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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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The Ides of November elects to use the spare time during which her navigator is preoccupied to run some diagnostics. Sensors are operational. Engines will need maintenance in a few weeks. Oxygen reserves are at 96%. Water reserves are at 0%, CRITICAL. Pilot life signs are within normal range. Navigator life signs are well outside of normal range, CRITICAL. Hyperdrive functioning normally, ready to engage.
The hyperdrive is reacting normally because they’re out of the hyperspace suppression field. They have been for at least a dozen jumps, now that Ides checks her calculations. She simply hadn’t noticed since Verda was doing the navigation so efficiently. Ides curses herself again in spite of remembering that that’s the entire point of having somebody navigate for you.
It doesn’t feel all that terrible to share the effort of flying a ship with someone again. With a cognitive load that’s so much lighter, even given how little Verda is presently able to help (for now… (perish the thought)), Ides feels freer. And from now on, the weed probably wouldn’t send them into a black hole.
The ship’s able to pay more attention to what’s around it and enjoy the feeling of travel, since she isn’t under as severe a strain. Now there’s less rebellion in her mood, and it’s starting to simply feel right.
Normal people don’t feel fundamentally wrong when they’re not hooked up to generators capable of replicating the outputs of nuclear bombs, Ides reminds itself. They also don’t think they have internal doors and security cameras. That doesn’t really dampen its mood.
What mood even is this? It’s not so different from when Ides had flown with Ginger, but it’s not as sharp. It’s cleaner than before Verda connected, but it feels a little dirty to be in contact with a weed in such an intimate way. What would its old crew think?
“They would be pleased you were overcoming your hostility to your own happiness, pet.” Ides hears the voice in its mind and shudders internally. That’s just what Verda would say, isn’t it.
How would it feel to have more crew managing other systems, and letting Olivia be a pilot and nothing more? Easy. Mindless, almost. The way the computers collaborate when primed just so makes the idea of surrendering that harmony to a meatbag feel almost profane. Verda’s different, Ides feels. She gets it.
That reminds Ides of what she said before, that it was a talented pilot. Of course it is. Ginger would call it the best, and she did several times. It still was defeated by the Affini. How could it say it was that good when taking that into account? No, it really is that good. It just doesn’t like attempted flattery by poisonous plants.
Being a good pilot didn’t count for anything in the end. It’s still here, and now it’s stuck in a pot of preservatives for the rest of its existence, because it couldn’t just let itself die. All of that stress, and for what? To be a xeno’s plaything while it goes through the suffering of fixing its brain? What if it doesn’t want its brain fixed?
Verda interrupts with a set of coordinates. Ides files them into memory and calculates for itself. They got almost the same target destination, one with nothing dangerous anywhere near it. That weed isn’t bad at this, the organically enhanced ship thinks as the ends of its mouth rise. Maybe with training she’d be better than Ginger. What a strange thing to contemplate.
Ides elects to use her navigator’s calculations as a gesture of good will. Another smooth jump proves the point: Verda gets it. What did she say about the xenos on Titis? That they worked as a team with none greater than another? Perhaps the mulch muncher is slipping. Maybe she won’t insist on Ides being a pet, and will let her go. That’s just wishful thinking. Right now the warship only needs to focus on making progress toward her destination.
They’re getting closer every 00:7:21.04. Occasionally they have to pause a few seconds extra so Verda can double check her computations, and there’s no doubt that’s justified. It wouldn’t take long to melt inside of a star, but it probably wouldn’t be a pleasant experience. It’d be worse to land just outside of one… Ides stops fantasizing about her weed navigator’s gruesome destruction and focuses on the smoothness of travel. She’s a lot faster than she was in her previous form. They probably would’ve barely arrived at Titis by now. Such a shame the wealthy hoarded this technology, even if that’s their right as job creators. The things the Navy could’ve done with a hundred of these drives…
They could’ve taken out Ruby Trunk, probably another few ships too, if they’d been open to kamikaze runs. It wouldn’t have won them the war, but… There probably weren’t that many pilots who’d have been up for that, to be perfectly honest. Ides may as well be honest with herself, given that nobody’s going to be checking her thoughts for purity any time soon. She flinches at the tickle of thoughts from her navigator, who’s contentedly graphing fractals when she’s not busy doing her job. The pressure from her mind returns to Ides’s full awareness. There really is a lot to that plant. If she’d somehow been born a Terran, she’d have been a good one. Or she’d still be a degenerate weed who exists only to choke out the worthwhile forms of life in the universe. That must be right. Once a weed, always a weed. That isn’t a saying but Ides feels it should be. If the weeds aren’t all fundamentally bad, then-
They nearly hit a gas giant hiding inside a dust cloud… which turns out to be a protoplanetary disk. It’s so pretty. Verda can’t be blamed for this one, even if jumping into unexplored nebulae isn’t the greatest plan. Going around would’ve taken… 1:09:00 at least. No wonder.
