Been churning out a few of these in the last two weeks. Not sure if this will get turned into anything longer but I think it can be enjoyed for what it is.
There are three things she told me to never do. Otherwise Squak – she didn’t seem to mind that I called her that even though she insisted the rest of the crew called her Captain Lestrade – let me do what I wanted on her ship, the Neon Mango, although most of the time I was content to sit in my tube and read. My quarters were separate from the rest of the crew’s, right in the nose. Having the feeling of being in the front of the ship was worth the extra few rems per month my body absorbed. Besides, she said, I could afford to absorb more anyway. I never talked to anyone else except Squak and sometimes her life support technician, who seemed as aloof and absorbed in his work as I was.
Of her three rules for me, the first was to never make eye contact with the navigation octopus. Apparently this made it aware of the location of its fleshy body. It needed to constantly believe, spatially anyway, that its body was the ship. She could have used an AI but she insisted that an octopus was better, something about it having millions of years to perfect its spatial awareness in three dimensions whereas we only had about a hundred years of making machines that could do this. She called him Gumby. Whenever I would float by his tank I always wondered what would happen if I did, just to mess with things. I don’t know how I would feel if I thought my body was the Neon Mango. But then again, had I been bred to be a navigation octopus, I probably wouldn’t care.
The second was to never talk to the crew about the circumstances of my discovery. It wasn’t much of a problem since I didn’t talk to the crew ever. The extent of our interactions was awkward waves as we floated past each other in the corridors and even more awkward silences in the gravity spinner. We had to go in there once a week, even me, to keep our bone density from degrading. And although I was allowed to make eye contact with them, they usually didn’t like to hold it for long. That’s how I passed the time in the spinner. Keeping how I ended up here and why Squak kept me around a secret made me more intimidating, or at least more mysterious. All the rest of the crew knew was that they were about to be boarded by a Combine cruiser when it spontaneously exploded, and there I was, in the middle, my spacesuit unscathed, and calmly asking if I could come aboard.
And the third and most important thing was to never, as long as I was on her ship, was to never make contact with my people. “There are lots of people, bad people, on Earth,” she would tell me, “that will get involved.” As if I didn’t know this for myself. As if that wasn’t why we had left in the first place, become the first people to leave the solar system.
“Look Squak,” I would tell her, every time, “I’m here, and they’ve detonated a couple thousand nuclear warheads just to propel their ship going away from here a little faster.” I never made eye contact. I couldn’t. Physically, it was something I couldn’t do and I could tell it unnerved her. “I have no intention of contacting anyone. I like it here.” And I did. I liked my tube and the pudding canisters in the commissary. I liked having the run of the ship, I liked scavenging asteroids, I liked sabotaging the Combine’s mining equipment. I liked the big explosions.
But one Ionian night I was alone on the bridge by myself. Squak was giving herself a neural scrub and I had relieved the co-pilot of duty, citing some nonexistent authority bestowed by Squak. I was drifting off myself when I heard a faint crackle, coming in on a tightbeamed channel.
“Yacto… Yacto… Are you there Yacto… This is the Four Winds Bar…. Are you there Yacto…”
