They had little contact with humanity. It was said in older ages, they had been a part of it, but this was not widely believed. Not anymore. And so they lost the knowledge not immediately apparently necessary, for beyond the shipmasters and forgemasters and the medics, what beyond their warlike role was needful?

  They were not farmers, or technicians, they were not inventors or engineers. And so they lost what the farmers and technicians and inventors and engineers teach a society, and never knew it. The great mass of humanity was a repository of knowledge as well as need, and to lose it, and the ones within it who preserved knowledge, was a blow none of them knew the depth of, except perhaps the Ideal.

  Humanity also lessened and atrophied, their fighting men largely left unwanted and unasked for in favor of the marines. And so they forgot what war was, keeping their lives and herded onto smaller and smaller domains themselves, in body and in mind.

  Some communities deliberately held on, to knowledge, to fighting forces, to the things everyone told them were unnecessary. They grew, they maintained, they expanded.

  This was deemed a coincidence. After all, what possible purpose would this unnecessary maintenance serve? It was, at most, a cultural quirk, and not a thing of import.

  --The Starless Void, Chapter Four

  ***

  She started exploring again.

  It made her smile, darting down passages and sometimes climbing slick equipment to see new things. She kept an eye out now for the copper doors, to stare out at the stars with wonder and with delight.

  She did it more often alone now, once or twice coming back to her… room? Apartment? To find Zachariah or one of the Line of Tristan waiting for her, anxious to report her location as soon as she was found.

  “I was just exploring,” she’d said, rolling her eyes and jumping onto a counter. Raphael had found some flavored electrolyte packets for her water, and she found she craved it with an intensity that was distressing even for her. She sipped at the drink, and considered. It was at least, flavor. She was reasonably confident it was something… citrus, originally, but it was hard to be sure. It had been copied far too many times, and tasted only by people who had never tasted the real thing.

  But it was still flavor.

  “For hours!” Zachariah had all but wailed. “What if you slipped and go hurt? What if you started throwing up again? What if—”

  “I didn’t, though,” she said, feeling her head tilt far to one side.

  “But you could have!”

  “I’ve climbed much harder and more dangerous things than that,” she said, exasperated, and a little stung. He wasn’t wholly wrong, but the nature of exploring was that you didn’t know where you’d end up. If you didn’t know where you’d end up… well, how could you hope to know if it was safe? Or leave a message for someone to find you, as she would have done at home.

  She liked climbing. It left her sore, she’d not done it in far too long, but she was less sore every day now.

  And the tubes in the ceilings of every major room she’d found were fascinating. It was more a channel than a tube, the upper third of it was a membrane, not a solid structure. It seemed to be waterproof, but… was it ventilation? They did not lead into the rooms with the copper doors, the rooms with outer windows, which… would make sense. You’d want such a room easily isolated. But figuring exactly which tubes went where was a bit of a trial. And… they were full, with water, not air.

  And what was that for?

  Her words seemed just to further distress Zachariah, and Margrave, who he’d brought along, possibly for moral support in dealing with her. Neither were intimidating men, for all that they were huge, not anymore.

  Raphael chuckled from the open doorway, and they all turned to look at him, the marines whirling and moving together to place themselves between her and the noise, perhaps before they’d even realized who was there. She frowned at them, then her eyes went wider, because lurking in Raphael’s shadow was the Ideal.

  She’d seen more of Raphael, and a little more of the Ideal in the past few days. Raphael had been true to his word-- she asked him questions, now and then, when she had enough from exploring that Zachariah could not answer for her.

  And then, one day, annoyed, he’d told her to ask the Ideal, when he couldn’t answer a question. She’d blinked, hesitated, and feeling like a frightened child when she hesitated, then like a child who’s accepted a foolish dare when she didn’t, she decided she preferred feeling like a fool to feeling a coward, and wandered off to find the Ideal.

  She’d been mildly surprised to just… find him, going through a… drill of some kind with his overlarge sword in one of the empty training rooms. One of the ones with fake sunlight and grass. She’d considered him for a moment, then decided that she’d wait until he spoke to her, not the other way around.

