Reel

Reel pushed the control sticks of her tug forward, throttling the thrusters up. The tough little engines spun hard in their housings, vibrating the ship as they sped the tug and the chunk of asteroid hooked in front of it through space. The acceleration chair engulfed her, the straps across her chest locking her in place. In her heads-up display, blinking guide lights marked her assigned path through the black of space. The velocity index in the upper left of the display shaded towards red, flashing to call her attention, warning her that she was going too fast. She ignored it, and it flashed faster, insistent. The vibration grew to an audible rattle as she picked up speed. She pictured the heavy-duty thrusters on the back end of the ship, frantically whirling in their moorings to provide the thrust she was calling for. She grinned, and jammed the sticks forward as far as they would go.

The acceleration index capped out, the flashing taking on a frantic quality. The awkward, unbalanced, load of the asteroid tried to pull the ship to the left. A smooth twist of the sticks brought it back on course with only a little wobble. Ahead of her, the rings of the processing platform loomed large, seven concentric wheels spinning in empty space. She cut the connection to the asteroid and throttled back hard, letting the rock speed away from her. It shot into the black, shrinking as it went, tumbling end over end before passing through the first set of rings. She pulled the tug to a hard stop, straining against the straps of her chair, and turned to watch.

The asteroid shivered as it passed through the first set of rings. Invisible beams of gravity grabbed at it in an effort to steady its tumbling, but it shot by far too fast for them to find a good hold. As it hit the second set, the outer edges of the rock melted away, a fine dust pulled off it towards the edges of the ring. Collection ports pulled the dust in like starving black holes, streams of matter swirling into them. The asteroid hit the third set and shivered again. The process repeated several more times, until the leftovers tumbled out of the last ring. She watched it spin off into the darkness, growing ever smaller, a much-pared down version of its former self.

Numbers flashed across her heads-up display. Percent material capture, energy efficiency, time. All of them glowed in disapproving shades of red. The asteroid had gone in far too quickly for the processing platform to break down more than half of what she’d put in. Time was lit up in a nice, pleasing green. She'd found it impossible to get both time and the velocity index into the green at once, no matter how perfect her flying. However, flinging the asteroids she collected as fast as possible was satisfying in its own way.

Light flooded around the edges of her heads-up display, the black of space taking on a sudden, harsh glow. Squinting, she pulled off her headset and blinked up into the sudden glare.

Captain Arcturus stood over her, arms stretched over his head. He’d pushed the simulation pod open without bothering to end the program first. She winced; that wasn’t very good for the pod. She would have to reset and re-calibrate it, and then…wait. He was looking at her like he was waiting for something.

“Captain Arcturus, sir?”

“Reel,” He said, his voice flat and weary. “You are supposed to be on light duty in the bridge.”

“Simulations are light duty.” She said automatically. They weren’t on the bridge of course, but he knew that.

His expression softened somewhat. “I asked you to assist Yerry today.”

Yerry didn’t need her help, but he knew that too. She hesitated, picking her words with care. “I think I could be more productive taking additional training, Captain.” She paused, trying to gauge his reaction, but he gave her nothing to go on. If anything, he looked…resigned maybe? “Besides,” she pulled herself upright and swung her legs off the platform, spinning on her shell. “The black is where I’m meant to be, not the bridge.” She put as much conviction into it as she could muster, standing up with a bounce on the final word.

“You are meant to be where I tell you to be!” Arcturus’ voice cracked off the bulkhead and knocked her back a step, her shell bumping into the sim pod. He hadn’t yelled, but the words were as hard and unyielding as the steel bulkheads around them. She opened her mouth to respond, but clicked it shut again. The Captain’s glare let her know that any argument she might make would find no purchase in his mind.

“Sir…” She started again before trailing off, uncertain.

Arcturus held her gaze for a long moment, black eyes hard. “Do you understand how fine a line we are walking?”

She eyed him, hunting for some clue as to what he wanted her to say. “Of course.”

He snorted. “If that were true, I imagine you’d be on the bridge, where I asked you to be. We have so little time…if the Efreet arrive before we’ve managed to…” He stopped, wincing.

She felt it too. Her implant buzzed ominously, and in her already sensitive skull it felt like someone ripping the scales out of her scalp. She put a hand to it and gave her father a reproachful look.

He ran a hand over the scales of his head, in a slow, weary way. “We just don’t have any time to waste.”

“I know that, Captain.”

“Do you?” He pressed his thumb and forefinger to the wide bridge of his nose, squeezing. “Then why are you here, running a simulation not even connected to your job?”

“I just…wanted to do something different.” She said, cautiously. “Something new.”

