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Aleph’s eyes were burning from the long hours staring at her notes. Her spine and head were hot and achy from Resonance with her devices and symbiotes.

This Ship was alive, but not only was it alive it was Intelligent and aware and thinking!

It could talk and she had not even realized it!

Omega had been the one to notice there was a comsystem in place. But Aleph had been the one curious enough to really dig into it. Which apparently had required that Pylo find a dictionary to attach to the thing’s output.

Which she had, although it had taken a few shifts to find apparently.

After the initial fairly dry back and forth greetings and the momentary misunderstanding that Pylo had to explain Omega seemed to mostly lose interest. But Aleph had been curious and delved deeper.

She learned It was a kind of translation machine that parsed and processed statements and then created rough analogues in the other side’s language. Which was entertaining to start with but after the experience with Pylo she was a bit suspicious of translations. Especially given Pylo had apparently been the one to setup the Terran side of this one.

So she had poked and prodded at the machine in resonance and discovered that the whole thing was incredibly open to connection and alteration.

Not just that but after fiddling with it the interface was scarily intuitive! Modular with clear and concise segments for every function, meant to be slotted around, rearranged and then used in any number of possible ways!

Aleph had learned lattice instruction formats on Terra, not to a mastery level but enough she could get by and help diagnose any problems with the software in the berth.

But compared to this she felt like she had been taught working with stones and sticks when apparently some one had invented snap together toy blocks!

It had never really struck her before that advanced technology might not just mean inscrutably complicated and impenetrable alieness before. But here it apparently also meant incredibly refined intuitiveness and accessibility.

It took her two shifts to get a solid feel for how the entire architecture worked in principle.

Three more shifts to isolate the language centers and then another seven to really dig in and start to understand what the mapping of Terran song to Ship language was.

And after that she really did not feel that words were the right term, the Ship language did not package information as words, it was all courses, directions, maneuvers, velocity, energy potential.

Whatever the information scramble was with Pylo and Terrans Aleph shuddered at the gross simplifications and almost random ad hoc word choice on display in this translation machine.

At the same time Aleph was seeing things and abstractions of motion in this simple modular little lattice that suggested the Ship had foundational concepts of what motion was that Aleph could only barely scratch the edges of with Omega’s intensive deep dive in advanced mathematics!

There were just no specific words for the taking of measure like the ship language did, the raw proportionate connection between values like mass and velocity. The deep wonder and symmetries that governed motion and even time.

All of it was incredible, although Aleph had to spend hours and hours to fully process and calculate a few simple references to even have an inkling of an idea of what was being said.

But even so it was great fun!

She suspected if there were any hopefuls back on terra thinking to one day design their own space faring vessels to fly the wonders of the reef they would trade an arm and a leg for the briefest wonders this ship said to Aleph in passing conversation!

And then she had discovered the ship had a sense of humor.

She had not really understood it before, the context was weird and she had doubted the substitution in the translation program. But then she followed the lines of thought, the incongruity of trajectory that was and trajectory that could be.

The nature of something almost like reflection?

But across a surface cascading and practically crackling.

How it looked a lot like one radio echo when it actually had subtle hints of being the product of another.

The Ship had a sense of humor and could find things funny!

The Ship understood the idea of a joke.

Honestly after learning what it looked like, how it worked and what it meant Aleph could not hope to avoid the inevitable.

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She was going to tell an alien mind a joke in its native tongue.

She was going to make a star ship laugh!

The first Terran to ever do so!

It sounded a lot more impressive when she didn't say it outloud.

“So, you are spending all your free time, which we have a lot more of now that we have moved into a place where the WALLS are all around life support systems... on telling a joke?”

Omega tilted her head to one side, then the other.

“No, I mean yes that is the end goal but no I’m spending all my free time transcribing a joke in a language built on the underpinnings of fundamental motion, within a range of speed that could be anywhere from relatively stationary to scraping at the very limits of the speed of light... and uh something to do with the color red”

Omega tilted her head and furrowed a brow.

“Am I going to have to dig up one of my math or physics skill shares to actually understand why this is worth it? I can feel at the edges It might really be good but... you are doing this to tell a joke to a Ship? And what about the color red is funny?”

Aleph grinned.

“If the Red one goes faster”

Omega blinked a bit.

“I don’t get it... ?”

She laughed a bit and waved a hand. “Um hard to describe? It has to do with a lot of things like how wavelengths squash and stuff? And if I just explain the joke it’s going to ruin it... Ya know?”

Omega blinked a bit then shouted over across the space where Quarti was doing something meditative. Or napping, it was hard to say.

“Oiy Poet of the ages! Can you come and help explain this one to me? Maybe give me a translated delivery of it?”

Quarti flailed a gesture at Omega that via several trawls through ancient records Aleph discovered was incredibly rude and vulgar but no one had used in hundreds of years.

Aleph frowned a little and looked over at Omega with a raised brow.

“Uh, why has she been so upset lately? I thought she would be excited by this whole thing... but you both have been kind of out of it”

Omega sighed and ran her fingers through her hair, then pulled it back and scowled at it, Aleph was not going to mention it but the grease was getting kinda noticeable.

“It’s this place we are going to, there is a lot of... spiritual noise? and it’s worrying her. She doesn't know everything that lives at this dock we are going too. It’s a world I think? But there could be something virulent for the colonists... or it could be that we will be fine... or there could be some kind of soul grinding monster there... She tried to demand we have total overlap rotating shifts to cover the store the whole time... This is... Kind of a compromise? We’ve both been getting half the sleep we should be”

Aleph blinked and looked down at the tablets and the collection of sub processing crystals she was using.

“Uh, oh... Wow uh I’m sorry is there... anything I can do?”

Omega sighed and shook her head.

“Not without years more of training and probably two deaths under your belt besides to get the metaphor right... We are probably safe, there hasn't been anything in the trip so far even close to dangerous... but... this is hundreds of thousands of souls at risk... and there is a lot more stuff going on spirit wise then there was before... More even than on Terra I think”

Aleph hummed then looked down at her notes.

“I could ask the ship about it? She’s got a really deep and powerful resonance timbre, and must travel a lot of places with all kinds of spiritual noise or whatever... Maybe she can double check to make sure nothing gets aboard that could hurt the colonists?”

Omega blinked a moment then grinned.

“Sure! That would be great, at the very least it might give us another set of eyes on it and let me and Quarti take a few more hours of rest a shift than we’ve been getting... If I can convince her of that being sufficient”

Aleph nodded and grinned.

“Sure just leave it to me, Uh it might take a few shifts for me to figure out how to phrase that though... There is a lot of stuff going on with just telling a simple joke... and she sort of talks ALL at once”

Omega ruffled Aleph’s hair and laughed.

“Ah that’s fine, it’s just a precaution me and Quarti are taking up anyway, so no rush... Uh yeah I better go wash my hair... my scalp is driving me crazy... Have fun making jokes about red”

Aleph watched her friend drift lazily into the distance then gave her head a shake and went back too it. She needed to not let things distract her this much, There was a lot going on beyond her own concerns.