Thomas brought his glass of whiskey down onto the desk with a satisfying thud.
The buzz that followed made him unaware of the effect that ‘thud’ had on the desk. It was strong enough to rattle the 'Doctor Bowdich' nameplate-- coated in what seemed to him like some kind of gaudy fake gold-- to the side, not quite falling off. He didn’t exactly mind either way, of course. He hated that thing with a passion unlike anything else. Not only did he despise being called 'Bowdich,' but if he’d been wrong all this time and the fake gold was in fact real, then it meant that his name had been attached to some sort of disgusting pretentious mark of bureaucratic elites. And if it wasn't fake, well, that just proved his point about trying too hard to be flashy even further, didn’t it?
The hull of the office rumbled, and the ice in his whiskey made some interesting crinkling sounds. His only hint of a reaction from him was a glance upwards and a sigh. Another engine discharge. They'd been getting more frequent lately.
"Chell, schedule a meeting with the head of Engineering." he rubbed the fatigue out of his eyes. "He's got to swap the coils before the Director has a meltdown about it."
“Yes, yes, okay.” a bodiless voice replied. “Let me remind you, though, that this’ll be the third time I do that. He keeps saying that it'd put the ship out of schedule by some infinitesimal amount of cycles, then asks for a ‘couple more days’ to find a way to avoid inconveniencing anyone."
Thomas stifled a laugh-- not the fun kind, but the kind you let out in complete and utter disbelief and frustration, because nothing else really fits the mood. "I bet it’s easy for him to play dumb when it's not his head on the line," he took a sip of his drink. If he had people he spoke to frequently, they'd probably object to his liberal use of drinking. But it was 4 in the morning (did that even matter in space?), and he liked having something that kept him engaged through the late night work. "If he makes another excuse again, tell him I'll just point the Director to his workshop next time she asks why her morning coffee’s been spilled all over the oxygen handling paperwork. You know, important stuff.”
A pause.
"Noted."
Then the AI laughed, and he wondered why he'd ever made the mistake of creating machine consciousness.
"What's so funny?"
"Oh, nothing." she chirped. "You’re in trouble either way, aren’t you?"
"Yeah," he let his head fall on his desk, "so please, schedule the meeting. I’m trying to avoid as much of that trouble while I still can."
"Oh, I did that before you even asked. I know what you're thinking, remember?"
He didn't reply. She already knew what he'd say, after all.
"Sometimes it's just fun to hear you rant, you know?" the voice continued. "Try to ease off on that, by the way. You'll never get people to like you like that."
"Ah," he looked up, energy seemingly returning from the short banter, "You assume I want people to like me. That's your biggest mistake."
"Yes, forgive me for thinking that the ‘Head of Health and Development’ should be seen as a charitable fellow."
"I’m plenty charitable,” he shrugged, “Just not too outgoing. And I didn’t exactly pick the job!"
"You still accepted the offer!" indignation dripped over her words. “And don’t you bring up your whole spiel about how it’s a--” she laced her words with a mocking, sarcastic tone-- “‘strategic position,’ you absolute nerd!”
It was true, though. Health and Development was actually so high up the hierarchy that he could technically work on and do whatever he wanted without much restriction, as long as he could justify it as 'Development.' And really, what technology didn’t ‘develop’ something?
Reading his mind, she interrupted. "You still need to care about people to do the other half."
Right, well, he was ignoring the whole 'Health' aspect to it, which was arguably the biggest part of his job.
"Hush, you'll break my whole villain act I've got going on." he finished his alcohol off. "Besides, why would I care that people think I'm some grumpy Machiavellian genius? If anything, that's a compliment!"
"Because you're the one that's supposed to keep them safe and healthy?"
"So is the Director, and she pulls the whole routine off pretty well."
"Unlike you, people like that in her."
"You'll break my heart."
"..."
The awkward silence lingered for what seemed like an enternal, yet perfectly calculated amount of seconds.
"Good."
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
He forced himself to look offended, but he knew that if that hadn’t come off at his expense, he’d have burst out laughing.
Chell's tone lightened, "Do get back to work, though. Or the Director will break your spine instead."
"Yes, yes." he waved his hand in the air and picked up his pen. Even in a state of the art spaceship housing an entire city, people still used pen and paper when it came to paperwork. Unbelievable. "Thanks, mom."
"And really, think about it." the AI said, in a tone far softer than he'd ever heard her use. "I think it'd do you good to have someone to at the very least talk to, other than me. People think much worse of you than you’re aware of, and I don't think you deserve that."
He blinked at the ceiling.
"Er..." he paused, at a loss for words. He looked down at his hand after he realized he’d tried to take a sip of the empty whiskey glass, then sighed.
Thomas looked back up, and gave a weak, confused smile.
"...I'll try?"
----------------------------------------
The streets of the city inside the Lunacy weren't so much streets as they were a mixture of open spaces, hallways, and catwalks. That’s not to say that the whole thing didn’t look the part of a city, it was just the fact that the Lunacy wasn't actually a giant spaceship with a city inside, rather it pushed past that description through sheer complexity. The Lunacy was the city. An enormous city, hurling through space, propelled by ionized gas and a reactor that bent reality at its seams, tampering with space and distorting mass to unnatural extents. Everyone on Earth, and the Lunacy itself, knew that the vessel wasn't just a moving city. It was a marvel of human innovation, one that required large parts and sectors of itself to be designed around the limitations of a project of its nature. Each building, each section, each hallway, each elevator, and each shuttle highway (to name a few things) required careful planning and calculation, which led to a few interesting quirks that Thomas found fascinating.
