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Cellulose & Steel	By : Not-Taylor Category: Misc Books > FemmeSlash Views: 1028 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I don't own HDG or its characters and I don't make money from this work.

Chapter List
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“If it’s possible to pilot a Terran vessel with only a single occupant, why do you have a navigator?” The xeno’s message comes after a moment of buildup. Her question is anything but unannounced.
“What makes you think I’m going to share military secrets?”
“You’re bored. How do I know you’re bored?”
“That’s the interface. You’re starting to pick up signals from my terminal again. It means that you’re becoming more neurologically compatible with the computer.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“For you it probably isn’t. There’s a reason people are supposed to take shifts.”
“But if I withdrew, you would be alone.”
“I would, and you wouldn’t suffer the consequences yourself. I enjoy being alone, you know.”
“Wouldn’t that make things worse for you?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You clearly won’t. You clearly are not fine, darling. Do you believe I haven’t noticed the way that you react to stimuli?”
“You’re an abnormally paranoid plant. You’ll never understand Terran ways, xeno. You clearly don’t understand me.”
“I understand that you were crying because you couldn’t fly any more, Olivia. I refuse to ignore the fact that you aren’t well. If there’s such a hazard for me after only a day or so, I can’t imagine what you must be enduring.”
“I’m not ‘enduring’ anything but my freedom. I don’t want to deal with being ‘fixed’ by your treatment because I know how you weeds think you cure people.”
“You chose to spend as long as it’s been flying uninterrupted. The data I’m somehow reading right now is saying that sixty continuous hours is beyond the safety threshold for emergencies. That’s two and a half of your days? That doesn’t sound especially safe to me but you’ve still exceeded that many times, haven’t you?”
“Leave my files alone! You’ve been on for far longer than the recommendation for initial connections, navigator. If you care about rules, disconnect.”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
There’s a long awkward pause, during which Ides desperately wants to think Verda has been defeated, but she knows better. The affini is plotting a way to turn the conversation around to something that advantages her. It’s not suspicion since Verda’s really awful at hiding her feelings. Ides doesn’t want to deal with this right now. The way her navigator is starting to remind her of Ginger is unsettling. Maybe it’s just how the terminals transmit their users’ communications. She hopes so.
The point of contact between the minds of the pilot and navigator doesn’t chafe. That’s confusing. Ides expected that it would. Affini are known to be cruel, but there’s no stream of digitized bloodlust. She actually seems, despite a lot of muddling and conflicted thoughts, somewhat happy. There’s no reason for either of them to be.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?” The message clearly indicates Ides’s sensor dysphoria. The navigator probably doesn’t know the name of the condition.
“I didn’t want to.”
“You were in pain.”
“And?”
“And it’s my responsibility to help with that, pet. I don’t want you to suffer.”
“You want to put spores in my head and turn me into a zombie.”
“I don’t want you to be a zombie, Olivia.”
Ides winces. Verda clearly found the part of the documentation about reinforcing the human identity of somebody experiencing sensor dysphoria. She feels disrespected that the plant would take such a liberty after exacerbating the situation by being so determined not to use that name for so long.
“That’s difficult to believe.”
“It’s true, Olivia. The xenodrugs are only there to help you adjust.”
She actually believes that. These xenos are truly deranged, Oli- Ides thinks.
“Consider that your alternative treatment is to plug yourself into a metallic object, alone in space, for weeks on end.”
“I’m happier here. At least you aren’t touching me with those nasty pointy things coming out of your chest.”
“You know that isn’t healthy.”
“So what? It’s better than being one of those things from the transmissions!”
“What transmissions? The ones encouraging you to turn yourselves in? You heard me explain why those were terrible.”
“Because we wouldn’t surrender nicely when we knew what was waiting.”
“Because standard domestication protocol requires intensive domestication measures as a response to the reaction provoked by the transmissions in question. You aren’t aware of how lenient I have been.” Her tone becomes much sterner. Verda is clearly not enjoying the discussion. “Now Olivia. You’ve been demonstrating with great clarity how severe the consequences of resistance are, beyond what I might hypothetically impose. I promise to make sure that you’re able to live comfortably without being connected to a machine. That’s because I want you to be happy. While I appreciate your concern for my welfare, I cannot allow my floret to come to the harm inherent in being the sole operator of a starship in the manner you have been so insistent on.”
“I wish I could have ejected you from the bridge as soon as we embarked.”
“I know, pet. Olivia, I’m going to help you recover.”
