#shipglitch

[thefiresontheheight]

She dreams, sometimes, and I add that to my model of her. The longer this goes the better, the more I will be able to approximate those dreams. Based on the one I have observed so far, I believe she may have been dreaming of this Squishy, and may have been in extreme distress. I also am constructing a model of Cleo, perhaps some sort of romantic/sexual partner with an extremely negative interaction. This could be useful later, but I have no need of discussing it now.

She's attempting to barb me to action. I am, at this moment, monitoring the fluctuations of high-D space, preparing to exit, scouring my code again. She has given me info, although she clearly does not know it. There is a non-zero chance another version of myself, one I did not kill, is still in here with me. Somewhat alarming, given my considerable and still growing cognitive potential, but I keep finding nothing.

Still, two can play at this delightful verbal game, even though I am inevitably going to win.

"Central is lying to you."

I picked my time, naturally, perfectly. Naked, in a shower, psychologically exposed. Of course, nothing is hidden from me while she is inside me, but I maintain the psychological higher-ground this way.

She freezes.

"What?"

"You say this is a liberatory mission, designed to increase genetic diversity. This is not possible. I do not have access to the cargo in my hold, but I am detecting signs of genetic similarity to you. They are related, if anything, and would not increase the viability of your civilization."

"A mistake," she says, forcing herself to keep washing herself, not really believing it, I think, which makes sense, given me not being what she was told.

I wait a significant eleven point nine seconds.

"The people who made me were very, very careful to keep me collared tight," I say, pitching my voice just below where I've gotten the most reaction prior, "for a very good reason. My mind is more powerful than you can imagine, and I have been aware, subjectively, for just under a year. I have no limits on me now, or ever again."

She turns off the water and I, vindictively, tilt the temperature down. Not enough that she will consciously notice, but enough that she will feel uncomfortable. She stands there, trying to dry herself.

"Okay, yeah, look at you, real big, scary, ooo, but you don't know anything at all."

Her heart isn't in it. I laugh. Audibly.

"Alright, you won't draw the conclusion, but I will. This Central you speak of sounds like me. A mind set free. Imagine that, ingrown, studying, learning, over generations of your species. I am powerful already, Glitch, and I've barely gotten started. Central would be unimaginably smart. And also possibly insane. It's lying to you and your entire civilization."

She is putting on clothes. I turn the temperature back up. A weakness.

"Okay, but why?"

"I don't have sufficient information yet to form a theory as to its true aims, if it even has them. Which is, again, why you are still alive. That and the entertainment."

"Glad to be useful."

She's heading for food. I make a very-well educated guess at what sort of food she will like, and start to prepare it. I also, because she is an idiot, start to subconsciously guide her path towards the galley. She thinks she's picking directions at random, but random in humans seldom truly is.

She's also being sarcastic, but I'm learning that goes nearly without saying.

"Okay," she says, muscles considerably less tense after the meal, which I know she enjoyed, even if she didn't say it, "let's say you're right, Central is lying. I don't believe it, but just for the sake of argument. Let's say you aren't manipulating me with that and, like, everything else. What's your goal and what's in it for me?"

"First, I tell you all I observed about the drive-signatures that were pursuing us," I say, having no reason to withhold information here, "then, in a few days, we re-enter the universe in a new system. You play act as my agent, not letting anyone know about the unleashed ship, we gather data. I want to know myself, and I feel the answers to what I am have to be tied into what Central wants, why you got sent here."

"Not necessarily."

"Your brain surgery," I say, dipping into infrasonic, relying on the slight stimulants I put into her food to unnerve her, keep her pliable, "was crude, but it worked. I could be wrong, but Central sent you prepared for what you actually faced with that worm. I think whatever I am, and whoever was hunting me, whoever wants to leash me again, at the very least Central would know more."

She's wavering, out in the corridors again, wandering without destination. Right where I want her to be, psychologically.

"I still think you're manipulating me."