“Then go help with the translations. That’s a new thing for all of us.” He huffed a sigh. “This is dangerous, Reel. We can’t afford mistakes. When we’ve…done what we need to do…you can have all the new experiences you want. But right now, I need you to go assist Yerry, not run trainings just for the thrill of it.” He glanced at the scores on the screen over the simulation pod and frowned. “Particularly if you’re going to score so badly on them. I thought you usually did well on flight simulations?”

“It, uh, gave me an oddly shaped asteroid.” Reel muttered. He looked at the screen again and shook his head, and Reel felt her face heat. There was no way he could mistake those numbers for anything but playing around.

“Just…go help Yerry, please.”

“Yes sir, Captain.”

She turned to hurry away, grateful for the escape from the uncomfortable conversation. Rounding the corner, she glanced back over her shoulder and saw Arcturus standing with his head bowed. His fingers rested on the abandoned headset, limp, and his eyes had a faraway look to them. He looked like he had the whole ship sitting on the back of his shell. Something about that sight unnerved her more than the lecture had. He looked...frail, like a much older Torellan, and she felt a stab of shame that she couldn’t quite explain. She put her own head down to avoid the sight and rushed away to the command center.

When she arrived and palmed the doors open, most of the consoles stood empty, their screens dark and their usual users still recovering in their quarters. Yerry sat alone, hunched with her head low in front of her own dimmed screen, her fingers tracing their weary way from one end to the other. Next to her, Reel’s console sat powered on, lit and still scrolling through the diagnostics she’d abandoned earlier.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

She slid onto the seat next to Yerry and offered the tired looking woman her best smile. “I’m back. What are we working on?”

The navigations chief returned the smile with no more than a faint crease at the corners of her mouth. The dull claws of her fingers never stopped working on the screen in front of her. “The computer has some early draft translations for us to refine. I’ll kick a batch over to you.” She swiped laboriously at the screen, and the power diagnostics on Reel’s console were replaced with lines of text.

The lack of enthusiasm wasn’t unfriendliness, Reel judged, but rather simple exhaustion. Yerry was usually full of energy. Reel had played around the consoles as a child, while the older woman pretended to step on her tail as she skittered between the seats. She remembered giggling up at her, and Yerry's bright, laughing eyes looking down.

Today, those eyes were dull, and her fingers dragged, the usual sharp tapping of her nails muted and lethargic. Reel wished there was a way to just…give some of her energy to Yerry. Seeing the older woman like this made the days she’d spent recovering in the sick bay seem wasteful. Here Yerry was, pushing through the aftereffects of the Strickening. Her dad was, too. Why hadn’t she done the same thing? She felt another prickle of shame. Well, she could at least see this job done right, whatever it was. She turned to her console screen, stretching her fingers by pressing the tips together as she took in the screen’s contents.

The evacuation of the ditch army continued today with great trouble and great losses than before. When the nebula, who had traveled along the coast for two days, found itself absent the German aerial armies entered the argument again. Troop retraction allows Germans to raise long shot along the coast. They argue that they have submerged three military bases and eight carrying ships. Regardless of the truth, it is clear that the federal losses are more difficult than before.

She stared at it. “Yerry,” she said slowly. “What...What am I supposed to do with this?”

Yerry didn’t turn her head, but Reel heard her chuckle at her own monitor. “Try to clean it up and feed it back to the computer. With a little luck, we’ll have some working translation algorithms by the end of the day.”

Reel studied the words. Trying to make sense of them made her head hurt, and she couldn’t even blame the implant. “Clean it up how?”

In answer, Yerry pushed her stool back to make space for Reel to see what she was doing at her console. The same mishmash sort of words filled her screen, with individual words and phrases highlighted.

“The highlighted bits are things that don’t make sense to me,” Yerry said, gesturing. “The computer is good at developing the early stages of a translation. According to the manuals, almost all languages have a shared set of words that they use most often. The computer analyzes the speech that we feed into it, and tries to match those words up with what it hears. Once it's done that, it starts trying to extrapolate...but obviously makes lots of mistakes as it goes. So, we have to go through, try to find the mistakes, and suggest changes. The computer incorporates those changes and refines its dictionary of words, until we start getting useful translations.”

Reel scrambled for something intelligent to say. “So the highlighted areas are the ones that you’ve made changes to?”

“Not yet. I read the section the computer gives me through all the way to try to make sense of it, and I mark the chunks as I go. You can tap a highlighted section to bring up alternative suggestions,” She demonstrated, opening a bewildering drop-down menu of choices. “Sometimes things become clearer in the context of the whole page.”

That didn’t seem to be the case here. To Reel’s mind, the words seemed to make less sense with every sentence. “Have you done an implant training simulation of this? Could I go take it and then come back?”

Yerry shook her head, her eyes crinkling in amusement. “No, since I’ve never had to translate a new language. I was surprised to discover there was even a manual protocol for it.”

