“Caretaker Whose Domain Stretches Shallow, Deep, North, Warp, Weft, South, Shuttle, and Comb Until Void.” Nathan’s fingers hovered, sliding along with the looping script, as though he were tracing it from a distance of precisely one foot away in order to not accidentally touch it. “Eightfriend of Eightfriends Purple-Blue-Scintillating Theophania “Three-Brain” Blessed-Are-All-Waters.”
He took a moment, closing his eyes and sighing deeply. He wanted to shake his head, but it was only the queued up complaint that was letting him stave off losing his mind to the headache that was in the process of obliterating his focus and he didn’t want to risk forgetting it—the complaint, that was—by aggravating the headache due to moving his head.
“I came to an alien universe, to an abandoned space station over a planet that’s way bigger than Earth,” he complained, “and the long-ago Stationmaster was an octopus named Tiffany.” He gave it a beat, then another, then sighed. “Fuck it, I’m going to go lose my mind in pain and be maudlin about the headache.”
For some long minutes, he proceeded to do exactly that. While he didn’t have an extensive personal history of migraines, he’d had a few in his day, mostly in conjunction with fevers. He knew the dire majesty of the icepick, the jackhammer, the grinder and the pressure crusher. He was familiar with the visual artifacting and glitching, the rainbow-flare auras of chromatic aberration, the hypersensitivity to sound; no mystery in the realm of the way the body reflexively tenses to the point of deep soreness was a secret to him.
That was not to say that he was used to them. But he knew how to cope, if only by seething.
The pain passed eventually. Mercifully, it did so without a runny nose to go with the tears that had streamed down his face at some point—Nathan very much did not want to have to figure out how to blow his nose while in a spacesuit, since the answer was probably “suffer, fool” or something along those lines. And when he came back to the present well enough to open his eyes, focus on the tasks, and relax muscles left over-tense, he saw a blinking notification on his helmet’s HUD.
Processing Completed. Now Available:
Benthic Dyes (Various)
Fabric (Provenance Unknown, Quantity Limited)
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“Thanks, Saucer,” Nathan said after re-reading the message. “That’s pretty neat. Benthic, huh. I don’t suppose you took some recordings of at least one of the couches that have the colors in a way you can reconstruct and translate?”
By way of answer, a set of ghosts flickered to life. They didn’t occupy every one of the places where the couches had been, instead corresponding to the ones that Saucer hadn’t marked in red. And they were, indeed, color-adjusted to recreate the diorama of the room.
“What’s your conversion ratio, by the way? How much of the fabric and dye do we have?”
Conversion Ratio for Mundane Materials: 10% - 25%.
Range depends upon factors primarily relating to degree of understanding.
125lb of fabrics available for use.
Effective dye availability depends on suit power.
“Cool. Can the dye be applied to anything, or is it only going to work on fabrics? If it turns out that I want to paint the walls or something…”
Dye effectiveness on internal bulkhead materials is estimated to be high.
“And of course we don’t know much about anything other than the internal bulkheads.” Nathan nodded. “Thanks. Okay, I can read the script now, or at least I can mostly read it. I… know I’m not getting everything about the Caretaker’s name. Purple-Blue-Scintillating isn’t right, it’s just the closest I can get? Which is weird, because I thought this fish was supposed to be basically magic and able to translate anything. Maybe English just doesn’t have the semiotic and linguistic building blocks to give me the correct word. If that’s even the right terminology. It’s not like I was a linguist.”
And indeed, Nathan was not. There was an element of truth in his musings, his hypothesis which he immediately moved on from due to the impossibility of actually testing it in any way. The fish would have been no more capable of teaching him the true meaning of the Caretaker’s name than the Interlife boon he received was—very little would have sufficed to do so, and it would never have been better than imperfect.
It would be quite some time before he truly understood that fact, and why it was true.
“So, we’ve learned a few things,” he said after a moment of recovering from his distraction. “One, Tiffany here was from a culture which had one or more Gods, or at least some form of divinity. Two, their ranks had more than one component—at a minimum, her nameplate mural thingy identifies her by how many people she’s overseeing, which is… eight direct reports, and each of those has eight? So she’s in charge of seventy-two people. And three, we know that her domain only extended to the ends of this station, which also means that those seventy-two people lived on this station, and that’s a pretty hefty station by Earth standards but tiny by, like, fictional interstellar space station standards. Though how much automation would that have involved? Anyway, um. Four, semantic and semiotic or whatever context has her as female. And five?” Nathan shook his head, grinning. “Her formal-ish name mural has her nickname—and it’s a total diss.”