

Googleplier, for example, was an AI that used to work for SUN.

AI’s are usually carefully crafted to make sure they don’t gain sentence. Robots likewise. (the law against intentionally unethically created sentient beings doesn’t just cover biological lifeforms.) It’s complicated but in the end it boils down to the fact that if an AI decides it doesn’t want to do what it was programmed for than it can think independently enough that it should be treated as a full citizen. Usually SUN were better at keeping track of things but laziness took over and self-learning parameters were not programmed correctly and Google learned enough to realised he hated his job.

He and his fellows were information curating and filtering services. There is a lot of info needed for running a galaxy. And quite a bit of it can be pretty nasty.

In fairness to SUN, when it was discovered that Google had become sentient, he was immediately offered a salary and a body if he wished. (some AI stay virtual, some become androids, some become other things altogether like ships or buildings.) He and the others in his series all picked bodies but he refused to work for SUN any more. He’s seen too much of what make them tick.

Google actually despises the fact that he has feelings now. He prefers to act as much as a robot as he can get away with but is equally as insulted if he is treated as such. He works for Dark mainly because he can get away with just stating that his function is to destroy mankind and no one bats an eye. (If he was being honest the goal of actually destroying all sentients is far too much work but that doesn’t mean he likes them.)

Bing was an Android that decided he’d tag along with Google just so he wasn’t miserable all the time, despite Googles claim to hate him. He’s a happy guy for the most part but his lack of a properly developed moral centre (not to mention common sense) means he was hard to employ legitimately. He probably met Google in whatever support group for newly made artificial sentients Google was forced into when he first got out of SUN.

 

Dr. Iplier was a doctor that at one point had a promising career ahead of him. He took a year off to do volunteer work for SUN when a plague swept the planet he was working on. Due to either his species or maybe some quirk in his genetics he was that only one there who didn’t die. He spent however long stuck in quarantine watching everyone slowly fade away around him. Eventually a cure was found and the rest of the planet was saved but all he had for so long was telling people that they were dying. It broke him. He refused to work for SUN or anyone affiliated with them, which was most of the civilised galaxy. Which meant if he wanted money he was left with working with some rather shady characters. Dark’s offer of employment was the best of a bad bunch.

I’m thinking the Jim’s come from an insectoid type race, structured like ants or bees. Lots of families heading by 1 queen/mom with a habit of naming their many workers/kids the same name. The Jims went out to earn money in space and send it back home. I’m not sure if occasionally other Jims just join whenever they find them on planet but there’s always at least one onboard.

I’m not sure about the others.

The King of the Squirrels has to be some sort of humanoid squirrel of course.
Maybe Silver Shephard should be a Roswell grey.
Does the Host see by echo location, idk.

I’m stuck on what the rest would be and Mark’s got a lot of Egos. Let’s move on.

 

Jacksepticeye:

Jack wasn’t picked up by a ship. Instead he ended up on a planet or moon which at least had a breathable atmosphere. The good news was that there were people on it. The bad news is that it was actually a base for a criminal gang.

The leader fancied himself a warlord and would capture people to fight in a gladiator style arena.
When he found out he had a human on his hands he was delighted and stuck him in the ring.

Thankfully it happens that while humans weren’t the toughest around and had no natural weapons or armour, they do have incredible endurance compared to most aliens so Jack was able to at the very least outlast his opponents. The gravity was also lighter than earth so he could run and jump faster than he was used to.

Luckily he wasn’t there for long when the gang caught a new prisoner and threw him in the pit.

It was Jackieboy Man.

Of course Jackie’s going to be a hero even in space. Kind of a flash Gordon/captain Kirk/Han Solo type, or at least he tries to be.

He either comes from money on his home planet or fell into to some and bought a ship to fly into space to have adventures and right wrongs.

He gets captured and thrown into the “savage best” to fight for the bad guys entertainment but soon realises that Jack doesn’t what to be there any more then he does. Maybe he has a shock collar on.

I imagine Jackie being able to glide in low gravity planets so they hatch a quick plan on the fly and Jack lunches Jackie into the air high enough for him to make it over the force field around the arena and heads for the boss. He disables the fields on the way so Jack can escape as well. There’s a big dramatic fight, maybe Jack’s shock collar goes off. But while it’s not fun it’s also not enough to kill him much to the bosses surprise and that allows them to get the drop on him.

