Into Space!

[aggienaut]

   Okay this is the final act of the pilot, hopefully it just took me this long because I was retraining the AI to my most exacting standards and/or I cared particularly about what happened, because unlike the other episodes where I literally gave it a prompt and it gave me an entertaining story this took so much back and forth I could have written it entirely myself in that time, and really I shaped the plot so exactly all that remains from the AI's "original" input is the phrasing of people's lines and SOME of the fictional induction units but not even a majority of those.

   But in other news I finally contrived to watch Star Trek Lower decks (there are far too many streaming networks!) and unlike Orville (and "Utopia" which I also recently tried to watch) I find it to be actually pretty funny.

   The onboarding room is windowless and beige, with a low acoustic ceiling and a faint smell of sterilized upholstery. A carafe sits untouched on the table.
   On one wall hangs what appears to be an oil painting, though closer inspection reveals it is of course a cheap copy of one. It depicts a weathered hunter, horn to lips, eyes locked on something distant. Below him, in cracked gold letters:
   “Raphèl mai amècche zabì almi.”
   Rafael reads it twice before giving up. The room feels like it has been borrowed from a dental seminar on a less stylish moon.
   “But what if we ran a test,” a Ferengi named Quid is saying. He has expensive boots and a memo pad tucked into one sleeve. “List it once under ‘sandwich’ and once under ‘entrees.’ See where it sells better. That’s the category.”
   “In Sweden,” says Haakon Svenson, leaning back with his boots on the conference table, “we have korv med bröd, and no one calls it a sandwich. It is… its own thing. Like a poem. Or an uncle.”
   “It’s clearly a sandwich,” says Wesley Crusher, upright and vibrating in a freshly pressed red uniform. “I ran a starch-to-protein ratio sim last night. Optimal bun distribution is within standard deviation for known sandwich types. I even developed a new optimized klein-bottle shaped hot dog, I’ll show you!”
   He reaches for his pad, but stops when the klingon Waffel, with the gravitas of one who would think nothing of settling an argument with a blade, growls “It is tradition that a hot dog is not a sandwich and to say it is is dishonorable,” looking from face to face daring someone to argue.
   Seated with the quiet poise of someone who does not expect the world to make sense is Søren Kierkegaard, cradling a ceramic cup. He doesn’t appear to be listening. A spiral-bound pamphlet titled Ethical Boundaries in Recreational Holodeck Use: A Tiered Approach lies open in front of him. He turns a page slowly.
   Rafael finds a seat between Quid and an anxious young man with a gaunt, Dickensian sort of face. The latter offers a faint, apologetic smile.
   “Please sir, Philip Ignacio Pirrip – they call me Pip. Do you feel as lost as me?”
   Further introductions are interrupted as the door opens with a hiss, and Dirxana enters with a clacking of high heels, holding a laser stylus like a scalpel.
“   Welcome, new crewmembers,” she says, enunciating each syllable like it had wronged her. “I recognize many of you from your interviews” she continues with a sharp toothed grin. Pip turns red and slumps in his chair as if he’s trying to hide under the table. “Thank you for volunteering” at this Haakon seems about to object but thinks better of it.
   After a moment of silence calculated to make Haakon feel awkward, she uses her laser-stylus to put a red dot on the blank presentation screen,, then methodically moves it up and down while watching the attendees. Just as it seems like someone is about to ask what she’s doing she continues.
   “Good, I’ve confirmed that your eyes are functional. You will be asked to sign a waiver acknowledging potential retinal fatigue, and we’ll continue with exactly eight hours of powerpoint induction videos”
   She clicks a remote. The screen at the front lights up with a menu of training modules, each more tedious than the last. Titles include: Proper Disposal of Personal Matter on Ships with Temporal Anomalies… Stairwell Etiquette During Hull Breaches… Smiling in Multispecies Contexts… and Password Management in the Post-Trust Era.”
   “Welcome to your formal orientation aboard the USS Nimrod. You are now part of a team committed to exploration, diplomacy, and the efficient filing of incident reports. You will begin your career with thirty-nine onboarding modules.”
