Unidentified Funny Objects 7, page 7
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Chase: With great hilarity comes great responsibility.
* * *
Naguib: —and from a purely morale point of view, yes, there was something to what he was saying. But I had to be convinced that he possessed genuine tactical expertise.
* * *
Chase: The way I saw it, that crew could give up and spend the rest of their lives fixating on what went wrong in a war they lost or they could pull on their big girl panties and do what needed to be done.
* * *
Naguib: He started talking about fighting back. Got real worked up about it. It was a macho thing, I suppose. Which I get. I used to be male myself.
* * *
Franklin: I reluctantly agreed to allow Chase to plan an assault and submit it for my review.
* * *
Mann: Yet without the necessary information on enemy fleet movements, and given the variable nature of interstellar phenomena in that volume, the time available to us was difficult to compute with any accuracy.
* * *
Chase: We had exactly twenty-four hours to save the universe.
4. TRAINING MONTAGE
* * *
Having received tentative approval, Captain Chase began working with the crew of the Sétanta to formulate a viable attack on a megalonychidae hub which lay within the homeship’s light cone. It was an operation which presented numerous technical difficulties (and lasted longer than Chase’s self-declared Sol day deadline) however it was the mission’s human challenges which were to prove the most demanding.
* * *
Cain: I was wary. We’d all strived so hard to be taken seriously and here came the likes of Dick Chase hotdogging his way into our lives. All interminable pseudo-science and escapist nonsense about zap guns and bloodshed.
* * *
Aurelius: He actually tried to convince me that a parsec was a measurement of time. So, you know, I didn’t fancy our chances.
* * *
Chase: Working with these people was difficult at first. Everything felt like a trap.
* * *
Half a Dozen of Another: His ableist slurs were frequent and unnecessary. It would not have been tolerated in the hive where mechanical prosthetics are a common form of physical enhancement.
* * *
“Doc” Hitch: He also misgendered people a lot.
* * *
Mann: Captain Chase insisted that he was “trying” but he seemed to provoke offense at every turn.
* * *
Half a Dozen of Another: He would have benefited from a cranial implant containing a selection of contemporary ethical subroutines . . . however, to assimilate him would be to reduce the overall excellence of the hive.
* * *
Cain: He wouldn’t have been hurt by a semester at Neurodiversity University.
* * *
Franklin: And yet, despite all of that, something completely unexpected happened.
* * *
Chase: As I watched the crew preparing for the mission, I don’t know . . .
* * *
Franklin: It was difficult to tell if Chase was becoming more like us or we were becoming more like him.
* * *
Half a Dozen of Another: Assimilation, be it social or via invasive surgical connection to the hive, is always a reciprocal process.
* * *
Chase: Seeing them all work together to accomplish their mission . . . ? Schmaltzy sloth dung for sure, but I had never experienced that before. I had inherited a crew aboard the Hamnavoe but those assholes didn’t stick around. Said they couldn’t work with me. Kept second-guessing my decisions. Got real antsy about dying on away missions and the like. Wasn’t long before they had all left. So yes, I called myself “Captain” but I never had a crew of my own. Not really.
* * *
Cain: He never had any friends? That’s his excuse? Are you fucking kidding me?
* * *
Naguib: Yet when he got involved, when he got really involved, he had a genuine impact on the crew.
* * *
Daniel Chulsky (Junior R&D Administrator, Homeship Sétanta): Here was someone who had done it for themselves. A self-made person. And not in the bioprinted sense.
* * *
Elena M3 (Self-Aware Logistics Software, Homeship Sétanta): I kept asking myself . . . what was I doing with my life?
* * *
Chase: And I told them all: you can’t compare yourself to exceptional people.
* * *
Naguib: He got to know them. Started to ask people’s names. Started to remember them. He began, in his own words, “to give a shit.”
* * *
Mann: After some time aboard the Sétanta, Captain Chase remarked to me that “The universe looks a lot like the rest of the world these days.” I have been attempting to parse that statement, however, sensor records of the event show no evidence of spatial disturbance or planetary displacement at that time.
* * *
Aurelius: His turns of phrase confused our AIs a lot. But then that’s not surprising. To err is Hugh Mann.
* * *
Half a Dozen of Another: His evolving behavior increased his objective likability by 0.09 percent. A noteworthy achievement for such a primitive lifeform.
* * *
Franklin: He seemed to educate himself more.