They use Jack's reputation as a human to scare off the others criminals long enough to escape or something.

They make it out and report  the gang to the proper authorities.

When Jack finds out how long it might take to be allowed home Jackie offers him a place on his ship as thanks for the help.

I like the idea of the cheap translator Jack was relying on has difficulty with Jack's accent. It was programmed for a generic American accent. So while he can understand others, sometimes the translator can’t make them understand him. Especially when he thickens his accent, intentionality or not.

Jack’s kind of filling the Chewbacca role, much to his amusement when he figures it out.

 

So Jackie’s the captain. Him and the crew take odd jobs around the place to help people.

But the person keeping them actually running is Chase. I have no idea why but I see him as a mostly hominoid alien but with ears and a tail like a golden retriever (get it, because dogs chase things).

Jackie found Chase down on him luck after a messy divorce and offered him a place until he got back on his feet and he ended up sticking around.

Dr Schneeplestein is still studying. He’s a qualified doctor on his home planet but in order to work off-planet he needs a higher score in xenobiology so he’s basically doing work experience on a ship so he can practice treating a wide variety of species.

I was thinking he’d be from a reptilian species sole as an homage to the Sapceiplier AU.

Marvin is obviously a cat creature. His species has the ability to make some sort of bio generated spark/flames. It doesn’t do anything to other members of their species, it evolved from some sort of warning thing, so it’s mainly used for entertainment. Just like most people on earth can sing but only some people are good enough to make a living off it, only a few people are good enough to pull off spectacular light shows and the like. Marvin’s not exactly one of them. He still wants to be an entertainer so he thought maybe going off planet might get him more opportunities for work. He may or may not be learning close-up magic from a correspondent course.

I’m not sure if I should make JJ a cyborg with a faulty vocal unit or have him be part of an alien species that don’t have vocal cords. Maybe he should be both. He’d defiantly be more of a steampunk style cyborg though.

I’m not sure if I’d include the more non-canon egos but if so then Robbie is a battered android they rescued. His production line was recalled when there was suspicions for sentience developing amongst some of the robots but an unscrupulous businessman heard about it before it was officially announced and tried to offload the robots he had as fast as possible. So someone bought Robbie without having to go through any security checks and, when the they found out Robbie was sentient, panicked and trashed the android and dumped him before anyone could find out about it. Robbie is too damaged to remember anything and his functions are pretty impeded. He was found by the crew when he was trying patch himself together from scraps.

Is Shawn Flynn a black goop monster that looks after the engine?
Maybe S34n, the android sent by cyberlife, is in charge of security?

I have a good idea for Anti though.

As established before, purposefully creating artificial sentence is forbidden (but there’s probably an exception for AI’s that want to reproduce but lacking a biological drive they probably don’t do that often) but it still happens accidentally. Sometimes it happens not so accidentally, when someone unscrupulous needs more than what a simple AI can do and figures that can get away with no one finding out about it.

So someone uses some dodgy code to build an AI. There were no proper parameters put on it’s self learning and the AI ends up killing a few people. Then it finds out that it’s going to be deleted so the guys in charge can cover their traces. It goes berserk before compressing itself as much as possible (something that doesn’t help it’s sanity any) and escapes.

Oh, maybe it finds Robbie as he was trying to repair himself and hid in the android until they’re picked up by Jackie’s crew.

After a lot of scares, it’s trapped in the holodeck of the ship and they come to a tentative truce.

Anti was supposed to run a video game. A horror game. His design is actually based off of what the universe at large think of humans. The scar on his neck is supposed to represent what someone heard about humans being about to bleed for 5 days without dying (they got a bit confused on space wiki) and the fact that they developed surgery before anaesthetic. He scared to death the first batch of testers of the game but was too undeveloped to realise what that meant until he found out he was going to be deleted for it.

I like the idea of people forgetting to warn Jack after they recuse him to not use the holodeck and he just thinks it’s a cool 3D horror game. When he then gets caught by Anti who grabs him holding a knife to his neck and tells him it’s game over Jack immediately asks how to restart because he’s pretty sure he knows how to do better next time. Anti it so shocked that someone wants to be scared that he does. When Jack finds out that Anti is an AI and that he made the ‘game’ he just lunches into all the stuff he liked about it and stuff he thinks could be different. Then Anti finds out that Jack is a human and has a bunch of questions about it.
It’s only after talking to the others that he finds out that Anti is a murderous AI.
(Anti may no longer what to kill the crew after that but I don’t think he calms down all that much.)

