Squidgy was drawing again. Grasping the stylus carefully in three different hands. It was simultaneously much more difficult and much simpler to do this under acceleration. Difficult because it strained several muscle groups that had already begun to atrophy and were on the verge of beginning full self digestion. Stressing against the weakness caused tremors and pain to shoot up and down Squidgy’s body.
Subtle little lashes of tearing agony that it was agreed by her elders helped to better train a young clerk towards efficiency and good practice in whatever task they found themselves in and prevent deviation from the reinforced physical optimizations once in place.
But every single sign of decaying capacity was something to fight against. Squidgie knew it would take almost her entire eight months of conscious life over again to complete this project optimistically. Any decay before then could potentially be a catastrophic diminishing.
It was exhausting though.
It was near starvation inducing work that made her almost as ravenous as pylo in miniature.
If She was a terran she was pretty sure the heat of her muscles would have induced rampant sweating by this point.
Instead she simply had to suffer and only reach for ice packs to bring the temperature down right before something started denaturing.
Being comfortable was decay. Being satisfied was decay.
Any crutch that could have made this easier was going to diminish her and start the slow decline into a bag of happy jellied brains and gonads.
She shuddered at the tempting thought but continued with the work. She had surveyed and tested them with Aleph and Omega and even Quarti. All had given valuable feedback and pointers.
She was honing in on the process, but she had to keep up the process or she would lose the ability before she was done.
It was a tricky balance, apparently you had to have SOME similarities to terran form but not too many. There were territories around every feature and trait and visual cue that could move the subject from the desired impact to utterly nightmarish.
But Squidgie was honing in on the right super stimuli.
Not that Terran aesthetics was everything, just that it was a vital part of the whole. To be in the correct position to act as an ally to the terrans they needed to feel comfortable with her yes. But she also needed to appeal to the ways that the Ship Mistress and Custodian would evaluate the form.
That meant for ▙◀ it had to be functional and robust. Scalable and readily maintainable over a massive scope of materials and economic scales. Up and downgradable in material and maintenance cost. Which was honestly just good practice and something that should be done even if they weren't a factor.
For Pylo it meant there needed to be an authenticity of pattern, form, living tissue and self referential history. Genetic forms and lineages expressed and changing and remembering and explicitly informing of their own history. Idiosyncrasies and random over exaggerated flourishes of adaptation into flowery displays would appeal the most if using the standard Siren stereotype.
Ship Mistress Pylo however did not seem to partake in the usual flourishes of universal beauty and appeal that Redweed’s Orphan Sirens did. Nor any of the exotic fashions Squidgy’s elders had sold to her of second hand records from House Courtesan members.
So perhaps not going overly ostentatious then?
A much more subdued signaling of honest fitness?
Hard to say, the records that had not been spirited away and locked down by Pylo’s earlier panic flailing over the hint of Squidgie reading any crew manuals had unfortunately swallowed up every single fragment of Courtesan Culture and preference on the ship.
The thoroughness of the siren was impressive when they were aware of the need.
Or perhaps those records had never been kept in the first place?
It was difficult to decide and a distracting mystery to fill another shift.
But these considerations had to go into the fashioning. A figure that needed to blend appeal, comfort, honesty and non-aggression all into one tightly packed hyper efficient bundle for three different species at once! Not to mention the more universal factors for hypothetical future crew members that were completely unknown, or interactions with port authorities. And even if she told herself it was only because it was part of ▙◀s evaluation, it should be able to at least have a chance of surviving if stranded at a port.
This was rapidly getting away from Squidgy’s ability to produce or manage already and it was the first step in the process!
But there was only so much frustrated straining to productively put herself through in a shift.
Unfortunately the best person to ask would have been Pylo herself. Sirens did this sort of thing easier than terrans breathed.
But asking about something this deeply tied into the plan of crew franchisement was liable to set off the Siren catastrophically if past experience was anything to go on.
