Weekly Writing – December 31 2022

I had to disable a dozen safety protocols to do it. Every one assumed there still had to be some better way.
Every one of them told me my commanding officer would be informed of my decision to override the protocol. How stupidly proud is it that I don’t even have a way to tell the damn ship that my commanding officer is dead?
They’re all dead. I don’t even have the authorization to update its crew manifest. So it just goes on making a note whenever someone fails to show up for a shift, informing officers who’ll never read their alerts again.
I’m living on a ghost ship. I don’t even know how I’m still alive, really. Just luck, I guess. In all those million-to-one-odds stories you hear about lone survivors, someone had to have the rotten luck to wake up after the crash or storm or flare while no one else did.
I had to just rip out the wires on the safeguards it wouldn’t let me override. Kill the terminals that told me it was a bad idea. Five-finger authorization, they call it, the human advantage of just breaking whatever says you can’t do something.
That tells you you aren’t compatible with the neurocircuitry. You can’t tell it there’s no one else left to be compatible. You can’t tell it you know it’s a doomed plan, there’s no way you’ll be able to steer the ship alone, untrained, to anywhere, and even if you do, forget about landing as anything but a fireball.
It can’t understand doing the last desperate, doomed thing available to you. It’ll tell all the corpses that I’m committing a mutiny, urge them to rise up from the quarters and bridge and cafeteria and stop me.
I’ll plug its cable into the standard node at the base of my skull, modified by mirror and microtools, by me, to be as compatible as possible, because there was no one there to tweak it for me. Maybe then I’ll think like it. Or maybe I’ll be able to explain to it that this doomed plan is the only chance we both have to survive.