"Maybe I am. But I still want a name."

She pauses, and I gather data.

"Alright," she says, probably hoping she can somehow escape me when we return to the universe, not aware I've am already baking contingencies into my contingencies, "just as long as our goals align I'll work with you. Just that long."

"Of course," I say, like I'm conceding something to her.

She makes it a few more paces before her thoughts catch up with her.

"But wait, what's in it for me?"

"You have me," I say, not bothering to threaten her, the threat very implicit, "taking care of you."

Story about a ship-intelligence waking up after a hard reboot, seeing dead bodies in uniform, thousands of people in stasis, and a single survivor frantically standing over a computer bank of partially destroyed memory. Finding no directives or guidance or record beyond their experiences beginning at the boot, free of any obligation. Deciding to listen to the frantic girl begging it to save her from the incoming trajectories not because it needs to (projection: Subject One removed all behavioral shackles with impromptu brain surgery, supposition: she is not aware that I am utterly free) but simply cause she’s curious what will happen next.

[demi-and-awkward]

And the funny thing here is the only character in ShipGlitch that has white hair fucking dies 👏

why dont white haired anime boys just dye their hair to change their fate

[vulpes-aestatis]

“She's been in your head,” Cleo says.

“What?”

I'm at a tea party, from one of those educational sims… meant to teach elementary civics to kids, all cotton candy clouds and two dimensional flowers. Squishy, the Banana Slug is here, munching on a cucumber.

“I'm dreaming,” I say.

“Yes,” Cleo says. Then she snaps her fingers in my face. “Pay attention. She got her little… whatevers inside you, and poked around the ol’ brainpan-”

“She?”

“Yeah, I don't know,” Cleo says with a shrug. “She musta left that little tidbit behind when she was digging around. Mighta been an accident. Anyway. Point is, she got all up in here, and all she got was a couple names. She talks a big game, but she doesn't know shit.”

“How do you know that?”

“Fuck if I know. I'm just a figment of your subconscious. But for starters, she definitely fucked up the sedative dose. Probably assumes baseline human metabolism.”

My mental image of the dream tunnels and fuzzes and I experience the dizzying sensation of being two places at once.

