“…So there we were, sealed in the engineering deck of that Pontsemoan relic,” I explained, it was three days later and I was once again buried to the hip in the engineering bay of the ugly piece of crap runabout that was supposedly going to get me off this rock, “thanks to Alex’s horrific bad timing. It was going to be at least two hours until the Professor was going to be able to get the gear down there to break the hydraulics free and get us out. At exactly the moment we start to relax into the wait, one of the hydraulic pumps kicks back in and hoses the entire deck down with fluid!”
A peel of laughter comes from my speakers, “oh, that musta been messy!”
I grabbed for the 20 millimeter spanner and started getting the magnetic containment vessel fastened down, chuckling at the memory myself. It hasn’t been a funny experience at the moment, but I hadn’t known what was about to happen. “Oh, it was. The six of us were all just covered in it, but thankfully the Pontsemoans don’t use toxic hydraulic fluids. We’re just standing there, shocked, dripping this viscous fluid, and Boudya looks me straight in the eye and says ‘Such a waste. All lubed up nowhere to fuck.’”
Stacy’s laughter this time threatened to blow out my suit’s speakers. “Benastians can’t really be that bad, can they?”
Grinning to myself as I continued to work, I laid it all out for her. “Oh, they are probably even worse. There’s been an age-old joke many authors have used over the decades that humans are ‘always in heat’, and they aren’t wrong! But the Benastians put us to shame. There are scientists in the Commonwealth that are frankly confused as to how they could have survived evolution to the point of interstellar travel, when they seem to be willing to ‘Drop and Cop’ as the saying goes, at the least change of the breeze.
“And it can be infectious to anyone they work with!” I shook my head, pausing in my current task to remember what happened after we’d been cut free from that derelict engine room, and allowed to get back to base to clean up. “Like I said, they were probably our first alien contact after achieving hyperspace technology, and our earlier diplomacy ended up with some broken marriages because of it.”
She still hadn’t stopped that soft chuckling. Our interactions over the last three days really reinforced my thoughts that she’d suffered a good deal being alone for three thousand years with nobody to talk to. At times she seemed almost manic in her need for conversation. I didn’t mind though. I’d been here alone for three weeks now, mostly just talking to myself, and was thankful for the companionship. If nothing else, I was sleeping a whole lot better.
“I fully intend on looking Boudya up when I get back to the Commonwealth,” grabbing another tool, I got back to work, “If only to check in with how she’s doing. We had good times back then, and when I thought there was a chance I was gonna die on this rock, I regretted not checking in with her earlier. We’d promised each other we’d keep in touch, but life gets away from you sometimes.”
“I think you’d like her! And one of her life-mates is that expert I mentioned earlier, the one I wanted you to -” I stopped, for a second thinking I’d heard something in the room with me. “Stacy, did you just hear something? Are you sure nothing else is moving around the sta…”
A vice-like grip clamped around my right ankle and pulled hard. So hard that I’m pretty sure I ended up several meters across the hangar, fetched up against a couple of the tool carts which I’d knocked over in transit. My head was spinning, my vision was swirling, and the stabbing pain from my ankle was horrific. “What the..” I started to say, and I felt cold metal flash across my jaw.
What the fuck was with all the head injuries I was taking in this misadventure! I was going to need a damned cranial scan next time I got to a medical bay.
Luckily, I don’t think I completely lost consciousness this time, but my bell was well and truly rung. When my daze finally started to clear, I was hearing a lot of screaming, half of it coming from my suit’s speakers, and the other half coming from a set of vocal cords very near my face. Both were speaking Giobhioni, but Stacy had taught me just enough that I caught it when she finally yelled, “I said calm your tits, bitch!”
I cracked my eyes open just slightly to figure out what the hell had just hit me…
HOLY FUCK! TEETH!
I was looking straight into a snarling mouth full of very sharp teeth. The first thing out of my mouth was probably the first bit of Giobhioni Stacy had taught me to actually speak, all because of the ration packets. “No eat! Taste BAD!”
Large slit-pupiled, purple eyes set in a green skinned but remarkably human looking face blinked down at me in sudden shock, her disheveled spray of purple hair falling into her face. She said something I didn’t understand, and raised a large spanner to brain me again before a loud high pitched tone screeched out of the hangar bay’s PA system.