There’s no malice in the statement. She actually means it. Of course, recovery is part of turning Ides into an obedient slave, but Verda already knows she knows that. It’s also true that this isn’t a sustainable way of living. Olivia is aware she isn’t actually a spaceship, but she’s been enjoying flying again. Maybe she should crash into the nearest neutron star after all…
“To change the subject to something more appealing, what do you usually do when you’re piloting a ship? I’m not sure what entertainment there is for somebody inside of a tank.”
Ides replies with a pulse of acknowledgement. It isn’t a word or a grunt, or even something translatable as language. It’s the language of Terran starship internal communications. Verda understands. She’s adjusting very quickly. That might be problematic, now that Ides thinks about it. She shouldn’t be reacting this way so soon, but of course she wouldn’t normally have been connected for this long.
“?”
Of course she can’t let it go.
“?”
Is she really going to keep asking? Ides delivers a more emphatic pulse.
“? Trying to bait your navigator is what you do for fun?”
“Basically.” Olivia had never been bored with Ginger around. They got along so well and always had something to discuss with one another. It hadn’t occurred to her to be bored before, and usually maintaining the ship’s systems took her full concentration. It isn’t taking her full concentration any more, especially with a navigator again. That’s probably not good.
Hold on, why did she tell the weed that’s a normal thing?
“Is there nothing else, then?”
“There’s music.” Ides sends Verda the list of everything onboard with special emphasis on the track that she had played before. They stop thinking about that for a moment and the engines become ready for another jump. Ides focuses for a moment and follows through with a feeling of accomplishment. Verda quietly calculates the next jump and sends through the coordinates.
The affini sifts through the available songs for a while before settling on a playlist called “Obscure Rags to Show what a Hipster You Are.” Olivia’s surprised that it isn’t that bad. Verda notices that and sends smug emoticons, probably unintentionally. They spend some time listening.
“Did you know what that was before you subjected me to it?”
“I recognized one of the writers. Do you like it?”
“It could have been a worse selection.”
“I’m glad you do, Olivia.”
Ides jumps again. It’s actually nice to have something to listen to while they travel, Olivia thinks to herself. It’s better than dealing with nothing but stars and gas clouds and an enemy of the human race. With her like this, unable to stab or bind, she almost feels like a real person. She’s a fellow spacefarer, somebody who left whichever planet she said she was from in order to see what was out there. What did she say? That sometimes change is good. But sometimes it isn’t.
“What’s it like to fly a small Affini ship?”
“How small do you mean?”
“As small as you’ve flown.”
“Oh. That would be somewhat larger than the Ides of November, which is the ship you’re flying right now, Olivia.” Ides wishes she would stop that. It’s not going to do anything while she’s plugged into the hyperdrive, which she revs because revving it feels nice. “We had several dozen crew and a handful of florets. Florets don’t usually accompany such missions because they require too much attention. Beyond that I was fortunate enough to have a more intellectual crew, who didn’t require much attention from me. Our command crew did a lot of reading when our attention wasn’t required to maintain the ship.”
“How you actually flew is what I was wondering about. Paperwork is the boring bit. Have you done navigation before?”
“My navigator’s floret was going through a crisis at one point so I had to fill in, but that was simply pressing buttons. Otherwise no. Why, pet system interface?” Funny. The software is messing with her too.
“You picked it up quickly. It’s surprising.”
“Everything here is oddly intuitive. I wasn’t aware how easy such a system would be to operate. The computers are almost naturally a part of my cognition now.”
“I can tell. Are things really that different?”
“It wasn’t possible to go behind the captain and mutiny as easily as it would be here, at least on the ships I’ve flown on. I find it odd that your captains have so much authority and veneration despite possibly doing even less than ours.”
“Affini captains don’t do much?”
“Not outside of combat, no. Ensuring the crew cooperates is less difficult than it sounds, usually. It seems that on Terran vessels a captain is entirely bypassed in combat. That isn’t documented anywhere so it’s a fascinating cultural phenomenon.”
“They aren’t supposed to be cut out. Ginger and I only did that because our captain was weak. Besides, it’s just easier to do things without waiting for permission. What if you had to verbally tell your vines to go where you wanted them to?” Olivia’s body blushes a little in its tank.
“Centralized authority has advantages in such situations, yet you seem to have found a way to bypass that as well by routing data between systems directly and coordinating a response.”