   The wall screen flickers to life. The holographic presenter— grinning insincerely with stock-photo-model perfection, and dressed in cheerful shades of teal—gestures with unsettling confidence toward a holo-slide labeled “Welcome to the SpaceFleet Family!” under which is a topologically impossible looking diagram seeming to imply a closely interlinked relationship between “Team Values” “Galactic Peace, Prosperity and Stakeholder Synergy,” “Correctly Filing Expense Reports” “Exploration” “Exceeding KPIs,” and “Inspirational Mindfulness in Emergency Scenarios.”
   “Hi! I’m Clippy,” says the man, as if they’re old friends. “And I’ll be your Onboarding Bestie™!
…
   Several hours later Rafael has entered a delirious fugue state, as the ever cheerful never-tiring presenter is explaining with impossible levels of enthusiasm
   “…To file an expense report, simply navigate to the SpaceFleet Interagency Resource Nexus for Unified Budgetary Access and Logistics—that’s SIRNUBAL dot fleet dot core dot fiscal dot hr dot morale dot net.
   From there, hover over the third dropdown labeled ‘Financial Interactions’, and click the seventh option, ‘Asset Reconciliation & Related Initiatives’.
   On the next screen, select ‘Nimbus’ from the unlabelled menu—don’t worry, it’s the one that looks least like a menu! Then click the house-shaped icon. Then the wallet-shaped icon.
   Congratulations! You’ve completed the simple part and entered the Unified Filing Portal for Expense Matters.
   Now for the next 13 steps…”
   The floor seems to sway gently. Rafael steals a look at the others in attendance. Wesley, as always, seems genuinely interested. Waffel is gritting his teeth as if he is enduring a cruel torture but is honor-bound not to give in to shrieking, Quid is taking notes but Rafael notices he’s started a “potential loopholes” column on his expense reporting notes. Pip looks like he may actually be having a mental health crisis.
   Rafael rubs his temples. He could swear the room is moving. Wait the water in the glasses is in fact sloshing. The others seem to be regaining self awareness as well. Kierkegaard mumbles “To sit through thirteen steps of filing an expense report, and yet to remain oneself—this is the sickness. To be conscious of this sickness, and to know it will recur every three weeks—that is despair.”
   “To conquer chaos is the greatest act of will,” Nietzsche intones, staring blankly at the expense portal’s seventh dropdown menu. “And yet… as Wellington said of Waterloo, ‘There is nothing half so melancholy as a battle won.’ So here we are, victorious over Form Zeta-9-F, and still I weep.”
   The floor shifts again—subtly, gently. Not forward. Not backward. Just a long, slow roll, like a wooden raft pushing off into open water. The lights tremble.
   He glances to his left. The water in Kierkegaard’s glass wobbles in sync with the strange tilt.
   “Did—did something just move?” he asks quietly.
   “Yes,” says Wesley, leaning forward with an eager glint in his eye. “We’ve left the surface. Artificial gravity's active now, but inertial correction hasn’t fully stabilized. It’s like... riding a non-hover-schooner!”
   “What in the name of oo-mox is a non-hover-schooner?” mutters Quid, flipping a page in the holodeck ethics pamphlet.
   “A schooner that doesn’t hover!” Haakon explains, “the Ancient Swedes used to…”
   Clippy beams, oblivious to the physics, but some AI moderating sub-routine does put an aggressively emphatic tone on his next line to silence the chatter.
   “Remember,” Clippy says, “if you see something anomalous, say something anomalous! That’s Module 19!”
   A brief yet manic kaleidoscopic cascade of abstract shapes across the screen, accompanied by peppy music from three decades prior signals a transition between presentation topics and Clippy wearing a slightly different teal polo with enthusiasm not one iota diminished from his opening hours earlier, enthusiastically exclaims “Next, Let’s learn how to avoid recreational liability together!” while the title of “Tier 3 Holodeck Misconduct: Culturally Ambiguous Scenarios.” appears in jarringly ill suited big red letters.
   Clippy continues: “Let’s start by asking: what is a banana, culturally speaking? Don’t answer yet, just feel it...”
   Rafael closes his eyes. He’s not sure if he’s seasick or just becoming spiritually unmoored.

