#Tak’s Ship AI @Zim: I absolutely hate you but if given the choice I’ll take you driving over Dib

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May I hear your thoughts on Tak's ship and Dib's relationship? How they get along?

Not well at all. Dib wants to use Tak’s ship as an actual ship and The Ship’s AI will do anything in its programming to prevent that. They’ve occasionally bonded over their dislike of Zim, and that mutual dislike has been used to get the Ship to work with Dib, but even then Tak’s Ship would often rather have Zim drive them because even though Zim is Zim, they’re a pretty good pilot from what they saw in that dogfight with him and he takes pretty good care of his Voot Cruiser. Unlike Dib, who has no idea what he’s doing because the headlights in Tak’s ship alone are more advanced than anything on Earth.

Plus, that sense of Irken supremacy can still be found in Irken AIs, especially AIs created by uploading existing personalities like Tak’s Ship AI, so Tak’s Ship holds the belief that the only person worthy to pilot it is an Irken, not a big-headed mammal from an uncivilized planet of raw pollution that hasn’t even come close to the rest of the galaxy in technological advancement. To the AI, Zim is insufferable and they hate him, but at least he’s a better pilot than Dib and he’s an actual Irken, so they’ll keep the complaints to a minimum if they ever find Zim in the cockpit

(Also a small headcanon about Tak’s Ship that’s kind of important here: The Ship’s AI uses Tak’s voice and has a bunch of her personality traits, but it isn’t an exact copy of Tak and considers itself mostly separate from her.)

Dib needs to either trick or convince the ship to even get in the cockpit. The Ship has found that the best and most consistent way to prevent Dib from driving it is not letting him into the cockpit in the first place, and although Dib has successfully reasoned with it once or twice, 99% of the time Dib needs to force his way in or trick the ship into opening up. Once he’s inside the Ship can’t eject him (Tak already used the escape pod) and the AI has a bunch of rules that prevent it from killing the driver.

Due to Dib briefly uploading his personality into the ship, Dib is considered one of the “Drivers” of the ship. Lower priority than Tak, but he’s still considered a driver. Because of this, The AI can’t kill him directly and isn’t allowed to take full control of the ship when Dib is driving. It can’t force itself to crash either. So that’s why Tak’s Ship, despite very much wanting Dib dead with no care as to how that happens, can’t just kill him.

But the AI is crafty and one of the personality traits it got from Tak’s personality is her immense pettiness, so it gets revenge on Dib when it can.

The AI can’t kill Dib directly and what it can really do to him is limited, but there’s more than a few ways for it to limit what Dib is able to do.

I already mentioned that it does its best to keep Dib out of the cockpit, but when Dib is in the cockpit, the Ship hides all but the extremely essential parts. When Dib is driving, he can only access the steering controls, hyperdrive controls, weapons and a few tiny things things like the landing gear and lights. That’s it. The AI hides and restricts the rest. Because Dib is considered a valid driver, but isn’t considered the ship’s OWNER, he can’t just request that the ship give him back these things and have them be given back.

And apart from the steering, Dib doesn’t know how to properly use the things he has access to because the Ship refuses to translate things. In fact, it couldn’t even if it tried. Dib originally used the ship as a translator/computer in Backseat Drivers From Beyond The Stars via a remote connection, and when Zim woke up the ship’s AI, it automatically detected that remote connection and put the entire computer system into lockdown, revoking it’s access to the Irken database and any foreign connections. This means that it can’t update things like maps, can’t connect remotely to anything or be remote controlled, and can’t translate things from Irken, as the translation software relies on the Irken database to work.

Dib can’t disable the lockdown, Tak’s Ship can’t disable the lockdown, Zim can’t even disable the lockdown. The only person that can take the ship out of lockdown and reconnect it to the Irken database is Tak because she’s the Ship’s owner. So even if the ship wanted to, it can’t translate stuff for Dib or give him information that it doesn’t already know, as it can’t access the Irken internet and look things up anymore.

So if Dib wants to use the hyperdrive and doesn’t want to miss his target by several thousand light years and die in the cold dark emptiness of space, he needs the ship to cooperate and tell him exactly what to do, because Dib can’t read the maps or tell what he’s doing.

With weapons, Dib has full access to all weapons (mostly because the ship only has one) and can aim and fire it, but the AI also has access to the aiming systems and has a tendency to force Dib to miss shots.

And lastly, Tak’s Ship has one master plan to get Dib to stop using it: using up all its fuel.

Dib has no way of acquiring anything that an advanced ship can use as fuel. Tak’s Ship runs on concentrated dark matter for the main engine and uses exotic matter to power the hyperdrive, neither of which can be acquired on Earth. Earth scientists still consider dark and exotic matter to be completely theoretical topics that aren’t even worth researching, and it will be eons until humanity finally figures that stuff out. And that’s assuming that they ever do.

Tak’s ship also doesn’t have a modern hyperdrive that makes its own exotic matter on account of Tak’s Ship being built from scrap on a garbage planet. Tak didn’t have the time or resources to try and find things like a modern hyperdrive, so she used older stuff that she took from the wrecks of older ship models.

And Dib can’t go to charted space and buy this stuff for two main reasons: the language barrier, as English isn’t spoken outside of Earth since Earth is a recently discovered garbage world that isn’t worth travelling to, and money, as Earth money is useless outside of Earth and Dib has no way of acquiring accepted currencies.

Fuel is in very limited supply for Dib, and the Ship knows that. Even when Dib isn’t using the ship, the AI purposely leaves parts of itself (often parts that Dib is unaware of) on so it keeps draining fuel. The AI also refuses to show Dib how much fuel it has left or even the fact that it uses fuel at all, so Dib doesn’t know about the fuel usage. The AI also refuses to show Dib any damage it’s taken.

It’ll take a long time since Dark Matter Drives (the type of engine that Tak’s ship has) are really fuel efficient, but eventually Tak’s ship will run out of fuel and Dib won’t be able to get it going again. The AI also has hopes that it’ll run out of fuel when Dib is driving it, just so it can take him down with it.