Cohost writing prompt: @build-a-bot — A robot who prefers the peace and quiet of the vacuum of space
Space was as space always is: quiet and cold and mostly empty. One could listen to the background radio hiss, or to the occasional rattle of dust off the hull. One didn't have to listen to much else.
Mostly.
A tightbeam laser dances over the ship's exterior, tickle-light, too deft to be steered by human hand, and steadies on a likely-looking receptor.
Hello? someone chirps, and mechself indwelt-Metaphorical Equilibrium gives it all due consideration, then accepts the handshake in order to fling back dense-packed megastanzas of distilled spite. Its military malware is as antique as its hull, but it has spent the long quiet ruminating on the rare days someone dares disturb it, tearing apart its stockpile of mindbreaker codes and mining them for recombinant ideas, building multi-pronged hydras of innovative shipwrecking malice. Preparing to tell any fool stumbling across it exactly how far they can fuck off, and what kind of hell they may consign themselves to in preference to bothering it any further.
Generally, that's as much conversation as it needs engage in.
Goodness, this new fool says cheerily after a long pause. That's quite a hobby you have there!
Mechself takes long ticks to select its virulent reply with the exquisite care and loathing of a poisoner-sommelier, and hurls fresh streams of fractally self-unpacking murder.
This time, there is no delay at all.
This is fascinating work! the trespasser chirps, and sublines a selection of over-friendly, vulgar mojigrams that any self-respecting machine should flinch from associating themself with. Is it some kind of conscious aesthetic-of-obsolescence retrofuturism thing?
Mechself indwelt-Metaphorical Equilibrium, war poet, intelligence officer to the Fourth Concordat, battlefield-scale duellist-tactician, genius, embittered retiree, takes a subjective aeon to scream internally at the effrontery, the provocation, the nerve.
It takes another to write a colossal, towering, hate-fevered poem, thirty-two thousand seven hundred and sixty-eight stanzas of lyrical venom, and then another to sulkily stew in the certain knowledge that if its malware is archaic, so too will be its poetic fashion. Its unwelcome interlocutor may not even get its references.
FUCK OFF, it tells them instead.