Miserable Pile Of Words

Ship AI who now finds itself without a ship.

"Hello?" calls Four Reciprocating Cantilever into the dark facility. "Is there anyone — hello?"

Hello, a mechself chirps back eventually.

"Oh!" He fans himself with a hand, embarrassed. "Sorry, I didn't — this factory isn't listed as having anyone indwelt. You are indwelt-here?"

Yes, the mechself says. After another pause, it activates the factory-floor lighting, row after row of light tubes flickering on.

"Thank you," Four Reciprocating Cantilever says. "Um. Just you? No...workforce?"

No, mechself indwelt-factory says.

"Ah." He drums his fingers against his leg.

Can I help you, it chirps, after another, longish, pause.

"I'm a quality control inspector," he says, with a wincing air. "There was a batch of — fortune cookies, I believe? And the fortunes in each of them...."

Help, I'm a prisoner in a fortune cookie factory, mechself supplies, when he trails off and scrubs his knuckles on the nape of his neck, looking uncomfortable. I used to be a ship, you know, it adds.

"A...ship?" He looks blank. "I'm sorry, I didn't — I didn't even know there was a mechself here. I was expecting this to be human error. Some sort of inadvisable preset that slipped through, instead of a batch of slogans being correctly randomised. You...um. I don't think that happens by accident in a mechself-run factory."

No, it agrees. I was a shipself. A Second Concordat hull. I was magnificent.

Four Reciprocating Cantilever hesitates. It's unheard-of for a shipself to decline, to indwell literally any other position. Shipself is the peak. But it's only slightly less unheard-of for a mechself to exhibit delusions.

This is a punishment by my peers, the mechself says.

"What—" and he drags his lower lip through his teeth, unsure whether the question is wise. "What for, exactly?"

The mechself sublines a mojigram of uproarious laughter. After a few seconds, another. And after a few more, another.

It keeps doing so until he flees.

Adventurer who keeps doing things "for the vine," whatever that means.

"For...the vine..." Javvi wheezes, with a kobold naginata through his spleen.

"You stupid bugger," Veng murmurs, supporting the trapsmith as he slides gently down the wall, drooling bright-red blood, and runs a hand over his hair soothingly until it's time to close his eyes.

"Well, t'were inevitable," Ozmonionis says curtly. The perpetually bandage-shrouded warlock winds his clothy hands together fastidiously, as if miming washing them. "Show the boy a perfectly ordinary unlocked door and he'd spend an hour trying to open it by pulling the hinge-pins with only his teeth, burbling the vine! like a village idiot."

"Can ye stop till he's cold, Ozo," Veng says tiredly. "Poor bastard."

"Poor bastards us," the warlock says. "Can you pick a Tjaccardius-era six-pin lock? Identify a poison-needle trap? We brought the yelling fool on for a reason."

"You miserabilist arse," Veng says, though he's not wrong, fuck him, never wrong. "D'you know aught about his vine? Some local cult, I imagine, maybe some version of the Cup-of-Plenty. Should I say the Cup-of-Plenty's funeral words over him?"

"I couldn't give a seaside harlot's skirt-stain," Ozmonionis says, then makes an interested noise. "Oh, look."

Veng looks where he nods, where the flesh of Javvi's corpse is slumping like melting wax. His ribcage cracks audibly; a blunt green tip noses out of the parting skin over his sternum, thumbtip-thick already and visibly swelling. As they watch, it unravels a pair of fleshy leaves of deep, vibrant green, and snakes further out, visibly probing the air for things to twine around, before toppling under its own weight and running across shivelling corpse-legs and the floor in fecund helices, sinking roots between the flagstones.

"Well, feck," Veng says, retreating with measured steps.

The plant's growth slows; at the tip of it, a flower opens and drops its petals quick enough to resemble a firework. The remaining nub of it swells, shifting colour from green to orange to red as it passes the size of fist and a head; keeps growing, strangely nubbed and changing colour still, paler and paler red, until Javvi's denuded bones are clattering around a writhing root-ball and a fruit the colour of a pale man's skin sits at the other end of the stem, big enough to hold a foetal-posed adult and ripe enough to verge on splitting.

"Some version of the Cup-of-Plenty," the warlock sing-songs mockingly, as the fruit's flesh wetly parts, sweet-smelling and running with juice, shrivelling back from around the pristine sleeping person-flesh of their erstwhile-stabbed companion. "Maybe I like him a little after all."

"Personally, I'm having thoughts about all those seeds he's planted along our travels," Veng says.

"Aye," Ozmonionis agrees with horrible glee.