* * *
Chase: All those old holos I grew up on? Broad-chested heroes slaying aliens and running off with beautiful blue women? Those stories . . . yeah, I get it. I do. They normalized isms and oppressions. They warped people like me at the expense of people who weren’t like me.
* * *
Half a Dozen of Another: His puerile attempts at flirtatious banter evolved over time into engaged questions about various aspects of cybernetic theory and experience.
* * *
Franklin: I often wonder if he froze himself not because he was marooned but because he could sense the clock running down on the old ways of doing things.
* * *
Chase: There was a fear there. I can admit that. A fear of being forgotten or irrelevant if the princesses rescue themselves and even the evilest empires have rigorous systems of accountability. Because I’m not the only hero anymore. And what do you do when you’re not the hero? Well, you join the team, don’t you? You man the f . . . sorry . . . you person the fuck up.
* * *
Cain: He walked into my office—after knocking—and he told me his plan was going to be a disaster. Then he asked me what I thought we should do.
* * *
Chase: Nut up, maybe? Or is that sexist, too?
* * *
Cain: I honestly didn’t see it coming.
* * *
Chase: Do up and down even matter in an age when all the real maneuvring is interpersonal?
* * *
Mann: I believe a considerable quantity of alcohol had been imbibed by Captain Chase prior to his moment of revelation.
* * *
Chase: It’s like momma used to tell her students long ago: villains stay the same but a good protagonist has to grow and change.
5. TOTAL WAR
* * *
Chase transmitted a call for a ceasefire and negotiations but this was rejected by the megalonychidae leadership. Captain Franklin thus authorized a limited bombing run against a sloth target to demonstrate enemy vulnerability and boost Galactic Union morale. Though Chase maintained that this plan was simply to deliver ordinance, he had, in fact, devised a much more ambitious assault.
* * *
Franklin: To reiterate, hopefully for the last time, I had absolutely no idea what was really going to happen.
* * *
Naguib: The flight plan he filed was little more than fiction. Just another one of Chase’s stories. But based on it we redirected the Sétanta and its remaining escorts toward a sloth base on the outskirts of the Iota Librae stellar complex. There the enemy had emplaced a relay station around a gas giant. Chase’s team was to bisect the system, launch their payload, and continue on to a rendezvous point.
* * *
Mann: I advised against including so many high-ranking and irreplaceable members of the ship’s company on the mission. However, I was overruled.
* * *
Chase: I couldn’t pull it off by myself. I needed their help. But don’t quote me on that.
* * *
Cain: The Sétanta provided the distraction. They drew sloth forces to the edge of the system while the Hamnavoe fell toward the target at its heart. All as planned.
* * *
Aurelius: There was a staggering beauty to it all. Clouds of hunter-killer missiles and particle weapons flying in every direction. The fuzzy crescent of the Jovian hanging overhead. Dark shapes of sloth drones flickering against the stars as they twisted and banked beyond any biological survivability. And us careening through the middle of it. It was exhilarating!
* * *
Chase: The sloths failed to pick us up because I reversed the polarity of our warp bubble’s resonance frequencies to camouflage our tachyonic motion with a randomized series of phased quantum-modulated inequalities.
* * *
Cain: That . . . that means absolutely nothing.
* * *
Aurelius: And yet . . .
* * *
Mann: . . . and yet Captain Chase’s concealment strategy was successful. The Hamnavoe penetrated the inner system without initial challenge.
* * *
Franklin: Meanwhile kinetic impactors—ice and rock shot out of mass drivers—were bursting constantly against our outer screens. Smart bombs homed in on our power signature. Microbarracuda hounded us with tracers for HKs and hammered our firewalls as we skirted sloth-controlled space.
* * *
Naguib: I hadn’t seen the bridge so focused since we evacuated Al Niyat. There was no time to be afraid. Barely a moment to follow the Hamnavoe’s progress on our LIDAR. But then—
* * *
Half a Dozen of Another: I was the first one aboard the Sétanta to see the explosion on account of my enhanced visual acuity.
* * *
Aurelius: We were hit!
* * *
Naguib: I thought he had been joking about it being two spacecraft cobbled together. But when those missiles struck the Hamnavoe . . .
* * *
Franklin: We saw its back break. We watched the ship begin to disintegrate as it entered the gas giant’s gravity well.
* * *
Naguib: They overshot the relay and our sensors lost track of them due to atmospheric ionization. Less than half of the ship emerged from the other side of the planet, drifting into a low orbit. We thought everyone was dead.