While I cringed, the giobhioni dropped the spanner and slapped her hands over her large pointed ears and screamed. And it was a female Giobhioni if our species’ gender expressions were at all similar: wide hips, narrow waist, and noticeable breasts filled out her uniform. Beyond the terrifyingly sharp teeth, her features were typical of a human woman, just that shade of green that made something in the back of my mind bring up the term “goblin”.
She fell over sideways onto the floor, twitching slightly, and the tone coming from the PA cut off. “Sorry about that Thomas,” she said, sounding oddly contrite, “I tried to gauge the frequency so that it didn’t damage your ears permanently. I really hoped I could talk her into listening to me before he jumped straight to violence.”
Frowning, I reached over and grabbed the spanner the Giobhioni had been using as a weapon, then looked around for some cable. “Will tying her up with some of that wiring cable be of any use at all? Or is she liable to just snap it as if it’s cobwebs?”
“Unlikely, and inadvisable.” she responded, “as keyed up as she is, she’ll snap them, you’ll be down some cables, and she’ll still try to kill you. I’ll just have to try to get her to give me a moment to explain, and maybe provide a translator unit so you can talk to her directly.”
“Who is she anyway,” I asked,”I thought you said all the crew were in status? That I was the only living thing moving around the station.”
There was a pause before she answered. “I’m sorry Thomas, it was part of security protocols,” she explained, “when my security subroutines detected you moving around the station, and you couldn’t be identified, I had no choice. The station’s chief of security was summoned from stasis. After gaining knowledge of your people, and that the ship on the surface had been towed away, I had hoped I’d be able to convince her that the isolation order would need to be rescinded. She’s been rather obstinate about it.”
I watched the Security Chief closely, preparing myself for having to try to brain her if she gained her senses and came after me again, underneath that shock of purple hair I caught sight of large pointed ears. No wonder that sound incapacitated her! I thought, then said “Wouldn’t it be necessary to wake up the Commanding officer to rescind that order? I get why security would be revived for an intruder, but a command officer would be needed for an executive order like that…wouldn’t they?”
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“Security Chief Jophixa Throhx is currently the most senior officer on the station,” she explained, “The Commander and his executive officer’s stasis pods malfunctioned 827 years ago. They just were not meant to keep someone under this long! But my orders left no room for me to wake them without authorization!”
She sounded distraught while explaining it, and I swear if she’d been human, she’d have been sobbing. “How many pods have malfunctioned?” I asked quietly
“917 of the 2812 pods that were activated are now dark.” she said in a whisper. “A third of the last known Giobhioni left in the universe, gone because I couldn’t wake them up, even long enough to do maintenance on the pods…”
“Steintrak Tafa…ak tbrath?”
The sound of the horse voice made me jump, and I looked back to the giobhioni I now knew as Jophixa, raising my spanner in defense.
She raised a hand at me however, making no move of aggression, and repeated, “Steintrak Tafa…ak tbrath?”
Stacy’s voice rattled off in their language for a minute or so, likely giving a short explanation of what had happened, before switching back to english. “This man is a human, from a planet called Earth. They only have a scant basic knowledge of our writings, and none of our language. Please do not attack him again, I have examined his personal logs and he is not a threat. His name is Thomas Aasen”
Jophixa wrinkled her nose as she thought for a moment, then said slowly, “Toe-mase Ass-an? Ext krat stebba tbrath rentu”
“She apologizes for attacking you. She has a translator implant and since I have uploaded the translation matrix for your language, she will be able to understand you directly. I’m hoping I can convince her to allow the implant as well, though it will also mean reviving other personnel.”
“Aren’t we sort of in a hurry to head off Barstol and that ship?” I asked, concerned “It won’t be much longer before they reach Commonwealth space and look to dock with a station to take on some supplies. I’m still not sure I’m even gonna get this hunk of junk space worthy in time to catch them, no matter what you say. And do I need to understand her? I wouldn’t think any of them would be leaving the station…”
“Tetrak mo-bintreth.” Jophixa spat out, waving at the ship I’d been working on, “te dida fro pad’eck!”
“Baka cha fik ndokra pado,” Stacy responded back, “It was I could unlock for him! The others are all under more secure protocols that need command authorization, or would have been too large for him to pilot by himself! This would have served fine!”