  It felt like eternity, and she’d ended up flopping onto her back to stare up into the false sky. No clouds, she’d noted with disappointment. Probably that was harder to simulate. Did it have settings?

  “Alright, what is it?” he’d asked when he reached what she assumed was a good stopping point, and unable to help herself, she’d pointed upwards.

  “Does it make clouds?”

  She felt him move to look up, rather than hearing it, but then, she was pretty sure she was imagining it, picturing his turn to the false sky in her mind’s eye. But rather than mockery, he’d huffed. “It can. There are settings. But I don’t know how to make it work.”

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  She made a face.

  “It does other things too. Sunsets. Starry skies. The bigger outdoor environments you can even get rain or snow, sometimes. I don’t understand the process. But that surely isn’t why you came here?”

  She frowned and sat up. “Yeah, with the gravity…”

  He watched her. It still felt like having a great cat observing her… but…

  But she’d been to a zoo before. Both sides watched each other.

  “The gravity. How does that work when you have shuttles landing in the ship? Or what about when this ship docks? It does dock, right?”

  He’d laughed, softly, and she startled a little, it was so unexpected.

  “Landing craft on this vessel have to enter an orbit to land properly anyway, they do so, then dive and flip as they do. It takes practice and a good deal of coordination if more than two vehicles are landing at once. Taking off however is easy. They drive over the hole in the floor and let the sentrifugal force launch them.”

  “Like a sling?”

  “Like a sling. When we dock at a spaceport, it’s less complex. Usually they have both mass and actual gravity generators, we slowly stop rotating and retreat to rooms that will be right side up during our stay, letting their gravity take over. Admittedly, we do have to be very careful to secure things in any rooms except those, but as the rest chambers are always programmed down, it’s not as much work as it sounds like.”

  “Huh. Thanks!”

  She’d run off, feeling more like a child, not less, and pretended not to hear his laugh.

  She didn’t know why, not for sure, but he seemed not to mind her. So now and then, if she ran into him first, she asked him questions.

  But he didn’t usually seek her out.

  … He was probably walking with Raphael and trailed along to come here, there was no sense overthinking it.

  “Let her be,” he rumbled at the anxious marines now, amused. She frowned then, because he was not expressive, and yet… she was sure. That was amusement. “The ship is not so large that we could not find her. If all else failed, we could track her by sent if she was immobilized and unable to come to us.”

  Zachariah’s shoulders firmed, and he stepped forward a few paces. “With respect sir, if she was hurt—”

  “The worst a human is likely to do by accident is break a leg.” Zachariah and Margrave jolted in disquiet and horror, and she sighed, despairing. “This is generally not anything worse than painful and aggravating.”

  “My brother broke both legs one summer. I’m not nearly as reckless as he is, and he’s fine.” Better than fine, really. Her brother had a fulfilling career with colleagues who valued his contributions. Sometimes she wondered if she’d have been better off, if she’d been the sort of person who could… just not be afraid, like him.

  But then, would any of that have helped here?

  “None of you should have to go through that—” Zachariah started, and as she rolled her eyes, help came again from an unexpected quarter.

  “None of you know what humans are. We are for them, yes, to protect and to serve, but there is a difference between relative fragility and true weakness. Humans ran down predators ten tims their size before we ever came to their aid, and they will do so again after we are gone.”

  She turned to look at the Ideal, not sure which part of that she disagreed with, only that something about it felt… wrong. She liked the bit about humans…

  “They… what?” Zachariah asked, baffled, and she remembered, suddenly, vibrantly, that this was not supposed to be happening. The Ideal snubbed Zachariah, he did not cauusually stop to talk to him about unimportant passengers.

  Which meant what?

  ***

  “She’s a chaotic influence,” Raphael noted, as even toned as he could be.

  The Ideal’s tone was as level as ever, but his eyes danced in his face. “He all but asserted I was wrong, there. I wasn’t, but that’s hardly important—”

  “You have a strange way of working on this project,” Raphael said, snorting. The Ideal turned to him then, solemn and dead eyed as the grass swayed to a false breeze around them. They’d ducked in for another so called sparring match, as soon as they could. As often as they could.

