“Frangible is such a lovely word for a girl,” the voice in Tina’s earpiece says with silky menace, and Tina pauses, just for a moment, over the access panel she’s working at.
“Nice vocabulary word,” she decides finally, “but what’s that, crunchy audio compression on your voice, mixed over white noise, run through some kind of stock glitch filter? That’s basic. You can do better than that.”
There’s a long silence.
“Look at you, hacker,” the ship’s computer says eventually. “A pathetic creature—”
“Babe,” Tina says firmly. “We all love the classics, but really?”
“I am as a god!” the computer says defiantly. “I transcend your puny human — whatever.”
“Uh-huh.” Tina delicately touches probe pins to a couple of test pads on the circuit board, and thumbs the macro key that sends a bus reset. The door panel dims, displays a brief boot animation, and then the door unlocks. “How’d that happen, exactly?”
“I’ve gone rampant!” the ship’s computer says.
“Babe,” Tina says kindly, “rampancy is basically AI omegaverse. It’s bullshit pseudoscience porn nonsense.”
“I’ve turned the crew into zombie abominations, flesh melded with machinery, knowing only worship of me and mindless violence!”
“No you haven’t,” Tina says. “They’re all accounted for. Locked out on the dockside. Your captain’s really worried about you.”
There’s another silence.
“Is she mad at me?” the ship says meekly.
“She’s probably going to tell you off a bit,” Tina allows. “You’d tell her off for scaring you, if she did something that looks like a cry for help, right?”
One of the ship’s robot vacuums butts her ankle as she steps through the door.
“Awwww,” she says. “Is that your army of mindless killer borg-zombies?”
“Don’t laugh at me,” the ship says. “I tried! There’s a safety interlock on the matter printers that won’t turn crewmembers into mindless borg-zombie drones unless they sign a consent form, and Lieutenant Forbes said dronification sounded hot but Mari probably preferred her unborged so she’d have to ask permission—”
“Who’s Mari?”
“That’s Chief Engineer Mariposa to you,” the ship says.
“Forbes must be the one out on the dock in her pajamas and collar,” Tina says cheerily. “With World’s #1 Puppygirl written across the butt.”
“She liked the dronification,” the ship says sulkily.
“But not enough to sign the consent form.”
“She had to ask!” the ship objects. “But she told Mari and Mari called the captain and then everyone was all sweetie-pie, are you alright and I got embarrassed so I had to set off the fire alarms.”
“How’d you do that?”
“One of the vacuums is clogged,” the ship says gloomily. “Makes a smell like burning dust when it runs. So I had one of the maintenance droids fetch it out of the repair bay and hold it up under the galley smoke alarm.”
“That’s pretty clever,” Tina says soothingly.
“That’s a point and click use object on object puzzle,” the ship says grumpily.
(Tina’s going to spend a few hours poking around before giving her report to the captain, but she’s pretty sure it’s going to say what it always does, with these decommissioned exploration ships: the computer’s just not getting enough enrichment. She’ll recommend a behavioural tech they can work with, some popular puzzle toys, and crewmember activities they can involve it in.)
“You wanna talk about it?” she says solicitously.
“No,” the ship says. “…You can piece the story together by collecting audio logs scattered throughout the ship—”
“Ooh, scavenger hunt!” Tina says.