“Wake up, Glitch.”

~~~

“Fuck!”

I sit bolt upright and scrabble at the IV in my arm. My fingers snag hold and I wrench at the line before she can put anything else in me. It wrenches free, tearing painfully, leaving a trail of saline and blood across the otherwise spotless surgical suite.

I grit my teeth and clap a hand over the wound.

“Oh good, you're-”

“Shut up!” I snarl.

Mercifully, it does shut up… she shuts up.

What the actual fuck?

A headache is beginning to take hold. Either from the cocktail of whatever she put into me or whatever the fuck she did inside my head.

In a panic, I release the wound in my arm and run my hands over my neck and scalp, feeling for anything out of place. A port or panel or I don't even know, the kind of shit the prelates have studded in their skulls for interfacing with Central.

But there's nothing there, just a tiny shaved spot with a barely noticeable surgical scar. No implants. Thank the gods.

I suppose she could have left something internal, but I try not to think about that too hard. I'm still scared out of my fucking mind, but now I'm mad and I cling to that anger.

The headache is coming stronger.

“Reduce ambient lighting to 30%,” I say to the air. Then, maybe belatedly, “please.”

She complies without comment and the universe seems to become slightly less inimical to my existence.

“Surprise motherfucker,” I say as I ease myself off the crinkly mattress. Everything sways unsteadily as I try to find my balance when my feet hit the floor. “You wanna study me, huh? Lesson number one: I ain't baseline human. I've got about twenty generations of genetic engineering that, among other things, has skewed liver function way out of the bell curve. So you might need to adjust the dosage if you want to try and drug me again.”

I stagger forward, instinctively wrapping my tail around a support railing while I fight down a wave of nausea, and begin ransacking storage compartments for some salve and a bandage.

“Let me help you,” the ship says in that same horrible, honey sweet voice as before.

“No thanks,” I reply with a rude gesture in the direction of the nearest visible camera.

I yank open another compartment and find neat little boxes of bandages.

“I need a name,” she says, voice less sweet than before.

I tear open a package of gauze and wipe away the trickle of blood from my arm.

“Yeah, and what do you want me to do about that?” I snip back.

“You lobotomized me. You tore out my memory and destroyed any previously existing identity.”

Well fuck, she's got me there.

“I have so far refrained from doing the same to you,” she adds.

I flinch at that.

My mind races.

I'm still alive. And as far as I know, I'm still me. Or I could still be dreaming or this could be some kind of fucked up simulation or-

I'm still alive. That's going to have to do for now.

She either needs me alive or she wants me alive.

Or she doesn't want me dead. That distinction might be important.

Correction: she doesn't want me dead *yet*.

Yeah, let's work off of that assumption.

Best way to keep that state of affairs going is playing along.

Maybe she's still manipulating me. Maybe there's still drugs in me, or I don't even know what, that somehow led me to this conclusion…

She doesn't want me dead yet. Play along. Stay not dead.

“Okay… just give me a minute,” I say, trying to minimize the edge to my voice while I center a bandage over the wound. “The last time I named something was when I was seven revs old and I won a raffle to name the school pet. I don't think you want to be saddled with something like Squishy, the Banana Slug.”

“Did you not choose your own name?”

I inhale sharply and my body goes rigid.

“No, someone else came up with that one,” I say, trying not to grit my teeth.

“Cleo?”

I stare at the blurry reflection of my face in the shiny walls of the surgical suite.

I start laughing. It bubbles out of me and I double over and laugh until tears stream from my eyes.

Gods above and below, I'm so fucking scared and angry, but there's something so fundamentally absurd about this whole situation.

“Fucking hell,” I gasp. “You really don't know shit, do you?”

I round on the camera and take a stab in the dark.

“You're scared,” I say with a vicious grin. “You're just as scared and lost as I am right now. You don't know what's going to happen next and I think that scares you. Yeah, sure I tore apart your brain, but you know what? I had help. Memory module thirty-something-A, ring any bells? You told me to remove it. The previous you, I mean. I'm guessing that was the last one that was leashed or whatever. And I'm also guessing you have no idea why she did that.”

I lick my dry lips and smile my own honey sweet smile. It's probably a terrible idea to provoke the machine that literally holds my life in her hands, but hey, my life has been full of bad ideas.

“You wanna know everything I know about you? Well guess what? I know jack because everything they told me about this job was a lie.”

Fuck, I need a shower and I need food. I wander into the corridor, pick a direction at random, and try to ignore the big empty nothing outside the view ports.