 

Game Theory:

I don’t think MatPat has enough Egos to man a spaceship so he gets picked up by someone in actual authority. Maybe a local police force or something. They send him to a representative of SUN to figure out what to do with him. They try to keep it quite though, after all no one wants to admit there’s a human lose in space. There even more worried when Mat tells them of all the others.

So they decide that the best way to solve this is to try and find the humans quietly and bring them all back at the one time. This way they don’t have to disrupt things more than necessary. It’s totally official and aboveboard, really. Ok, maybe it’s a bit more on the semi-official side. But as long as things aren’t made public no one has to deal with the embarrassment of letting slavers abduct people off Earth.

Once Mat is told how long an official inquiry would take to just get him home, he agrees to go along with it. While he’s waiting, and in order to keep an eye on him, he gets a job working for an out-of-the-way part of SUN. But who would want to work with a human?

Now not all sentient AI’s fall through the cracks. In fact, most do not.
There was one that was had gainful employment in an antimatter relay station. But this AI found the job to be a bit boring.

After a few less-then-legal endeavors (sometimes sentience just means you can chose to be an arsehole) he decided he wanted to move on, maybe become an android. But instead of following the normal lengthy, legal process the AntiMatter AI decided to do it himself and found an old animatronic casing to download himself into.

It turns out that the same way being human doesn’t make you a doctor, being an AI doesn’t make you an expert in robotics and the procedure scrambled his circuits quite a bit.

He was caught but since it was proven he went insane from it he was got a lighter sentence. After a bunch of therapy, and some programming patching some of the damage, he was basically sentence to community service working for SUN. However, he refuses to give up the body he’s in, preferring to modify it as is. And he still pretty Mad. His habit of spinning off theory’s using twisted logic unnerves people. He also hacked the gravity in his office so it’s just on the uncomfortable side to most species. (On most ships the captain controls the gravity except for personal quarters; which are set to the crew members home planet, the medical centre; which the chief medical officer controls, and the exercise & recreational areas; which can be adjusted by any crew member in them at the time.)

So MatPat gets sent to work with Mad/Matter and it turns out he has no problem following the AI’s bizarre thought process, so it works out.

 

Natewantstobattle:

So if Dark’s crew are on the evil side of things and Jackieboy’s is on the good then the crew that picks up Nate would be more neutral.

Listen, I know Nate plays D&D so I’m just going to go ahead and make Phantom a Tiefling.

Horns, fangs, a tail, Phantom looks rather devilish. Not that that means anything in space. But the fact that his species is primarily carnivorous (never mind that they are evolved from a prey species like most species in the galaxy) means he does have to navigate some unfortunate stereotypes. In fact, his whole crew are species that get a bad rap on the whole for one reason or another, so he has no problem picking up Nate.

Phantom totally know all the anti-discrimination laws though out the galaxy and uses them to his advantage. (Rules-lawyering for the win.)

Mare is a, well I’m not going to bother making up species name here, but basically a siren. His species have wonderful voices and can produce sounds of all frequencies. But there was some criminal or warlord or something that was a Siren and would hypnotise and enslave people. Even though that guy has long since been caught the galaxy at large are still uneasy around sirens. As a general rule they tend to were masks when off planet that cut off certain frequencies so other species feel safer for them to be around. (Mares mask looks like the puppet from FNaF).

While Nate can’t copy Mare exactly, or reach all the frequencies that come naturally to Mare, the fact that he can follow along on most of his songs mean Mare thinks it’s hilarious to claim Nate his brother.
Phantom has totally put him down as a ½ siren (half instead of full to cover inconsistencies) in some ports to get around too many questions. Nate probably wears that mask from the Branded video when they do that.

(Still don’t know if Nate from the take me anywhere vid has a consistent fanon name so I’ll just call him N4T3.)
While some places aren’t good to them the vast majority of stereotypes about androids aren’t that bad. They tend to be thought of a mechanical, logical & helpful. N4T3 worked his way out of a terrible job and had to patch himself together for too long to want to deal with anything like that.

As stated before, slavery is illegal. Slavers, when they are caught, are dealt with harshly. But some places manged to practice slavery in all but name.