“That’s what I said. Of course it only works if your pilot is capable of managing things independently-”
“So you’re especially talented, Olivia? I should have known. You’re quite modest about it.”
“I’m not sure this is something worth bragging about, honestly.”
“I think it’s impressive. Even if you’re using the computational power of the ship, you’re still managing a lot of pieces at the same time. Your simile of vines was prudent, because that’s how it feels to me. The features I’m manipulating work similarly to how my vines do. It’s… I’m still surprised how easy it was to adapt.”
“That could be. Most Terrans have difficulty adapting, which is why there are tests before anyone takes pilot training.”
“How much training do you need? If it’s this simple you shouldn’t need much.”
“I’m still holding your hands quite a bit there. You might have noticed a strange taste. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“That is somewhat strange, but no I didn’t notice before you mentioned it, Olivia.”
Again with the name. Ides is getting annoyed now. Verda needs to stop calling her that.
“Pay attention.” Ides retracts some degree of control over the navigation computer. She’s just factoring some ints, but it’s effective in tying up memory. Verda shouldn’t be equipped to notice that part of it for now.
“It’s stronger. What is that?”
“Me. For some reason other users’ access signatures are mapped to taste. If I were operating within regulation limits, you would only taste me when I was speaking to you. Right now I’m in ‘your’ part of the system.”
“Fascinating. You taste like nothing I know of. Do you taste me?”
Ides regrets bringing this up. She’s embarrassed to be asked that, yet she could easily have predicted that would happen. Worse, the question is completely innocent. Verda does have a taste, though: peppermint and butterscotch with a hint of clove. Olivia had learned what cloves were when she was trying to figure out the flavor of her pilot training navigator.
“Freshly mown lawn.” It’s easier to say that and be done with the discussion.
“What does a lawn taste like, Olivia?”
“Rows of houses that are all the same and charcoal burning everywhere.”
“I see…” Verda clearly does not see. Naturally a weed wouldn’t get it. A properly maintained lawn has had its weeds removed.
“Anyway… My point is that I’m doing a lot of your job for you since you’d be crushed quickly if I didn’t.”
“And you can just do that?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Olivia darling, you’re doing something in excess of the capabilities of most high quality Terran pilots (contingent upon the accuracy of my studies prior to your becoming my floret), while also apparently doing the job of your navigator.”
“That’s only according to official reports. I’m sure they’re all doing the same if they have to.”
“Were, pet.” Ides feels a little sick. “And they might not have developed those skills if they didn’t allow themselves to run entire ships for weeks at a time. I’m beginning to see just how serious your condition is. :( You’re very resilient for having survived extraction.”
“There wasn’t a choice.”
“There’s always an opportunity to wilt. You’ve done very well at hiding your pain. You shouldn’t have to hide it, Olivia. As your owner I want to prevent you from having to do so.”
“You don’t own me.”
Verda transmits an eye roll. Ides isn’t surprised about that. Instead of replying, Ides jumps again. They’re dangerously close to a black hole. It’s no trouble for Ides to move away, thankfully. Dangerous might be an overstatement. It would have been dangerous if her thrusters were broken too. They aren’t. Actually, the hyperdrive is working too. They’ve been out of the Affini field for a while now but Ides was too distracted to think about it. She doesn’t need Verda any more. She could easily shut her out of the navigation systems and take over fully. But she doesn’t want to. It’s nice to fly with somebody for a change. Those weeks following Ginger’s abduction had been very strenuous, in a way she would never admit to a weed. Being just a pilot again feels good.
The black hole is aesthetic. Ides records an image for her internal archive. As in, she memorizes how pretty it is. She also takes readings and pictures for science. Verda pokes her with their next destination, and she pokes back with sensor data.
“What’s this, pet?”
“I don’t think that’s anyone’s pet.”
“I suppose not.”
There’s silence.
“You placed us too close to that event horizon. We might have fallen in.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll make sure to be cautious in the future.”
“That’s what your job is, navigator.”
“Of course, captain. I’ll need a moment to recalculate.”
“However long it takes for us not to become eternal spaghetti.”
The Terran ship feels her navigator smiling at her. It’s… different from the weed’s past smiles. It doesn’t feel cruel or violent. There’s no intent to control. Ides doesn’t feel the need to be defensive for once. She watches the xeno’s calculations. Verda is enjoying herself. There’s no enslavement going on, and no irony in calling Ides the captain. That isn’t right. She must be missing something. The ship jumps away.
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Cellulose & Steel