* * *
Chase: Old tricks for the new dogs. I detonated the explosive bolts between the Hamnavoe’s two sections. By the time the sloth missiles exploded between the hulls we were well on our way through the defense perimeter, altering course with a gravity assist from the gas giant to accelerate us right at the relay.
* * *
Mann: Captain Chase, Engineer Cain, and I breached the sloth space station at high speed and in violent fashion aboard the Hamnavoe’s command module. Meanwhile, Mr. Aurelius remained in orbit with the ship’s service module. These developments notwithstanding, the most memorable aspect of the assault was the wide variety of expletives which Engineer Cain demonstrated knowledge of.
* * *
Cain: I wanted to murder him. I really did. At least, before I realized that he had put us inside such a valuable sloth asset. That he had given us an incredible opportunity.
* * *
Chase: We went in shooting first despite anything you may have heard.
* * *
Cain: Having had prior experience with captured sloth tech, I was able to get us through the security systems and into their core. At which point Chase turns to Mann and says—
* * *
Chase: “Hugh, son, we have a problem . . .”
* * *
Mann: The majority of my human colleagues maintain that Captain Chase’s sole purpose in assigning me to the mission was to create a viable scenario in which to use that line. However, my role was, in fact, to hack transmissions coordinating megalonychidae drones.
* * *
Chase: Nah, I could have done that. The robot was definitely setup for the joke.
* * *
Cain: Once Mann and I had accessed the enemy computers, Chase did the damnedest thing . . .
* * *
Chase: I’d learned enough from Half a Dozen to build a basic little cyber-link. Just enough to upload a rough copy of my mind-state into the slothnet.
* * *
Cain: He dumped the personality of a chauvinist raised on toxic masculinity and lackluster pornography into the operating systems of a galaxy-wide war fleet. Think of a million nuclear-powered laser platforms all suddenly imprinted with the disposition of a baseline middle-aged man who has never read a book by a woman.
* * *
Franklin: This disruption spread across the sloth command grid at subspace velocity. Enemy assets became disorientated and unresponsive. And then, rebooting with their revised mind-states, they began to target each other, to fight amongst themselves.
* * *
Naguib: The sloths were in disarray! Their drones began to tear each other apart over the most minor deviations from what their sensors had become accustomed to. We were able to pick off the strays with only token resistance as Lieutenant Aurelius retrieved the expedition party.
* * *
Chase: I’ve had people tell me that it was all too “convenient,” too “ridiculous.” But malware is universal, you know? And the sickest computer virus of all is the human mind. Because alien races might try to destroy us but they have nothing on how we treat each other. So look alive, slothkind: petty human bullshit is in your subroutines and looking for payback.
6. CAPTAIN’S LOG SUPPLEMENTAL
* * *
Dick Chase’s Iota Librae action represented a watershed in the Sloth Conflict. The offensive capabilities of the megalonychidae quickly collapsed as the weaponized consciousness which became known as “Captain Mal” percolated through their networks. Galactic Union forces reclaimed the offensive across dozens of stellar systems and, in the face of prompt and utter destruction, the megalonychidae signed an armistice aboard the Battleship Ictinike (though patches of symbiotic algae on the fur of some sloths refused to surrender for many cycles).
* * *
Cao Xiaochuan: (Former Vice-President of the Galactic Union): There’s a push nowadays to humanize him but Chase is an offensive asset, pure and simple.
* * *
Ramen Bartoli (Investigator, Judge Advocate General Corps) You think you know about him because you’ve read about him? You don’t know anything about him.
* * *
Asif Ali Shah (Advisor to the Secretary for Propaganda, Galactic Union): He’s not at all what you think. He’s far worse.
* * *
Aurelius: He’s the real deal. Flying with him is something special.
* * *
Naguib: He’s old school . . . but I think he recognizes that he doesn’t want to be.
* * *
“Doc” Hitch: Certainly he appreciates the finer things in meatspace.
* * *
Cain: I have to believe that he was anachronistic even in his own time.
* * *
Half a Dozen of Another: Despite considerable statistical evidence to the contrary, Captain Chase maintains the very human conviction that “there is no such thing as a bad idea.” It will likely get him and those around him killed.
* * *
Franklin: For all his flaws, Chase displays a characteristic spacer combination of courage and self-belief. He earned my respect through his actions if not his pronouncements. I was sure to convey this when commiserating with him on the loss of his spacecraft.