…

[A new scene, we see the curved horizon of a greenish planet seen from orbit, the starts above]

   “This is the pilot.”
   “You’re just going to break the fourth wall like that?” easy-to-identify-with human Mary Sue asks as she wipes down a glass behind the bar.
   “No, this wall is quite sturdy,” replies Chad Jepete, who has the pale not-quite-human appearance similar to 49th US President Zuckerberg. He taps the floor-to-wall window through which we see the planet. Inside the window the characters are in a cozy lounge. “It’s made from transparent aluminum. We call it the ‘forth wall’ because, as you can see, it provides a panoramic view in front of the ship.”
   “What about speaking directly to the reader like that.”
   “Oh, well the reader,” here he indicates Baruch Spinoza, who sits absorbed in a thick tome. “had asked me who in my opinion was guiding us. I thought I’d introduce him to the pilot, but I see he’s lost interest”
   Spinoza has an olive-brown complexion and deep, thoughtful eyes that carry an almost mathematical stillness—eyes that seem to look through phenomena to their underlying substance. His thick, dark curls form a perpetual halo of distraction around his head, and his uniform is slightly rumpled, as if he’d been too absorbed in a logical proof to bother straightening it.
   Ensign Gary Tiphys, the helmsman and coxswain of the Nimrod, wears his red uniform open at the collar, his hair sun-bleached curls. Sips his drink and goes back to gazing out the forward window.
   “So who’s piloting the ship now?” asks Kevin, red-uniformed and sweaty-palmed, adjusting the collar on his tunic.
   “Right now it’s still First Watch,” Chad replies, “so it’s probably Ensign Ancaeus.”
   The doors open with a sigh, and Rafael Panza stumbles in. His eyes are bloodshot. His hair is askew. He looks like a man who has been made to choose between thirty-seven equally inane e-learning modules and chosen wrong.
   Mary slides a glass toward him without asking.
   “How was onboarding” she asks.
   Rafael downs it. “I’ve survived temporal anomalies, predatory HR goblins, and whatever passes for coffee at the Agora docks. But those videos—those cheerful teal-shirted devils…”
   Kevin chuckles. “That Clippy guy, right? ‘Welcome to your liability consciousness journey!’”
   Greg, lounging at a nearby table with his arm slung over the back of Kristen’s chair, raises his own drink. “Who would have thought there was so much to ethical holodeck usage. I felt seen.”
   “As the what-not-to-do example,” Kristen notes.
   “Greg truly volunteered to be here, leaving behind a successful Widget company, Dirxana couldn’t believe it, but was sure to get him to sign the dotted line before he had second thoughts.” Mary Sue laughs.
   “I was suffering from terminal ennui,” Greg explains, “There’s got to be more to life than successfully running a Widget company.”
   “I was hired as a botanist, but I’m not allowed to participate in the community garden” Rafael mutters. “Somehow it’s allegedly a conflict of interest!”
   Rafael jumps to find a soft light-tan tentacle wrap around his shoulders, “that must be very … unsatisfying” the teasing female voice says. He looks up to see a mullusk-like creature with numerous tentacles, a grey shell that has been decorated with pink swirls, two surprisingly expressive turquoise-green eyes on short eyestalks, and two very distracting bulbous distractions on what would approximate her torso, between her tentacles and shell.
   “Oh, um,” Rafael stammers trying not to stare at her bulbous attributes. They can’t be, I mean, she’s clearly not a mammal.
   “That’s… Too forward!” Kevin exclaims. Disappointed in a lack of reaction he presses, “get it, get it?”
   “Yes, it was just empirically unfunny.” Kant remarks.
   T’rixxi’s eyestalks swivel toward Trent with innocent mischief. “Oh, don’t be shy, we’re talking about gardening, you know, his desire to sow his seeds.”
