Instant Story

Series of posts, each blank line denotes a new poster:

[Comparing real-life understanding of tech by the people maintaining it to a fictional universe] Of course, this is minus the stupid witch doctor rituals.

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” comes to mind. And a lot of other rituals.

Doesn’t that actually help with a significant portion of callers?

[Fictional universe organisation] rituals work too, except when they don’t. Doesn’t make it any less of a ritual that is performed without understanding why it might help.

Clearly. The next step is ritualizing it. Add some latin chanting as well.

I think the orthodox chant is “Fucking piece of shit. Why isn’t it working!” repeated in a low mumble. Just translate it into a language the people around you don’t speak and you’re done. – RecklessPrudence

Isobel was suddenly very grateful for her camouflage field. She kept to the walls as she followed the chanting people in what was once a functioning generation-ship and was now a floating hulk. A floating hulk bare inches away from disaster. A floating hulk on the precipice of the catastrophe curve and inhabited by… tribes.

She had no doubt that their names translated to ‘the people’, but they had very obviously devolved into primitive tech-worship. Isobel had seen them maintaining machines that had very obviously failed. Performing repair tasks on artefacts well beyond repair.

Using dead remotes as religious totems.

There were some patches of leftover cogniscents who were almost completely sealed off from the rest. They used air vents as a mode of travel. Air vents! If they were working properly, then the denizens would have been chopped to pieces by the fans or eradicated by the blockage destruction systems.

It was like watching someone trying to cross a canyon by stretching dental floss across the gap and then traversing it like a tightrope.

This time, the ritual worked. This time, the machine that made the air whirred into life again. This time, there was great rejoicing.

She stood, contemplating the one machine that kept the entire… mess… alive. There were others, but they had fallen into disrepair and disuse, though they were still altars for these poor, lost people who believed their distant and unreachable destination was heaven.

If she cannibalised the defunct machines to repair one other…

To what end?

These people were doomed.

One of the priestesses also lingered at the temple that was once the air recycling system. Staring, apparently, right at Isobel.

There’s no way she could see through…

“Ghost! I command you be gone!” She said. An old form of Terran English that fascinated Isobel. “Canhazchizburger!” And she threw a handful of salt and poppy seeds at Isobel.

Salt and poppy seeds that caught in the seams and folds of her suit. That effectively rendered her camouflage moot. Isobel turned it off and raised her faceplate shielding. “I am no ghost,” she said carefully. “I come in peace for all mankind.”

“You am come to save us?”

Well, crap. That counted as a distress call. “Yes,” she said simply. She was going to have to call for backup… but since her own love of history just landed her in this pickle, she could very well use it to unpickle this whole gen-ship. “I am name Isobel. You am name is–?”

“Jem. Me am name Jem.”

“How is you see me? I are hidden.”

“Eyes be seeing less,” answered Jem. “Some colour they go bad. You have many more bad colour than everything. Is look like Solja in gilly suit.”

Wait. She was colourblind? This was going to be some extreme variant of fun…

“We begin, make more new air?” Isobel offered.

Jem nodded vigorously. “Can has new air kay th'x bye.”

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“On most airplanes, in an emergency oxygen masks will be deployed from above your seat. This is an Australian airplane however; in an emergency, we will deploy drop bears from above your seat.”

Either way, the lack of oxygen problem is quickly solved. – RecklessPrudence

“What? Why would you do something that barbaric?” Esterhazy boggled.

“Well, the oxygen systems are tied to the landing gear, see,” Shirl expanded without missing a beat. “If there’

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space—each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision. – RecklessPrudence

Nobody knew what the natives called it. There were no natives to ask. Whatever had happened on this world had destroyed all but the simplest and toughest of organic life, but left the buildings and infrastructure to be slowly buried

“Wow, how’d you get it to work?”
“I ran a Physical Impulse Mechanical Stress Routine”
“Huh?”
“I kicked it.”
“Ahh.” – RecklessPrudence

It really only took ten minutes to fix, in the end. A little heat. And a lot of whacking with the right kind of maintenance.

She charged them an Hour for her work, part of which was a ‘luck tax’. As in, they were lucky they reached

I’ve made jokes about “Reboot… with steel toes” and “troubleshooting with a 12-Gauge - PULL!” plenty of times! – RecklessPrudence

A certain sign of doom amongst engineers is whistling backwards. It means something expensive is about to happen. When they hiss through their teeth whilst breathing in… there’s very little to be done.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” asked Rael, off-the-books-apprentice.

“Eh,” the engineer currently in charge shrugged. “Pass me

“Yes, I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can find his way by moonlight, and see the dawn before the rest of the world.” - Oscar Wilde c/- RecklessPrudence

Everyone who met her knew that there was something wrong with Sai’dut. She would talk to herself, or stop her appointed tasks to stare at something irrelevant, she would grow forgetful or latch on to some asinine entertainment and learn everything that nobody wanted to know

An Outside Context Problem is the sort of thing most civilisations encounter just once, and which they tend to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encounters a full stop.
-“Excession,” definition of an OCP c/- RecklessPrudence

Thus it is that the Cogniscent Rights Committee has passed numerous laws to prevent them. Shipping through inhabited systems with recognised intelligent life native to them is generally forbidden until such time as that native population has regular and reliable space flight.

Google Maps is accurate. Apple Maps is the product of Dali and Picasso smoking a joint before painting the child of a canary and penguin with a frightened cat used as the paint brush, then selling the result as a map. – RecklessPrudence

There’s an old human saying, that there is no such thing as an accurate map. Maps lie.

For a start, they compress thousands of square distance units into flat expanse capable of -for instance- being held by

On a scale of one to “I will invent a time machine explicitly for murdering your parents,” how mad do you think [person] is? – RecklessPrudence

“Ambassador Z0rk? He’s always tetchy.”

“That’s tetchy?” Shayde boggled. “Remind me never tae get him PO'ed.”

“Pee… ode?”

“Pissed off. Angered. Riled. Bluidy furious.”

Humans. They were equally confusing in any temporal zone. At least she wasn’t mysteriously speaking

“But, how did you know that the file contained their secret plans for world domination?”
“Because it was labelled ‘secret plans for world domination’.” — RecklessPrudence

K’orvoth could not believe that the humans would be that stupid. Or stupid enough to lable said plans in all known languages where anyone could read it.

Or to leave such things on an unsecured commconsole in the open.

He could not believe this windfall. “Decrypt it at once,” he ordered. “We

First submission since the identification of an ableist slur. Edited from original form, thusly:

I love the image of his brain just clearly rebooting because too much ridiculousness and unbelievability is hitting it at one time. – RecklessPrudence

Harry stared up at the edifice that was Security Chief ‘Sherlock’. It was hard not to. Sherlock stood at 6'4" and she was a diminutive 5'2".

“…i know i’m in trouble, there’s no need