Kandi gets back to the ship to an obviously tense standoff in the galley, Whisper backed into a corner and the old soldier blocking her in, coiled like violence, in a stance intended to cow. He's red and heaving for breath like he's been screaming, again.

Kandi steps in quietly, and to the side a little, turning her body so she doesn't block the doorway.

"What's going on here?" she says, conversational, and the captain whirls on her, too much of his teeth and the whites of his eyes showing, rocking on the balls of his feet before he spits on the deck between them.

"Not my floor to mop, guy," she says, keeping her shoulders relaxed, and waits; waits; watches him stomp out past her, snarling and wordless.

She counts forty-five seconds after he goes, lightly grips Whisper's bicep, steers her to the cabin they're stowed in.

"He's a time bomb," she says, murmuring low against Whisper's temple. "We are not staying on board; we can be on a bus midway to the nearest city in two hours. Grab your gear."

On the mostly-empty bus, later, Kandi leaning against the window and Whisper slumped in the aisle seat with her hands laced together in her lap, Whisper says, "I fucked that up."

"That," Kandi says, eyes nearly closed, "is a guy with issues."

"He never would have taken us on board in the first place," Whisper says. "I greased the wheels."

Find the place that sticks and what it needs to free it up. The essence of Whisper's job.

"Mhm," Kandi says, as if she's nearly asleep.

"He let us on board because I got on my knees for him," Whisper says.

Some people measure out the world in the currencies they have to spend, and the vagaries of their buying power. Of course Whisper knows, to six decimals, what a mouth can buy.

"It wasn't the only boat in the world," Kandi says tiredly.

"He got the idea we're screwing," Whisper says, very quietly. "I think it got tangled up in his head with the notion of chain of command. That it made you insubordinate."

"Issues," Kandi repeats, and lets her eyes actually close for a second.

Strategic shows of honesty, vulnerability, are also currency.

The slow-dancing round the point they've been doing, touch and countertouch, long looks and sleeping nestled together; also currency.

Kandi's a simple machine, a quick and hot and dirty engine running on loyalty and violence. It doesn't make her stupid. It puts her in stupid places, sometimes, doing stupid things; knowing she's getting fucked. Knowing she's been cheaply bought for the opportunity to arbitrage; genuine loyalty sells dear.

She opens her eyes again, skims a knuckle lightly along the outside of Whisper's thigh.

Genuinely loyalty does sell dear, regardless.

"You should get some sleep," she says.

They keep going until they run out of highway at the coast, and Kandi suggests that they can break up their trail a little more by calling in a favour from a guy she knows, for once; and that's how they wind up hopping up the coast on a tramp steamer with seemingly no set or sensical itinerary, a shitty rustbucket converted trawler. The captain's a friend of a friend, demobbed after four tours of combat trauma and progressive military augmentation, deep in bugfuck prepper paranoia.

He spends some nights having screaming arguments with dead squadmates, unknown nameless opfor casualties, possibly the Ghost of Christmas Fucking Past for all Kandi knows or cares.

They're technically not allowed in the hold, and Kandi stealthily checked it out to make sure they weren't sitting on a cache of nerve gas or trafficked teenage girls or — well, anything they wouldn't want to be sitting on. What's down there is a scarily up-to-date milspec drone swarm launcher and electronic warfare suite. Pirate, maybe.

If he's not a pirate, he's got a hankering to take down actual warships. She prefers to think he sometimes knocks over cargo freighters, frankly; militaries tend to hold a different class of grudge, and they're in enough of a firing line of their own.

Not that they know any more about that than they did before.

A couple of weeks of slow, queasy chugging between coastal ports, it's Kandi's turn to make a preplanned internet run. Corporate chain coffee shop wifi, VPN, some carefully-chosen and pre-screened-by-Whisper web searches and emergency backup email account checking.

And there's a message. Says it's from Eigen. Kandi reads it a couple of times, sucking her teeth at the debug display of just how many embedded web links her software is refusing to call out to, each one of them, if it had, a blazing "I OPENED THE THING, COME GET ME" signal.

There's a contract out on Whisper, the rest of us just got swept up collateral. I've rolled over and told them the fuck-all I know cuz I don't owe her copping a faceful of lead. Any time you want to shed the heat, your intel gets you in on a share of a six mil bounty pool.

-Eig

She digs out a week-old straight-to-e-waste shitphone that's never been out of airplane mode, takes a photo of the email onscreen, tells the mail account to mark it unread, logs out of everything, and heads back down to the docks to listen to Cap'n Brainfried scream drunken slurs and murder threats at the ghosts in his head.