'23kpc' Chapter 33: The Pooch Plays Fetch

Dogs (even whirring, levitating ones) will be dogs!

[I continue to be mostly disappointed with AI image generation, and to feel guilty (on both creative and environmental grounds) about continuing to play with it. In some cases, I can avoid using it by adapting a “real” image — either mine, or from somewhere online if its license permits. And I doubt I’ll ever afford to pay a human artist for custom illustrations… Anyhow, this one sorta-kinda captures a Durwood(ish) sensibility in its subject. The “breed,” i.e. model, is not quite right, I think, but it’s a spirited little thing, isn’t it? I wish the setting and the small plastic disk The Pooch is chasing were better — less, well, y’know, weird. But they are what they are!]

Reminders:
(a) The ‘23kpc’ Reader’s Guide
(b) The complete ‘23kpc’ story so far

Last week:

The morning after a flirtatious (and presumably beyond flirtatious) interlude in the Midtown Diner and afterwards, in their cabin, Guy, Missy, and Durwood headed out for a stroll around the deck. They came upon Matty on his day off, lounging in a deck chair in a loud casual shirt, drinking a loud casual cocktail. But he wasn’t genuinely relaxing, let alone already relaxed. He was, in fact, brooding.

Like other crew, it seems, he’d gotten sucked into the drama which took place during Guy and Al’s visit to the Tascheter’s Rijksmuseum. It had turned out to be just one more symptom — like the sudden “gaps” in the news feed — of something seriously wrong with the ship’s systems. The Tascheter seems, in short, to have been somehow… somehow poisoned by the most recently passed wikon.

Specifically, it had been infected with some mysterious ideas: cultural influences of a sort, and it was these which had suddenly altered the display walls in the Rijksmuseum’s AlphaLiteralist exhibit. Why would someone have done this?

Imagine, Matty said, that Guy Landis were a jazz musician, or a mathematician, or a chemist: someone actually, well, creative. He said that such a Guy Landis might come up with an idea, a concept, a complete work of art or a simple artistic notion that they’d want to share with other starliners. Maybe they could use the network of wikons…?¹

Guy’s narration picks up here:

Chapter 33: Durwood Overboard

Suddenly, it strikes me — genius sculptor, saxophonist, geometrician, screenwriter, and chemical-engineering arc welder that I apparently am — that the wikons are a much bigger deal than I could have ever imagined.

Since Matty first told us about the things, I’ve been imagining them as simple interstellar trading posts, dealing only in hard news and scraps of other knowledge suitable for the news feed: reports of new stars on the scene and old ones now gone; asteroid fields worth bypassing; colonial uprisings and collapses; possible planetary playgrounds for compulsive hedonists, not that I myself know any such people...

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But in its years of sailing, a ship picks up much more than data from outside its hull. A starliner, after all, carries aboard a miniature civilization. Over years, decades, centuries, even with the dorming and rebooting schedules which slow its inhabitants’ time to a crawl, it’s bound to develop a culture — several cultures — of its own. And that word “culture” covers a lot of ground. Our Rijksmuseum, for one obvious example, houses a whole wing just for works of art by people aboard the Tascheter. For another example, in the whole starcruising fleet there also may exist only one SloGo neighborhood — at least, one quite like ours. Likewise, some other ship has a Via del Corso or Temple of Heaven, maybe, but ours sure doesn’t. There may or may not be more than one Jellyroll anywhere, although an Aloysius Morton stands behind the bar only in ours. And surely only one ship in the galaxy, in the universe, has on its passenger rolls a charming descendant of the family behind the Tascheter’s original mining and retrofit, and her (“sometimes”) charming other half...

And, so it seems, all that stuff about the culture we’ve become — what the Tascheter itself is, and what we’ve developed into — gets shared with every wikon we pass, just in case some other passing ship might find it worthwhile later.

Holy mackerel, I’m thinking, these wikon things must be—

“Huge?” says Matty. (Apparently I’m thinking out loud.) “I wouldn’t go that far. You can cram an awful lot into a two-meter lump of heavily shielded metal, fiber optics, glass, semi-conductors, ionic gating subsystems, blah blah blah. Especially when just about all the cube’s got to do reliably is broadcast and receive — take new data in, store it, and send it right back out again.”

Right about then, I feel something nudge my hand draped on the arm of the chair. Durwood.