A spacesuited man, middle aged in years and outlook but young again in body, knelt in a silence devoid of air before a machine which had not woken since before the hippopotamus of Earth returned to the ocean in the form of the whale, some tens of millions of years before the software-developer-turned-serial-reincarnator was first born.
“So.” Nathan tilted his head one way and then the other, peering at the swirling, fluid markings on what had previously looked like a dark, dull metal computer terminal of alien design and manufacture. “This gorgeously bright bemuraled computer terminal of alien design and manufacture has an interface. The interface is, obviously, for aliens. But what does it even do? I mean, how does it work and what are its functions?”
The insides of his helmet helpfully developed markings corresponding to the grooves in the terminals. They came with measurements, which did not help him in any way, but the presence of the green dashed lines let him visualize it a bit better. And as he drifted left and right, meditating on the problem, he realized he was letting his eyes wander along a representation of an appendage.
“Ah.” Nathan smiled. “Tentacles! I mean, I’m not normally the person to say that in that tone of voice, but… tentacles! Tiffany here had ‘em. Eight of them. One each into each of these grooves, I wonder how they interacted with it, was it some kind of electrical thing…” His mind leaped ahead of him, and he shook his head and tried to get himself back on track. “Right. Two up top in the big groove, two on the left, two on the right, and two wrapped around the couch. Around the perch? Do octopodes perch on couches? I can’t imagine wanting to use the term sitting to describe them, it’s not like they’ve got butts to get into the seats. That seems like a relevant part of the definition. Saucer, do you think they used electrical impulses on their skin to interface with the terminal?”
Saucer took a moment to process the question, coming as it did after a burst of irrelevancy—though true and accurate irrelevancy, since the Oxford English Dictionary, which was at the time the canonical English dictionary on the planet Earth, defined sit as “To be or remain in that posture in which the weight of the body rests upon the posteriors” which does necessitate the possession of such an appendage.
By way of response, a slender probe wormed its way out of Nathan’s hand and started to work its way across the air to the groove in the terminal which both he and his companion were hypothesizing was the interface for the system. He opened his mouth to ask a question, but a blinking line of text appeared below his status readout in the top left of his screen, and he smiled after glancing over and reading it:
Mode: Non-Destructive Query
“Great,” he said with some degree of relief. “Though if you want to deconstruct one of the terminals, that would probably be okay? I mean, not the center one, because maybe the captain’s—I mean, Caretaker’s—is special. Though then again… are the other ones special? Do they have specific seats, they might have specific seats. Do you integrate well enough with my brain magic here to, like, read the language now that I can read it? And why are there six and not eight if Tiffany here was an Eightfriend? Wait, that last question is dumb, obviously the Caretaker could have direct reports who weren’t bridge crew.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Saucer interrupted him with a set of flickering lines of text, garbled and slowly whirling as the letters resolved into English, or at least into what he perceived as English through the powers of unknown provenance that he had gotten after his first death.
Caretaker—Eightfriend of Eightfriends Tiffany—Captain
Seeker in the Shadows—Eightfriend Vindarre—Sensors
Seeker in the Light—Eightfriend Piuunu—Communications
Mind of All Minds—Eightfriend Sulfurflame—Personnel
Annihilation—Eightfriend Hava—Miscellaneous
My Breath Is Your Breath—Eightfriend DDNE Melusine—Station Operations
Thrive—Eightfriend Thrive-We-All-Who-Dwell-In-This-Void-Which-Is-Our-Nightmare—Logistics
“Okay, that’s…” Nathan sighed. “That’s a lot. What the fuck.” He looked at the words for a moment, glancing from station to station as Saucer laid out for him which names went to which terminals. “Melusine. For some reason that name seems familiar. I must have read it somewhere? Anyway, let’s see… I feel like if we’re going to fuck up any terminal, it might as well be the Personnel terminal? I mean, since we’re figuring that nobody lives here right now? I really don’t feel like I want to blow up the interface to the sensors. Or to… miscellaneous, staffed by someone whose title was Annihilation. Are you done with that querying with the probe?”
There was a pause, and the probe wound its way back into the glove of Nathan’s suit. Probe Completion Status: 0/100 blinked on his helmet, and he snickered audibly.
“You got distracted by my asking about the language and didn’t wind up doing the probing? And now you’ve decided that I’m right about how we should go check out Sulfureflame’s terminal instead of the Caretaker’s. Aren’t I supposed to be the one with ADHD?” He snickered again, unhooking his feet from under the rungs of the tentacle-holds which he’d been using. “Yeesh, one hundred percent ADHD by agent-count and not a single dose of amphetamines around to help us stay on track. That’s great. Or something.”
In this, he was of course correct. In the vastness of the universe he had been reborn into, the universe in which the ancient space station dwelt which was once populated by the benthic cephalopod-analogues he’d begun learning about, things almost entirely not unlike amphetamines did exist—but the mechanisms of their action were just barely, just subtly enough different, or in some cases wildly different, and they did not assist those who might otherwise have benefitted from them in a medical capacity.
Regardless and in addition, the nearest example of such was in a different galactic cluster. Reader: Nathan would not encounter them.
Bereft of their assistance, he would simply have to muddle on, like a narrative that had long lost what little plot had ever been planned for it but which, thankfully, had a bevy of distractions to enable the forgetting of that regrettable fact from time to time.
And in such manner did he float, always carefully, always slowly, towards the Personnel officer’s console.