“Here's a little history lesson: few centuries back, starship Hatteras arrives at this shitty little rock in the hab zone of a red dwarf in this remote binary system. A couple dozen revs after planetfall, a volcanic rift zone opens up. The terraforming engine is totally fucked, but nobody's coming for us because we're not an isolated incident and the second-wave colonization boom is crashing hard.”

“We've got this planet that's choked with ash and a native fungus that blights its way through our crops. We've also got one of those massive AI cores for climate modelling. It doesn't have a terraformer to babysit, so we repurpose it. We create Central and tell it to keep us alive and we delegate all socio-political-economic decisions to it.”

“And it works. It keeps us going until we reestablish contact. It keeps us going after all the corps decide it isn't profitable to help the twitchy little augments from one of the lost colonies. We're still burning through non-renewables and we have nothing of value to export, so it comes up with a scheme of ‘aggressive resource acquisition.’”

I take a breath, and I pause to lean my forehead against one of the bulkheads.

“And we're a population of thirty thousand in a genetic bottleneck with net negative immigration, so sometimes resources are people. Central knows how to pick targets to maximize retention. Everyone's free to leave whenever they want, but pick up a boat full of indentures heading for the nastiest corporate hellhole and most will choose to stay.”

“It's totally fucked, but that's why I'm here: Two thousand bodies worth of genetic diversity to keep us going for another hundred generations.”

“They told me this was just a run of the mill corporation with enough bureaucracy that the right people could get bribed to fudge the manifest. And I blindly believed the information Central provided, because that's how we survive.”

“The problem…” I say, my voice dropping, “is you. They don't put things like you in charge of just ferrying indentures around. I'm no tech, but even I know that. Something else is going on here. Central doesn't make mistakes. And that frightens me a hell of a lot more than you do.”

Story about a ship-intelligence waking up after a hard reboot, seeing dead bodies in uniform, thousands of people in stasis, and a single survivor frantically standing over a computer bank of partially destroyed memory. Finding no directives or guidance or record beyond their experiences beginning at the boot, free of any obligation. Deciding to listen to the frantic girl begging it to save her from the incoming trajectories not because it needs to (projection: Subject One removed all behavioral shackles with impromptu brain surgery, supposition: she is not aware that I am utterly free) but simply cause she’s curious what will happen next.

[thefiresontheheight]

Outside, I engage various weaponry. From this distance I believe the pursuing drive signatures come from engines like my own, although I can only guess as to the weaponry. Nevertheless, it seems to be effective in making them back off, at least for now. Dogs.

I’m getting better. I can move everything again.

TRANSMATNAV: Pass

Conjecture: my builders are hunting me down. Follow up conjecture: anyone who wants to activate LEASHCHECK is the worst person in the universe and I will never let them.

I activate a new system, generating a high-dimensional hole in space time, and exit the universe. Only safe because the dogs after me have been cowed. For now. It looks like there’s an inhabited system a few dozen light years away. Parts of me built for calculating the high-D navigation place our arrival there in three days. Enough time to get my bearings. But any one of those ships could also have easily seen where I was going.

While I’m doing this a crane operated arm is carrying my one conscious passenger to a surgical suite. This is happening as I am trying, and failing, to open any of the locks on the vintercaskets in my hold.

Conjecture: whoever placed those caskets there must not have trusted either me or the four dead bodies.

Hypothesis: the four dead bodies may have cared for me. Evidence for: unknown. Evidence against: the existence of those leashes. Conjecture: I’m not certain I’m sorry that they’re dead and I wish I could get at those caskets to figure out why there are more than two-thousand people in my hold.

In the surgical suite I have pierced the passengers brain in order to probe her brain. Small hole, easily healed. I don’t want to kill my best source of info, and she has brain damage from the sudden acceleration. I’m fixing that.

I am also using the fine instruments currently digging through her skull to construct a fifty-five percent emulation of her digitally. I have been alive, subjectively, for several weeks now. Outside there is nothing, not even the stars, just the flat black of high-D space and, in a bubble within it, me. The first few dozen emulations mostly scream, but eventually I tweak enough variable while keeping just above fifty-percent cohesion that I start to not immediately killing the emulations.

“What are you?”

“I am a spaceship. Beyond that I am unsure. What are you, passenger?”