Which left the custodian, who Squidgie was pretty sure was under several kinds of trade embargo that required the request be filtered and termed carefully.
Well exhaustion and effort was going to be a constant companion on this road anyway!
Squidgy would just have to put in the work and use it to fight off another wave of decay, atrophy and complacency.
Now where was the Custodian at this time in the shift?
...
“You want to perform upgrades little clerk? How curious indeed. Hmmm ah yes and you need help in actually executing on a viable design? Oh dear this just won’t do...”
The Custodian was honest, clearly playing out across their panel and even emitting in subtle long light pulses the tally of their urges, demiurges and conceptual plans in the wide open for others to take in and understand.
To know what motivated them and precisely how one was affecting them.
It was intricate and complex and at times difficult to follow in full, but everything that governed a decision was there if one could just take the time to evaluate it carefully.
Almost always after the fact of course. There was just too much data to handle the deeper motivations any other way. But in principle the Custodian was to use a Terran phrase, an open book.
But still the weft and sweep of exchanges between the various internal processes was beautiful and inspiring to Squidgy, and if not for Aleph she suspected that she would have eventually found a way to be employed by and imprinted on the custodian.
Several of her fellow motile juveniles were already trying to court the custodian for some kind of employment but as far as she could hear in the discussions between clerks none had been hired.
Squidgie liked to think she would have been clever enough to manage it where all her kin and peers had failed. But maybe all of that was just from Aleph and her incredible care and nurturing that she could stand out from them at all.
That put proverbial steel in her nonexistent (for now) spine.
“Yes Custodian, I am after all but a clerk but I feel I can do and be more. Will you assist me?”
“Well you’re going to leave yourself exposed to constant immune response with a reinforcing mesh like this. It would be cheaper to go with a properly sealed environmental container and secured neural inputs like your parents.”
Squidgie bristled a little bit and put more harsh tang in her long light emission. It was not entirely analogous to a cold and angry tone of voice, but close enough for the custodian.
It’s not like there was the full suite of a terran social-intuition operating behind that honest display anyway.
Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“That would defeat the purpose of the exercise custodian. I want to keep my juvenile immune system’s robustness as well as the athletic agility and related cognitive structures of my anatomy. If you see here and here I am explicitly keeping the foreign intrusions constant whenever there is atmospheric exposure and grafting the intakes into my original respiration filters”
A flutter of activity showed the Custodian prioritizing deeper attention and thought to the matter rather then the initial almost autonomous reaction that had been prompted the first time.
Several of the larger scale eyes focused intently on the drawing and then a few probing queries for deeper statistical data pinged off of Squidgie.
Dutifully she provided them as fast as she could, although the rush was leaving her internal copper whorls overheated.
Finally the barrage silenced and more conventional speech continued.
[https://i.imgur.com/4bQDArn.png]
“These neural structures won't be able to keep up with that bipedal gait at all, however if you just add a simple analog feedback circuit with pre-computed resistances you only need a much higher level and simpler control system. Here.”
An arm swung into view and swept the sketch with a coherent light beam to reorganize the pigmentation.
Rebuilding several swaths of the original painstakingly made sketches. That stung a lot more than squidgie wanted to admit. But she had brought the schematics here for critique and improvement. The Custodian’s work was obviously going to be superior.
But the loss of those precious efforts in less than one of aleph’s blinks hurt anyway.
“As for the rest, if you're using one of the ship’s Motiles for the gland system as indicated, it'd make much more sense to keep part of it's neurology and musculature here along the spine and have it manage the manipulators as well."
Squidgie caught glances over the updated structural and internal layouts. It was much more deeply annotated. There were marks of structural elements and several minutely written texts and referents to go along with the commentary.
“Also there are modality compressions you will need to handle the larger joint counts and reach. Sacrificing your hand count along these lines will serve you better and give more neural tissue accessible for mapping into the new proprioception. Yes. If you are serious this should serve better as a schematic."
