Harls looked outside. It was still quite dark out there. He noted it in his journal. Jenkins nibbled at the journal, perhaps he wanted to play. But Harls had no time for play, he was very busy.

Harls Slarly was the undisputed King of Space. He said to Jenkins, “I am Lord Elrond, I am the King of Space and I have no time for play.” Jenkins stared blankly before continuing to nibble.

“You know, Lord Elrond? From Lord of the Rings?”

Jenkins did not know. This was par for the course.

“Come along Jenkins, we have much to do today.”

They did not.

In a cold, dark universe, one man is fighting for good. This will have no impact on the cold or dark of the universe.

#SPACECOP

###Episode 1

You don’t meet many people in space. It’s staggeringly unlikely to get to anywhere or anyone accidentally. Space madness and schizophrenia are rare, but still orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude more likely than just running into somebody. The Inter-Solar Human Police Department recommends asking questions first and shooting later. Specifically, it recommends questioning your sanity and shooting immediately after you’ve determined that you are sane. If you run into someone in space accidentally and you’re sane, the balance of probabilities tells you that the person you’ve encountered must be here intentionally. Anyone intentionally meeting a spacecop is either stupid or dangerous, and probably both because everyone knows that spacecops will start firing at you the moment they realize they’re sane.

Harls Slarly, Lord Elrond, King of Space was a spacecop. He had applied for the role of timecop, but his application was rejected because time travel is impossible. JobAI took note, however, and Fourier transformed the application into that of a spacecop. He was a perfect fit for the job because he didn’t want to do it and neither did any successful spacecop. Once JobAI had made the decision, trying to change its mind was pointless. When a thing is 100,000x as smart as you, it doesn’t matter if it made a mistake. If it can convince itself that it’s right, it’ll have no problem convincing you.

HS, LE, KoS regretted the application for two reasons. First of all, he didn’t like what had come of it. He didn’t want to be a spacecop. But he had also thought about it for some time and realized that he didn’t want to be a timecop either.

Policing is easy in one dimension. If someone tries to commit some crime at (0), you just need to have two sets of guys at (-1) and (1) to surround them. On Earth’s effective two dimensional surface, you need quite a few more guys. But you can still fight crime. If someone is committing a crime at (0, 0), you need sets of guys at (1, 0), (0, 1), (1, 1), (-1, 0), (0, -1), (-1, -1), (-1, 1) and (1, -1). In three dimensions, it’s totally unfeasible to do any policing at all, even if you were just operating on earth. To catch a guy at (0, 0, 0) you need blah blah blah a lot of 0s, 1s, and -1s in groups of threes. I’d figure that for each dimension, d, you need 3d-1 sets of guys. And the reason nobody is a timecop, apart from the fact that time travel is impossible, is that you have to plug in a 4 up there. That’s 80 sets of guys. That’s a lot of guys, man.

On top of all that, people don’t commit space crime. There’s too much space and not enough people and stuff. Mostly if you’re capable of space travel, you don’t really need to commit crimes anymore. Maybe embezzling or some other white collar crime (whole freaking suit’s white, you’re in space, get it? It’s a space suit joke. Like the astronauts.) But those crimes don’t need spacecops. They need space accountants. Or honestly just regular accountants.

JobAI was not programmed to figure all of this out. He was programmed to be very smart, but people were afraid he’d take over, so they hardcoded some decisions like Any area that can contain crime should be policed. It seemed sensible at the time, but since then JobAI had taken over. He was not a cruel intelligence- he had no desire to hurt, and he only cared about self-preservation insofar as it could further the human race. But he did have a lot of useless preconceived notions that weren’t doing people any good.

His Majesty Harls, of Space, couldn’t blame JobAI for his loneliness. He could only blame the human condition which, as we know, is that we are very, very scared and very, very dumb.

He could also blame Jenkins, who refused to talk to him as he skittered this way and that on the floor behind him. Yes, that was it. He would blame Jenkins.

“Jenkins, what the hell is wrong with you?”

Jenkins looked up, there was a flash of clarity on his hairy face for a moment, and then it passed.