“Stacy,” I cut in, before the argument could go on, “You said Jophixa can understand me, but I’m still out of the loop without you repeating anything she says in English for me. Could you maybe run subtitles on my H.U.D. to make this quicker? At least until we figure something out?”
Jophixa made an excited gesture, tapping her index finger to her head and pointing at me as she jumped to her feet. “Bo’dra! Te faka yadri!”
In my HUD, the words
Looking over at me, she once again waved at the ship she spat on the floor,
“As she said, it was a matter of security access,” I said with a shrug, “I had to take her word for it. If you know of something that’ll get me home sooner, that you can get me access to and don’t mind me making off with, I’d gladly take your offer. I don’t mind putting in some work, but this thing needs a lot of it.”
She thought for a long moment, then gave a sudden tilt to her head, as if deciding something. she glanced up at the ceiling, that peculiar habit that most species seemed to have when speaking through their communicators or an intercom,
“Yes Commander,” Stacy replied, then added, “And my name is Stacy, not Station! Please don’t treat me like some silly Virtual Intelligence.”
Jophixa had just begun to turn towards the hangar door when she stopped dead and looked back at me.
“I didn’t do a thing,” I explained, “She was like this when I met her. Seems during the 3500 years you’ve been in stasis, something triggered her to jump to full sentience.”
Her eyes went wide,
We stepped through the door at that point and began walking down the corridor, “I take it that means nothing untoward is going to happen to Stacy then?” Peering down at Jophixa from the corner of my eye, I was finding myself rather worried about that prospect. Stacy and I had only known each other a few days, but I kinda liked her. I might have to figure out some way to bust her out of here if something extreme were in the works. “You are going to reset her, or dissect her to see what went wrong or whatever, are you?”
For the second time that day, I had a face full of very sharp teeth mere centimeters from my own. This time she was hanging off the front of my suit, feet braced against my stomach, one fist ready to swing,
My own eyes widened from shock, and I stepped back against the corridor wall for support. “Whoa! Hold on, Jophixa” I said hastily, “I asked because I don’t want anything to happen to her! There are people out there that distrust Sentient A.I., but I’m not one of them! If you’d been planning something like that, I’d have had to figure out a way to get her out of here, take her with me!”
Dropping down to the deck, she grumbled to herself for a while as we continued walking. I was finding myself extremely happy to find out that the Giobhioni had a different view on sentient AI than so many humans have over the years. Hell, even today there were some pretty strict regulations on the development of artificial intelligence. No access to weapons systems, control of critical infrastructure must have hardware cutoff switches, things like that. We hadn’t actually seen a fully sentient AI that we could prove yet, but the paranoia of early science fiction never vanished completely.
If I had needed to break Stacy out of here, I likely would have needed to keep her quiet from anyone but my most trusted friends. I had no idea what Commonwealth Intelligence might do if they found out about her.
“Hey, so about Stacy,” I began. I felt I owed her a warning about how humans might behave if they found out about her.
She grunted and looked up at me with a tilt of her head, but didn’t say anything. I guessed that meant I should just continue. “Mostly my people have gotten over our fear of sentient AI, but we’ve never actually encountered one as far as I’m aware. If you folk revere them as it seems, be careful with any AIs you might introduce to them. It might go fine, but there might also be tension. I don’t want to see anyone, including the AIs, hurt if it can be avoided, ok? If you have to, just keep them far away from my people. Or make sure they pose as virtual intelligences.” I paused for a moment, “Hear that Stacy? If you happen to interact with any other humans, play dumb VI, ok? Don’t let on you’re sentient unless you know they aren’t going to endanger you! I’d like a chance for us to be better friends, and that can’t happen if some paranoid or over ambitious dipshit decides you’re a target for their mental illness.”
“Aw,” came the syrupy sweet reply, “I like you too Thomas! And you aren’t getting away from me that easy! I don’t let just any guy inside me!”
A choking noise came from beside me, and I turned to look at Jophixa. She was bent over coughing uncontrollably, leaning against the corridor wall, staring at me whenever she could catch her breath. I couldn’t blame her really. That first time Stacy let off that remark to me, I just about swallowed my tongue. Since then, I’ve gotten used to her occasional attempt at flirting. Hopefully Jophixa did as well.
I lightly slapped her back a few times hoping to help her calm the coughing reflex. “Yeah,” I explained, “She’s got a saucy side. Better get used to it. I hope your crew aren’t prudes.”