Another dozen flashes erased and rebuilt every single sketch and carefully scrawled illustration.
Then the whole sheaf of paper was handed back to Squidgie.
There were deeper details on servo electronics, chassis shapes, variable materials, possible applications of polymer processing along popular Siren aesthetic art movements. Welding tips, bone crafting expertise, glucose balance models. Several annotations linking to various documented clerk holding chambers and life support strategies as documented across the reef.
Deeper and further readings that were earmarked on cybernetics, programming, deep tissue stimulation, immunology, internal ecology informational security theory, michakaryia symbiotic handling, circulatory system plumbing, enzymatic chemistry.
The pages were fractally encoded down to the very limits of Squidgies ability to actually even read and some hints that perhaps deeper data was far too small to be resolved with her naked eye!
It was unrecognizable as anything she had made.
Much of her ideas were completely overturned and re-written!
Although a few were kept.
Apparently, the idea she'd included with the contact microphones for tactile feedback had been approved by the custodian’s wisdom. There was notes to a known system in their archives marked for deeper reading. Also under the relatively small experimental sub-section a request for a sample of several materials manufactured by Pylo to measure their relative speeds of sound.
It took several long minutes to read and grasp everything that was suggested, lightly sketched out ideas had been filled in with near full fabrication spec grade instructions!
It took even longer to properly think through it herself.
And after that she had to bring up archives to cross reference and double check the fine printing with a proper magnification lens!
Fortunately most of that was errata and side postulates not related to the direct engineering. So it was probably safe if Squidgie accidentally missed one due to smudging or dust obscuring it.
After that the rest of the shift was painstaking hours to go over and sketch out another set of her own suggestions and adjustments to the recommendations. She was almost entirely done when she double checked one of the notes and felt a sinking sensation that made her wish she had tear ducts.
It was obvious once she really looked. What Squidgie had thought to be just punctuation was actually a reference for how to translate each sentence marked by it into a practical exercise to be undertaken as part of her education. The entire thing was filled with them and the precise indicator was robust enough that she would have to re-read the entire thing and then execute the indicated exercises to actually grasp everything written!
It made her want to scream vocally but there was no air here where she had been studying.
This was going to require ten times the work at least! She kind of wanted to yell at the custodian for leaving the referent so unobvious. But of course ▙◀ had left almost immediately after handing her those papers in the first place!
It stung a bit that they had not even bothered a simple goodbye. But again there was no expectation that she would have any desire for a terran suited protocol. The custodian had treated her promptly, precisely and with all the respect that any clerk would have expected or wanted. And it's not like it was lost on her; she was grateful to not feel the implied debt every second of their time was, it was just that in this specific instance they might have considered the transaction worth it to placate the terran memetic constructs in her mind.
But no that was unfair. It was on Squidgie that she had not let them know it would feel dismissive and belittling to have her entire life’s work so far casually threshed and rebuilt from the ground up and then left in her hands like a minor transactional receipt.
Honestly the trove of details and schematics was a fortune worth of effort to have been bestowed on her simple request for aide. In fact, there must be some system within ▙◀ that had realized this was more important than their conversation implied for this much processing power to have been mobilized.
She was just too slow and dim to have noticed that in the logs.
And she had many dozens of shifts of experiments and exercises to perform before she was prepared to even bring up the amendments that had initially struck her.
Well.
She had wanted to keep her brain and body near exhaustively strained before the project could ensure it by simpler means.
On a fifth total review she realized even the sketches had modification annotator marks!
It made more than half of the notes actually consisted of multiple possible designs for each given system, to be differentiated between by experiment, it was by no means intended to be a final production, or even an actual fabrication ready as a non-final prototype.
Just a highly detailed research exercise.
The sting of their rudeness was washed away in all the deeply touching attention this collection of documents represented.
It made sense ▙◀ did actually care about Squidgie. They were the Custodian after all.
They were very considerate of her as per their contract.