For example, the fancier and expensive community sectors, as well as important management and business blocs got to be positioned in a part of the ship-- the top-- specifically placed far away from any critical areas (or, well, far away from anything, really), giving it the luxury of vast, open spaces filled with greenery. Large trees, beautiful parks, artificial rivers and lakes, populated with sleek, tall buildings that'd convince anyone they were standing in a very modern metropolis on the Earth's surface, topped off and sold convincingly thanks to a simulated sky that wrapped along the hull, matched to the 24 hour cycle that the ship ran on.
One of his personal favourite spots was a nice little restaurant, on one of the sides of the ship, near the "Directorate--" a specific sector of the top designated to the highest administrative and leadership buildings, to attend the meetings that the Director herself held with the many heads of each department, and to work at his office near her building-- the restaurant, 'Trails,' was cleverly positioned to overlook a lake, the Directorate, and some particularly nice patches of trees and flowers on one window, while the other one, thanks to the fact that the joint itself was on the very side of the ship, gave a beautiful sight of the stars and space outside.
It also helped that the food was pretty good, if a little expensive.
Other spots on the Lunacy however, and this was the 'fascinating' part, had a completely different style. With the absence of a 'sky,' the rest of the ship was lit up with stark, neon coloured lights, flashy commercial screens, holographic projections, and traffic adverts and signs that advertised and directed the populace through the city. Most importantly, the architecture was, to be quite frank, a completely different story from the open spaces on the top. Floors of commerces and housing were stacked on top of each other, still sizable, but more noticeably constrained by the limited space the ship could give. There were still large, open spaces, but they overlooked and intertwined with each other, mixing different lights and colours for a mesmerizing maze that never failed to catch the eye.
None of this was to say that the living conditions were any lower than the 'fancy' parts, no, it was just so much more different than Earth that it was hard not to call attention to the contrast. Every part and floor had its own little quirks, like how hotspots of restaurants and cafés would be lit up with reds and yellows to catch the eye and invoke hunger, but the insides of those places and the tables would have more neutral lighting to match a sense of comfort and hospitality.
It was, to say the least, a very interesting place to live in. And the views, the wonder, and scale did wonders to distract from the fact that, eventually, the Lunacy would land on its destination, an exoplanet semi-distant from Earth, and act as the first settlement outside of the Sol system.
"-Doctor?"
Yes, Thomas knew it was a couple of years off still, but he still couldn't help but keep his mind on the destination, mind swimming with thoughts about it.
"Doctor, hello?"
Who could blame him, really? It wasn't like this was the first attempt to settle in other planets and moons, no, multiple spots in the Sol system had already been growing for some time now. And this wasn't even the first attempt to settle on the exoplanet they'd been going to, there'd been other, although failed, missions to do the same before. But it was all the same satisfying that sense of curiousity and exploration that treading new grounds brought about…
"Bowdich!"
The mention of that dumb surname brought him out of his trance, and he noticed that someone had been bumping his shoulder as he rested on some railing to look onto a nice spot he'd found of the neon lights he'd been thinking of earlier, with tons of shuttle cars flying by an intersection nearby that danced through said lights in a very hypnotising fashion. He turned over to the person that'd been rudely interrupting his little free time he'd gained after finishing up work, which reminded him, wasn't it almost 5 AM by now? Who would even try to approach him at this time-
"-Huh?" he looked to his side in a moment of surprise, and the first thing he noticed was a mop of shoulder long, messy brown hair. "-Director?"
"I've been trying to contact you for almost an hour, is this where you've been?"
The woman in front of him stood a few inches taller than him, and gleamed with authority. The half stern, half annoyed expression worn on her face and in her tone, coupled with the dark sunglasses (that he knew weren’t just sunglasses, he'd made them, after all,) and the fancy looking suit and tie instantly made him scramble to attention, trying to hide the fact that he didn't think he'd been caught so off guard before.
"Er, yes?" he looked around, slightly confused. "Is there- is there a problem with that?"
The Director studied him for a second, and he wondered if she was deciding whether or not to grill him for not finishing something he needed to get done, even if he knew in the back of his mind that it was 5 AM, on a weekend, and that he'd actually gotten work done just a couple of hours ago.
She sighed. "I was going to ask why you weren't sleeping at this hour, but I suppose it's to be expected of you not to be."
He was this close to replying with some banter, as if it had been Chell that had just said that. But then he remembered that he was actually speaking with his boss, that she looked even more annoyed than usual, and that he really didn't want to get fired, or thrown out an airlock. At this rate, sleep deprivation would be the end of him.
"Ah- my apologies for not answering earlier, I was…" he brought his left arm up and pulled on his sleeve, prosthetic metal revealing itself under cloth, and tapped on a specific spot, bringing up a couple of screens that revealed multiple missed calls. "…Uh."
He looked over to the view he'd been staring at, then back at her. "Distracted?"
The Director shaked her head, and gestured to her wrist. “There's no reason to apologize. I'm aware of the time, and you were under no obligation to answer, let alone await a call from me."
He internally breathed a small sigh of relief.
"But I saw that you weren't inactive, so I decided to contact you for assistance with something. If you don't mind, would you come with me?"
"Yes, of course, er…" he raised a brow, unsure of what she was asking for. "…is there something wrong, or…?
"Not particularly," she turned around and began to walk, doing a similar motion with her hands as he'd done, aimed at the air instead of her arm, then a small 'beep' noise rang out. She turned back to him, noticing a shuttle cab approaching them. "I was about to pay Engineering a visit, and I assumed you'd be interested in assisting me in pointing out what needs to be done to fix the recent problems you mentioned."
Ah. He figured it seemed like Chell had forwarded the meeting he'd tried to schedule earlier to her as well.
"Think of it as an apology for making you go through the trouble someone else should've been put through."
Thomas let himself give a small, amused smile for a second, and nodded. "I'll accept the offer, then. Lead the way."
He'd have to thank the AI for getting him out of trouble for once.