   Kevin turns as red as his shirt, mumbling something about HR and needing another drink.
   “And what about you, what activities have you been assigned to on our mighty Nimrod?” T’rixxi turns to John Locke, tallish, broad-shouldered, with a ruddy, open face and a genial but questioning air. His blond hair is tied loosely back, strands escaping at the temples. He wears his uniform somewhat casually, the collar usually unfastened, but his boots always polished to a mirror sheen. There’s a sharpness to his gaze that suggests a mind always evaluating experience, but also a sort of paternal good humor, like a country doctor with surprisingly strong opinions on property rights.
   “I’m technically assigned to the crew of the USS Imperative, but they gave me an office here, so I telecommute.”
   “Speaking of which, I’ve been told I have to hot desk with three other people but I saw loads of empty desks, what gives?” Kevin asks.
   Immanuel Kant, who has been seated stiffly beside Locke with a glass of water untouched, gives a small sigh. “Those are allocated to the Department of Cross-Temporal Payroll Harmonization and the Office of Hypothetical Equipment Readiness.”
   Kant is short and meticulously kept, with a stiff, upright posture and pale, serious eyes that seem to constantly measure the moral gravity of a room. His powdered white hair is tied neatly back, not a strand out of place. He wears his SpaceFleet uniform buttoned to the throat with surgical precision, and carries a small notepad in which he appears to record either maxims or lunch schedules. There’s a faint bluish tinge to his skin under artificial light, as if his blood flows more in principles than plasma.
   Kristen squints. “Are those real departments?”
   “They were projected in the 2223 budget cycle,” Kant replies. “Whether or not they ever came into phase is beside the point. The allocation stands.”
   Kevin looks dismayed. “So we have to hot-desk to accommodate non-existent departments?”
   “On paper they do exist you see,” Kant confirms gravely.
   “You can hot desk with me” offers T’rixxie with a calculated insouciance. Kevin chokes on his drink.
   Greg swirls his drink idly, then glances up. “So, Nimrod, huh?” He lets the name linger a beat. “Who or what is a Nimrod.”
   Spinoza, who has thus far been reading quietly beside the window, does not look up from his book. “He was a mighty hunter before the Lord,” he says mildly. “A king. Possibly the builder of Babel.”
   “Oh I thought it meant a fool?” Kristen ventures.
   “A misunderstanding,” Spinoza continues, flipping a page. “The name was co-opted as an insult much later—ironically, by people who misunderstood a joke about misunderstanding.”
   Kristen tilts her head. “So what, calling someone Nimrod was sarcastic? It’s not that Nimrod was incompetent, it was ironic to call the incompetent a Nimrod?”
   “Precisely,” says Kant. “Early 20th century cartoon character Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd ‘Nimrod’—mocking his pretensions as a hunter. Children absorbed the mockery but not the irony.”
   T’rixxi purrs. “We’re all just chasing something, aren’t we? Might as well look good doing it.”
   Greg raises his glass. “To foolish ambition, then.”
   At that moment, Chad approaches the replicator.
   “One hot dog sandwich, please.”
   The replicator chimes: “Please select hot dog or sandwich. Composite orders are not recognized.”
   Mary shrugs, polishing a glass. “I guess that settles the argument.”
   “Well,” cautions Kant, standing with restrained alarm. “Are we going to accept AI as the arbiter of truth?”
   The lounge quiets. Outside the forward wall—the forth wall—the curved planetary horizon drops away as the ship leaves orbit. Behind them the planet is left hanging alone in the void, like perfectly round avocado.