“You’re assuming space is empty when our routing has a strong bias toward massive objects.”
“Oh.”
“Just because you normally wouldn’t have to worry about hitting things doesn’t mean that you won’t still hit them when jumping.”
“Has that ever actually happened, Olivia?” Not again. Stars, please.
“Several times. Once was a pilot flying drunk. Most of the rest were during the initial testing of hyperspace technology. Accidents happen. We’re outside of well charted space and we’re in a substantially denser region than the Accord, so our odds of hitting something are a lot higher. I can see you’re being careful, so this is just a reminder.” There’s no point in screaming at the plant. That might make her grow faster or something. Ew.
“I’m impressed your charts are as good as they are this far from the space you frequently visited. Terran ships didn’t usually go far outside of that area, did they?”
“A few centuries ago there were a bunch of astronomers obsessed with mapping the galaxy. They did a really good job.”
“They… just mapped it out, without hyperdrives?”
“That’s right.” What’s the problem with that?
“For what reason? That’s a very intensive process. I can’t imagine that it took less than a century to get anywhere near a serviceable result.”
“Curiosity, I guess. Just to explore and learn new things. As far as we knew at the time, we were alone out here. Nobody was going to do it for us.”
“Was that profitable, Olivia?”
“No. It didn’t have to be. But I’m certain it wasn’t cheap.”
“I see.”
”Don’t you ever feel the need to be the first to do or see something?”
“Not as such, no.”
“Then how do you weeds get anything done?” Verda doesn’t have a visible emotional reaction to that question.
“Mostly by doing things that need to be done. Not everything has to be a contest.”
“So the Affini didn’t try to map the universe before being able to go there?”
“Not really… Most prefer not to be solitary mad scientists.”
“That’s a shame. Mad scientists are the people who do the most for the future of society. At least, that’s how it’s always been for us.” Finally, proof the Affini are inferior! They don’t appreciate knowledge for the inherent good that it is.
“Some of us are a little different in that respect, darling… Olivia. Some prefer to see the cosmos as a work of art to be enjoyed with friends. Some see it as a decillion petalled bloom of reality witnessing itself with a thousand sets of visual organs from a thousand directions. Both perspectives allow one to see the beauty of existence and as such both are valid. It’s simply a matter of worldview.”
“If it’s a work of art, who sculpted it?”
“The answer to that question is one you should discover yourself, my brave terran explorer. What sort of caretaker would I be if I simply told you what I think?”
“You’d be a good navigator if you gave me directions, wouldn’t you?”
Verda chuckles. “I suppose that’s true, Olivia. Since you insist, my advice is to believe what you see, because that’s all you can really know, no matter what those you trust might have seen themselves.”
“That’s not very satisfying. Aren’t you supposed to be an old wise green thing? Or is it just small green things with a single stick that are supposed to be wise. Maybe you’d talk funnier if you had secret wisdom…”
“I believe the Buddha is reported to have said something similar, long ago. What do you think?”
“They used to say that the only immutable realities were death and taxes. Looking at Terra earlier… I don’t really know any more.”
What kind of person would Olivia be if she dedicated the rest of her life to making people pay taxes again? No matter how valuable freedom is… that doesn’t look very good on her part. Verda is too distracted by preparations for their next couple of jumps to say anything in response. Ides and its two external processors proceed toward its destination in relative silence.
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Cellulose & Steel