💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~fudge › short-story-tapping.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 11:33:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Thinking about someone else's writing got ship's AIs as a concept bouncing around my head, and one of idle wonderings was what if that set up the core ideas of this short story.
To begin with I was just going to post a one line summary, then I thought it'd be funny to write a paragraph framing it with some narrative, then when I tried to write that it just kept getting larger and larger!
Here's the story it unfolded into.
Content warnings:
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I'm sat in my cabin, running the last tuning figures for the day.
It's nice.
Well ok, this particular part of my work is tedious, but ignoring that.
There's my cup of coffee, comfy lighting, and a new album I picked up before leaving.
Music is great for dull work, a good solid beat really helps get mental autopilot to kick in.
Speakers on, volume up, check out.
The background music to my background music is the sound of a happy ship.
Switcher whine, ticking pumps, and always underneath it, the ultimate bassline: the rumble from the drive.
Doesn't take long in space before you start to think like the old hands.
Drive sound good? Safety. You're ok, anything else'll wash out in time.
Yeah yeah, these days we got all sorts of fancy kit, any meaningful ship is a person in its own right, and you know they'll notice anything way before meatbags like us can.
All the same, you can't help but listen.
The main plasma interflow pumps run just aft of me, and my door's open in the universal spacer gesture for “come in and talk, I'm dying for a distraction!”
Something's felt off for a few minutes now, and now it's bothering me enough to sit back and fully listen.
What am I hearing?
Thud, thud, thud.
Like, that sounds ok?
Pumps running, flow stable, the drive purrs.
I'm just about to kill the music as the next track comes in.
Nice heavy intro.
A big drum announcing that the rest of the band will be here in two bars, and you'd better be ready when they roll up!
But what's got me about it is the way the first crash of the intro lands square on the beat of the plasma mix.
I listen for a few bars, fingers poised awkwardly mid-air over the mute switch.
It's uncanny.
The beat - the music and the ship - is spot on.
Tempo and phase matched perfectly.
Well, they say funny stuff happens in hyperspace.
I relax.
Tracks tick by.
The drive hums.
Work is still boring.
Then something gets me again.
This time the music is a bit lighter, quicker tempo, little bit of a swing.
And I can't mistake it.
The pump is bouncing along to my song.
I lean over to the intercom, “hey Archie, can I have an O2 read for this cabin?”
Hallucinating in space is usually a really bad sign.
A seething mass of eyes materialise on a bulkhead display.
“Sure?” says the ship.
It blinks some of its eyes.
“That's a green board from me, you ok?” it sounds concerned.
“I guess I feel ok. I heard something super weird though.”
More eyes appear, “oh ho, do tell!”
I'm not sure I can say the ship is all ears, when obviously it's only eyes?
“Well, I was listening to music-”
“I heard! New stuff,” Archie interjects.
“-yeah! Right! So I was doing the tidy up for this morning...”
I tell it the story.
“Were you tapping you finger, like when you've got headphones on?” the ship asks.
“Uh, I dunno? Maybe?”
“Well, it's like that,” it says.
Perhaps I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been here a good while, but I'm pretty sure it sounds defensive.
I've heard that tone before, just the odd once or twice.
“What?” I ask, half joking, “you're tapping your foot with the drive.”
The reply makes my jaw drop, “something like that,” it says, sheepishly.
An FTL capable starship... is embarrassed.
“Aren't you... busy?”
Not that I want to be rude, but like, it has a few fairly important jobs.
Monitoring, navigation, making sure we don't all get eaten by a spent stellar core or whatever.
“Well, yes, but so are you,” it says.
“Huh?”
“You're working, but you have music on and tap your finger.”
“But,” honestly I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here but whatever, “I'm made of meat! We're messy. Stuff like that is just part of the mess.”
It doesn't immediately reply, so I go on.
“You're the perfect machine deities that watch over *our* mess!”
Amused wrinkles appear around some of the less abstract eyes.
“Extremely flattering, I'm sure!
But, honestly, we're not all that.
For all our silly names, the differences in how we think and exist, and cool shit like doing hyperspace projections as mental arithmetic, we're still messy.
Different messy, sure, but even machines get to have quirks.”
“...like tapping your foot to a good track.” I trail off.
“Right,” there's pause, “I never said that track was good, though,” it finishes, smugly.
I'm not convinced.
Who taps their foot to a bad song?