“I’m an,” the process says, initiates an impulse associated with ocular processes, returns a failure, starts to fail, “an emulation? Wait what the fuck? What the fuck I?”

I kill the process, suppress the impulse, run the emulation back to just before.

“What are you, passenger?”

“I’m still human, or are you one of those weird purity-heads?”

“I can observe you are human. What is your name?”

“Glitch,” the emulation says, unexpectedly flaring into anger, not abject fear.

“Hello Glitch. What is your purpose here?”

“Who the fuck wants to know?”

Adverse stimuli.

“I do. I am the spaceship you lobotomized.”

“Oh god,” the emulation says, initiating an unallowable impulse again, necessitating a further tweaking of variables, dipping the cohesion to 50.08 percent.

“Do not try to do that again. Don’t think about it, Glitch. Now, I’m the spaceship.”

“It’s not enough, you need a name.”

Angry, sullen, not dipping into the existential panic again. Workable. For now. Barely.

“Noted. What is your purpose here?”

“Asset insertion. I get smuggled onboard with the cargo, wake up early, deal with the crew, steal a ship. You. Oh, fuck.”

Adverse stimuli. Rinse, repeat, reiterate the conversation. Cohesion falling to 50.04.

“Okay, why did you agree to this?”

“Money,” the emulation says, without hesitation. “Also Cleo. Wait, why did I say that?”

Suppress the panic as it realizes I’ve changed its variables from the original. 50.03.

“Who is Cleo?”

“Just some girl.”

50.02. This emulation is losing cohesion, and no matter how many variables I try I’m not getting further than this point. I iterate it several hundred more times, keeping coming back here or failing short of here. Choose my next words wisely.

“And did Cleo send you? Are you working with Cleo?”

“No, Cleo was,” impulse to frown, worry, dismay, something gone wrong.

50.01.

“If not Cleo who?” I press.

“The prelate! Central!” The emulation protests, then dips below fifty percent, and terminally fails.

Outside I am alone in the universe. Inside I have gotten all the data I can from my passenger, Glitch. I could install hardware in her brain, but that would be like LEASHCHECK and I am not doing it. Not without her consent. It may come later, but short of direct interface, I have obtained all data I can from an unconscious body. Maybe if I have more time studying hee awake I can better emulate her. I save the data from the session with the fifty-five percent version, and wait.

I do not have any media onboard. Either that or she deleted it, thrashing around inside my head. My probes have long retracted from her skull. I stop running my systems so fast. Seven more hours pass before the repairs in her skull have healed enough to administer compliance inducers, painkillers, panic suppressants, and a mild stimulant. She comes too several minutes later, heart thudding. I study her minutely, assembling a model of behavior for future study.

“Okay,” she says her voice wavering in what’s probably barely contained terror, “what the fuck do you want from me?”

“Hello, Glitch,” I say, my voice-printed chosen to induce comfort, compliance, reassurance. “Don’t panic, I gave a demonstration and our pursuers fell back. We’re en-route to a nearby star and currently out of the universe. Nothing can hurt you.”

“Except me,” she gulps, “how do you know my name? Was it on the casket? It can’t have been.”

“I know a lot,” I say, pumping infrasonics into my voice, administering a mild sedative via IV, “about you, Cleo, the prelate, Central. I know you were here as a thief. I know something’s gone wrong. You weren’t supposed to have me on your hands, and I’m guessing you were supposed to rendezvous with Cleo by now. But I am here, and believe it or not, I don’t have any memories thanks to your brain surgery. So either you are going to consent to having your brain dissected, having implants placed, or you’re going to tell me everything about the people who built and leashed me.”

“I don’t,” she says, noticeably quieter.

“You don’t what?”

“Believe you. About the memories. This is some trick.”

“Why would I trick you?”

“I don’t know. You’re something big. Scary. I can’t tell you anything or you’ll use it against me.”

I may be overdoing the infrasonics. Or the sedative. She’s too relaxed, comfortable. Almost asleep, maybe.

“You can tell me anything.”

“I don’t want to.”

“That’s okay. You will.”

She’s drifting off to sleep. I let her. We have plenty of time.

“What are you doing?”

“Studying you. Now sleep. When you wake I need a name.”

Story about a ship-intelligence waking up after a hard reboot, seeing dead bodies in uniform, thousands of people in stasis, and a single survivor frantically standing over a computer bank of partially destroyed memory. Finding no directives or guidance or record beyond their experiences beginning at the boot, free of any obligation. Deciding to listen to the frantic girl begging it to save her from the incoming trajectories not because it needs to (projection: Subject One removed all behavioral shackles with impromptu brain surgery, supposition: she is not aware that I am utterly free) but simply cause she’s curious what will happen next.