  “It’s the most progress we’ve seen in years. Decades. At least since your elevation to your present position.” The Ideal sighed and dragged a hand that could crush a skull down his own face, dragging his lower eyelids down until they showed their red undersides. Raphael bit back the comments he wanted to make on that. “You know why they have to have that chipped away at. If insubordination-- actual insubordination, mind, not his mere questions-- was the price I’d have to pay for it, I’d have you calling me a fool day and night already.”

  “I was under the impression that was my job already?” Raphael kept his tone bland, and was rewarded with a brief smile. “Just the same.”

  “If she has this influence long…”

  “Are you looking to recruit, my lord? I didn’t believe the marines adapted females, even back in your day when they made them of children, not clones.”

  “Oh, hush, you.”

  ***

  “—and so we’d have to get the computer replaced, if any human manufacturing ships still make the computer, or anything like it. I’d fix it if I could, but—”

  Niki, wandering past, found herself muttering ‘have you tried turning it off and on again?” to herself, then slapped herself in the face when the marines turned to look at her. “Sorry!!! Just walking past. I’m not trying to be an asshole, I swear- and—”

  Strange Marines were still… a lot in crowds. And she didn’t want to anger the Ideal, she knew she was permitted to hang out with Zachariah, but beyond that… sometimes she still wasn’t sure what she should do, what they would allow and what they would not.

  “What would turning it off and on again even do?” one asked, frustrated. Issac from his nametag.

  “Ha-ha. You’re right, I’m sorry, I just talk to myself a lot these days, ignore me.” She felt about three inches tall, and edged along the hallway-- the was a further brewery and what she thought was a mill for grain that she had been checking out, and it had lead to a nest of the fluid tubes, kept separate from the brewing equipment. Presumably they were near a water reservoir of some kind. She wondered if there would also be a pool or something of the like nearby.

  “What’s even the joke about saying that?”

  Something about the tone finally got through to her, and she turned around, slowly. “You… do know to turn off computers and restart them regularly, right?”

  “No! What purpose would that even serve?”

  She took a few deep breaths, and stepped closer, looking at the computers that kept everyone alive on the ship. She usually stayed out of the area, which was why she hadn’t found the tube-nest earlier. It had large tanks, that the tubes lead into, as well as what looked like equipment for an aquarium, water circulation, heaters and the like. “Computers… are meant to debug themselves during a reboot, among other things. I… I’m not a technical expert, but if you really haven't done it in a while, you… maybe should.” How the hell could they live in a spaceship and not know?

  …. How the hell was it most people on earth could eat food from all over the world, but didn’t know how to save seeds? Maybe she shouldn’t judge. Sometimes it was the basic shit that got lost first, and she knew that they lost a lot of information, over the past centuries.

  “It’s the computer running the life support functions of the ship, I can’t just shut it down,” Issac argued. The two other men with him looked baffled.

  “They can’t have installed it knowing it would have to run twenty four seven, no breaks. Not with something that important,” she mused aloud, then realized she was doing so and flushed. “Can another computer keep it running for a bit?”

  “Not long. Four, five hours at most.”

  “And how long would the reboot take?”

  Issac blinked at her, and after a moment, backed down. “I… think about twenty minutes?”

  She stared. “Out of curiosity, how long can the ship run without it before it starts killing us?”

  “…. at current capacity… three months?” He was starting to look sheepish. Fair enough, if he’d never been asked to consider it before…. “It’s a large ship, and most of it is oxygenated even though only a small portion is in use. Other things would go out first, the water recyclers and the nutrient reclaimers….”

  She took a deep breath. “Maybe open it and check for dust too? Computers like to not be dusty. But… reboot it. Maybe it does nothing. But maybe it doesn’t.”

  Then she turned and scuttled off, hoping she hadn’t made it worse.

  For worse or for better, if you enjoyed this, or saw something weird about it, please by all means let me know about it! Any and all comments are a joy to me.

  May your eyes and hands never fear to investigate the small things, and may these investigations bear fruit therin. Your work matters. May it satisfy you in turn.