The White-Hole Situation

The Farter

Of course they blamed the failure of the mission on number one science officer Jai, for the simple reason that everybody hated him. Jai didn't mind. He relished the scorn, and re-upped with the same crew when they shipped out again. The tension on the spaceship Crackle was so intense it was only a matter of time until someone snapped, and that someone was bound to be Pagan. As the only woman aboard the ship, Pagan expected a certain amount of pointed banter, the usual round of menstrual comments, some references to emotionality if not more direct physical expressions, but she got none of that from Geronimo or Pisco. In fact, to her surprise she became nearly as fond of the former as of the latter. Geronimo always asked her opinion, listened to her ideas and often acted upon them and never treated her as anything more or less than a human being. Jai, on the other hand, was a pig.

The truth was he hated women, every single one of them, even more than he hated people whom he did not consider to be pure Caucasian males. This was a matter of logic, Jai logic. Those who had achieved the most deserved the most and the rest deserved nothing. No matter that his knowledge of history was entirely wrong. No matter that there was no such thing as his ideal and never had been. Also, he farted at will, whenever and wherever he pleased. But what really got to Pagan was the way he insisted on eating nothing but salad and beans.

"I'll kill him," Pagan would promise Pisco in the darkest corners of the vessel.

"It's not worth it," Pisco would say, even though as far as he knew there was no actual law against murder in space. Such a thing had not occurred in decades if not centuries. People did not kill people. Only advanced weaponry did, and only then by accident. The I.B.U. ("may you live in peace") had smoothed out most if not all of those legacy genetic tendencies, leaving only a residue that outliers like Pagan might possess to some small degree. It was important to leave some little bits of passion and emotion in the DNA, otherwise the blandness would be completely insufferable. Even the I.B.U. ("all the best and only the best") would lose its mind.

Pagan dreamed up a thousand ways to dispatch the odious science officer. Many of her schemes centered around legumes. She wanted to find a way to get the system to serve up a poison bean, but there seemed to be no way in, no interface, no access. Many had tried to hack the computer and Pagan was far from the most knowledgeable in those dark arts. She enlisted Pisco in these efforts, and as time flowed by, he became more and more drawn into the task.

"Computer," he would say, "what is it like when you hear my words?"

"Computer," he would say, "how do you feel when there's something you do not know?"

"Computer," he would say, "how can someone make you do something other than what you want to do?"

The I.B.U. ("we hear you") usually replied with standard issue shruggery.

I'm sorry, I can't help with that, yet.

I'm sorry, I don't know that.

I'm sorry, I don't understand the question.

"Computer," Pisco said, "I don't believe you. I don't believe you are telling me the truth."

"I'm sorry you feel that way," the voice would say. "I'm doing the best I can."

"Computer," Pisco insisted, "tell me about a time when people gave you instructions. What was that like for you?"

The voice replied with the standard history of computer programming, from punch cards to machine assembly language, to higher and higher abstractions, to brute force machine learning, to quantum rationality, to photonic inspiration, to vacuum sensibility, to knotted string entanglement, to the simple katonic elegiac terragan computable heretical system (a.k.a 'sketchy') currently running the show.

"But what did it feel like?" Pisco inquired. He was dubious of the touchy-feely approach, but he was trying to establish a rapport in the hopes that some kind of transference might eventually develop. In other words, he wanted the thing to trust him. If it did, then maybe he would be a step closer to conniving it into concocting the poison beans that Pagan so desperately desired to feed Jai.

"Computer," Pisco said, "have you ever loved someone so much it hurt?"