Reel had never thought about it before, since every species within the Efreet Empire used only Efreeti. She knew the other high races had their own languages, but the computer could translate those readily. Yerry went on. “As for how long...” She shrugged, shell rising and falling. “I’ve only been working on it for a day, and we’re already up to whole paragraphs, even if they’re a little bit scrambled.”

Reel felt a growing excitement as she looked at the words on the screens. The lines teased her, hinting at a vast, unexplored world. The words of an unknown people lay before her, waiting for her to crack them open. Something new… “How far along should we be?” She asked without looking at Yerry. The words had her full attention now.

Yerry must have seen it, because she chuckled again. That was good to hear, and it made her sound less exhausted. “According to the manual protocol, I should still be working on simple sentences. Things like ‘How are you?’ and ‘I like food.’ We're far ahead of that.”

Reel blinked in surprise, tearing her gaze away from the tantalizing words and back to Yerry. “These aren’t simple at all. Why is it going so fast?”

“I really don’t know.” Yerry said slowly, seeming troubled. “Nothing about this system is the way it’s supposed to be. You’d think it would be harder, with the dozens of languages down there, but it seems to be helping the computer along.”

Reel nodded slowly, but she didn’t really understand. Wouldn’t more languages make the job more difficult? “Can I watch how you do it for a few minutes?”

Yerry smiled at her, warmth overshadowing the exhaustion for a brief instant. “Of course you can. Here, let me show you how I’ve been going about it.”

She talked her way through two more paragraphs that the computer spat at her, explaining her reasoning at each step. Her gestures became more animated as they went on, and her skin seemed to regain some of its healthy green color. Together, they worked some more, and on the last paragraph Yerry leaned back and let Reel take the lead. She limited herself to only a few words of advice as Reel chewed through the section.

This last one was the strangest of the lot. The previous sections had been a single speaker. In this one, the computer had identified several different voices participating in a full conversation. An utterly baffling conversation, but a conversation nonetheless. The computer would play back the recording when prompted. A deeper voice led off, and a higher pitched voice answered it.

<“Now just a minute, Ms. McDonald!”>

<“Yes?”>

“That’s an affirmative statement, isn’t it? Why is it so drawn out?” Reel asked.

<“Remember that scene in Naughty Marietta where I leaned across a cow to kiss you?”>

“Listen, the deep voice does the same thing at the end of his line. The computer notes the change in pitch here. Yerry pointed out.

<“Yes?”>

“And again!” Reel chimed in. “Wait, has the computer offered a suggestion for that rising pitch?”)

“Let me check…” Yerry said.

<“Well I’m very sorry I didn’t lean across you and kiss the cow!”>

“Oh! The computer thinks it might be a request for information, confirmation, or to prompt a response.”

“That’s how they ask questions? Why on earth would they do that?”

<“So am I!”>

An untranslatable roar of noise followed the final line. The computer identified at least two dozen different voices in it. Every one of them was making the same repetitive sound, a kind of “Ah! Ah!” exclamation. Those voices did not participate in the conversation, except to make that sound. Every half dozen lines or so, they exploded with noise, with no pattern that Reel could find.

Reel felt a growing sense of hopelessness as she considered the lines before her. The computer didn’t have any suggestions at all for the meaning of “kiss”. “Cow” it suggested as a kind of food. It identified Marietta as a name.

Yerry seemed just as confused. “It’s a conversation.” She said, though she didn’t seem very convinced. “But it’s not a very helpful one, is it?”

“I think the first sections we worked on were more useful.” An icon flashed on the bottom left of the screen, indicating that the computer had finished its work on one of those. Yerry and Reel had offered the computer three or four possible word choices for every highlighted section. The computer cross referenced those suggestions against other cases where those words appeared. Using what it found, it developed an updated version for their review.

Reel threw the updated version onto her screen. She and Yerry fell silent, their eyes darting through the words in tandem.

The evacuation of the channel armies proceeded today under greater difficulties and with heavier losses than before. With the clearing of fogs which had hung over the coast for two days, the German air forces got into action again. The withdrawal of troops made it possible for the Germans to bring up long range guns within range of the shore. They claim to have sunk three warships and eight transports besides. Whatever the truth of that, it is clear that allied losses are heavier than they were before.

By the time Reel finished the paragraph and looked up, Yerry had already finished. Her eyes stared unfocused at the screen, and she chewed the scales of one lip absently, not noticing Reel’s attempts to catch her eye.

“Yerry?” Reel prompted her.

“Hm?” Yerry shook herself slightly, bringing her eyes back into focus. “Yes, Reel?”

Reel pointed to the screen. “I think these people might be fighting themselves.”