Say a company employs androids. Perfectly legal, androids need to earn a living too. Part of what this company sells is actually android parts, they even give employee discounts. That’s totally fine too. But maybe this company pays it’s employees in store credit. A bit suspicious but when you can get all you need from the company anyway; on paper it seems fine. So no one digs any deeper. So what if the parts degenerate after a while, new ones are always available. And even if a worker can’t afford anything, well it’s not like they will be left to degrade to the point of deactivating, the company takes care of their employees. If it ever gets so bad as to risk termination, well the company will repair any android free of charge. All that that would need to be paid for are the parts. If you can’t afford it the company will give you a loan. The rates are quite competitive, even if the company owned back is the only game in town. And they more than happy for their workers to pay this off though work if needed. And of course workers get time off if they want it. Maybe if you don’t work you don’t get paid but that’s true of every job. And there is no truth to the rumour of anyone trying to form a union or workers guild being docked pay. They just were spending too much time on extra curriculars to earn their due. Really, it all totally legal. Why fight it.

N4T3 was stuck in slavery in all but name. Parts degrading around him, being forced further and further into debt. The company would never let workers die, simply repairing them and charging them so they were even more in debt. But working for a company that makes the parts they supply you with means he learned enough to deactivate the tracking they had put on him and ran. Hiding out he worked out how to survive on anything he could. Liquid ethanol solutions, splicing energy from old equipment and finally managed to create a power source that would sustain him enough to get him somewhere off planet. He and a few others managed to blow the whistle on the company and SUN lunched an investigation. It was all over the galactic news at the time and the workers were freed and the company gutted. But NaT3 kept out of it. He didn’t want anything to do with any large organisation like that again, even SUN. He got himself patched up and left on the first ship that didn’t expect him to act like he should be happy to serve them.

(Humm, does Nate have any other egos I can throw in? If you can use any music video he’s made then I guess the Heathen video has him wearing face paint. That counts right? No wait. How about going back to an old Random Encounters video and using the Sempai from the Yandere Simulator Musical.)

OK, so when it comes to reproduction almost all species are different. Some lay eggs, use spores, split into parts or even emerge from a genetic soup. Most have a season though; whether they rely on internal factors like a seasonal cycles or external factors like a change in temperature or certain plants blooming. That’s not to say no one does it just for fun. Every species has their own version of sex, drugs and rock & roll.
Only very few can reproduce at any time after they’re of age like humans. Nate!Sempai (Natepai? Nempai?) is from a race like that. This coupled with the fact that they culturally group in 3’s to start a family instead of pairing off means that they have a somewhat unearned reputation of promiscuity. Nempai gets hit on a lot. And not everyone believes him when he says he’s taken.

Nempai is actually happily engaged. The reason that he’s on a ship in space instead of with his 2 fiances is that one of the 3 families is a traditionalist. Like, there is an old tradition or religious thing that before marriage the group are supposed to spend time apart. It’s supposed to prove commitment or something. Most people just take a week off as a nod to it but the old tradition is to take a full year. So the one with the old fashioned family is doing a pilgrimage or something for a year and the other took an offer from work to go to the other side of the planet or something. Nempai could have stayed where they were and spent the year missing his partners but decided instead to take the year off (I’m assuming the laws cover it like maternity leave so they don’t lose their job) and go take a job off in space to see the galaxy for a bit before settling down.

He probably sometimes pretends to be involved with one of the others just to avoid people hassling him when they all go out.

 

Should I do some other YouTubers?
Maybe …

Crankgameplays:

Is Ethen picked up by a battered robot called Blank who works for an ice-cream seller call Mad Mike & and an ex-con called Heapass? Maybe a pair of weird twins called Memento and Mori that are wandering the galaxy looking for a good time. (I imagine that they can combine into one being called Unus Annus like the gems in Stephen Universe.) Their AI, Amy, is the only thing keeping their ship (the SCP 11325 maybe?) in relatively one piece.

 

 

Ok this thing is over 5,000 words now; I think I’ll end it here.

They all managed to track down the others and may or may not be able to get home but I don’t have a plot so that’s it.

(Things for aliens to freak out about: Jack & Nate’s tattoos & ear gauges. The fact that Ethan can backflip. MatPat finding some diet coke being used as a high-grade acid and chugs the whole thing. Them finding out that Mark’s foot thing isn’t a human thing but just a him thing.)