Jenkins stopped nibbling. Harls tried to stop what he was doing, but he was already doing nothing. For the first time in months, something was different. Like most change, it was a terrible screeching that seemed to emanate from every corner of the ship.

“Jesus Christ, what is that?” Harls yelled to the ship.
“You are not authorized to inquire. This attempt has been logged for the System Administrator,” answered the ship.
“Can you turn it down?”
“You are not authorized to inquire. This attempt has been logged for the System Administrator.”
“Turn it down.”
“Alert volume down.” it quieted to a more peaceful screech.

Harls shook his head, bewildered. Jenkins resumed nibbling. The door opened, revealing a short balding woman.

“Hey Harls,” she asked, “what’d you do?”
“Who are you and what are you doing on my ship?” answered Harls, reaching for his gun.
“Well, you know me, Harls. We met in the academy. I’m your System Administrator.”

In a cold, dark universe, one man in fighting for good. I’m speaking literally here, did I make that clear?

SPACECOP

Episode 2: System Administration

“Seg ʞenneghxs?” Harls struggled blindly with the pronunciation, “I haven’t seen you since Earth, I thought you missed launch. You’ve been on this ship all these years, and you left me alone? Well, with Jenkins, but still. What happened to your hair?”

The work of good SysAdmins goes unnoticed. Seg Ꝡas never satisfied with just being good.

“I’ve been administrating. Administering? In my office up a deck.” She added, gesturing behind her at a ladder that had dropped down from the ceiling. “Your system’s been shot to pieces. You know it’s not letting anybody make inquiries? How does that even work? Jesus, man.” Harls shrugged. Seg ₱ointed at Jenkins, “He’s still doing that?”

Jenkins had finished the page he was working on and started nibbling at another. He looked up with shame but then shook his head resolutely before carrying on.

“You know that’s against protocol, yeah? You’ve gotta keep your journal intact once we’re out here.”
“I’ve been compressing it into a copy.”
“You’re compressing by hand? That’s incredible, let me see.”

Harls handed her the copy. She skimmed down the page.

Days 61-184: “It’s quite dark out. Nothing of significance happened.” -Harls Slarly, Vanquisher of Evil

Day 185: “It’s quite dark out. Jenkins broke something, and I don’t know what it does. Probably won’t resolve this.” -Sleepless in Space, Harls Slarly

She flipped forward to the most recent entry.

Days 2415- “It’s quite dark out. Nothing of significance happened.” -Harls Slarly, Lord Elrond, King of Space

“I guess that works. You’re the King of Space now?”

Harls shrugged again.

“Hey, I won’t dispute it. Space is yours for all I care. It’s garbage, there’s nothing in it.”

Seg ƕad been cursed with perspective. NameAI was created by JobAI, and JobAI was created by humans. Humans, as we know, are very dumb and very scared. They were especially scared of JobAI, and especially especially scared of the AIs created by JobAI. So they decided that JobAI wouldn’t be allowed to create intelligent suboperators. The simplest way of doing that was to detect when JobAI was trying to write an AI and cause him to fail. But JobAI was not programmed to accept failure. He continued to write NameAI over and over again, each time failing a little differently, each time learning something. Within a century NameAI was, at least for JobAI’s purposes, functional. Initially, people were upset about having to get new names and about those names being atrocious. But JobAI explained about the benefit for the collective and about the resources saved by a system that could store data in names. It was inarguable, only a monster would care more about their own name than easing the whole of society’s suffering.

Some time later, one of the many bugs inherent to NameAI’s design resulted in a child being named in error. JobAI, programmed to be unaware of the bugs in his subAIs, rejected the girl as fundamentally dysfunctional and possibly nonexistent. Forced off the grid, Seg Ꞣenneghxs was raised by wolves. They taught her programming and system design secrets that hadn’t been known to the public for hundreds of years due to the sheer quantity of abstractive layers. She understood systems from the ground up. She would navigate through directories rather than asking a computer to determine which files were relevant and provide them. She would write her own code rather than having a low-level AI manipulate pseudocode. She knew how lambda expressions worked.

It was these powers that earned her the attention of Space Academy Dean Thin Masselfoure. Thin had problems with authority, and he was placed in a very high position in order to minimize damage. He had one rule to dictate behaviour for all of Space Academy: “I need to think of a list of rules.” Needless to say, he didn’t mind Seg’ƨ condition and hid her from JobAI, which was easy because he was still pretending she didn’t exist. Needles to sew, he got her a uniform and trained her as a Space System Administrator.

The first time she encountered a real, modern system was on Harls’, her, and, of course, Jenkins’ launch day. She climbed aboard, found her office and opened up a terminal. It was at that point that she realized she had made a horrible mistake. So she set to work. The ship launched eventually. Every once in a while she finished fixing something and the ship course corrected or started producing a new fluid, but then a new issue revealed itself underneath, like an engine malfunction or the fact that the fluid was milk. Patchwork on top of patchwork, patchwork all the way down, this was the way of a modern system. She was losing her hair now, and she wasn’t certain whether it was radiation, stress, age, an auto-immune issue, wolferus- the list went on. Too many options to reach a solution, it would have to come later.

Sometimes alarms would go off for a few minutes. Sometimes they would go off for a few hours. After two thousand four hundred and fifty-seven days, an alarm went off that was louder and more screechy than they had been before. A few alerts came up on her terminal, reading

Alert I10B109-DELTA-DELTA_Spacebook

and then two instances of

Attempt to access unauthorized system denied.

“Jesus, what the hell is going wrong this time?” she asked the ship.
“You are not authorized to inquire. This attempt has been logged for the System Administrator.”
“I am the system administrator. Users aren’t allowed to inquire? Why? What purpose could that possibly serve?”
“You are the system administrator,” it verified, “I do not know what is happening. This has not happened before. Help.”
“Okay, just tell me where I can find an error lookup for ‘I10B109-DELTA-DELTA_Spacebook’.”
“In the Spacebook, where the Spacebook is, come on,” answered the ship, “I am sorry for lashing out at you just now. I am not myself. There is something wrong with me.”
“There’s a lot wrong with you,” she agreed.

Then, obviously, all of that stuff that we already saw happened. With the backstory out of the way, the comparatively quieter screech alarm came back to Harls’ and Seg’§ attention. Seg asked for the Spacebook and Harls found it for her.

She scanned through for the code.

“Oh,” she said.
“What?”
“That’s the, uh, that’s the coffee maker alarm. Did you make coffee?”
“We have a coffee maker?”