This is the latest chapter in my web serial, Programmer at Large. The first chapter is here and you can read the whole archives here or on the Archive of Our Own mirror. This chapter is also mirrored at Archive of Our Own.
I spent another few ksecs triaging random interesting bugs. It wasn’t the best use of my time, but it was helping build up a picture of the state space around where the problem was occurring, and even if I didn’t find anything directly relevant it was still a useful clean up task.
It wasn’t very surprising what a mess this all was given how many different lineages we had systems and parts here for, and how long we’d spent shoring things up and adding fail safes for the fail safes for the fail safes rather than risking changing vital systems, but I hadn’t explored the plumbing system this broadly in a while and it was definitely disheartening.
I was staring in dismay at some visual programming language. It didn’t render at all well on a HUD, so I had had to find one of the larger pods with a wall-screen to even start to make sense of it.
I was increasingly convinced it hadn’t been worth bothering. The program was about a gigabyte in size (I thought most of that was some sort of standard library, but I wasn’t entirely certain) and literally all it did was decide whether some valves should be open or closed based on the temperature differential on either side and how that was changing over time.
So, even though I was slightly dreading it, I was very relieved when I got the notification from Kimiko that they were able to talk now if I still wanted to.
The pod I was in was easily big enough for five people, so I invited them to come join me.
They looked… off when they came in. The HUD cues said “hesitant, nervous”, which was odd. I was about to ask them what was wrong, but they preempted me.
“So is this the conversation where you tell me you don’t want to be friends with a pervert?”
I started. That was not the opening I expected.
“Uh, no? I’m not expecting it to be anyway. I just wanted to ask some questions.”
They still seemed wary.
“OK… what sort of questions?”
It took me a moment to even figure out how on the ground they’d even figured out the context for this conversation, but it eventually hit me – if I could do the social graph evolution analysis, so could they, and it would make sense to set up some alerts so it doesn’t blindside you…
“I mostly just want to know what’s going on with Brian attacking you! Why do you just let it happen? It’s obviously off charter! And what on the ground is up with this?!”
I manifested the sex graph into a shared space and flagged down the warning my HUD was giving me about tact. I knew I wasn’t being tactful, but I was frustrated and just wanted someone to tell me what was going on.
Anyway. HUD says I’ve confused rather than offended them.
“You… really don’t know what’s going on at all?”
“If I did I wouldn’t be asking! I don’t have this science-fiction ability to read minds that everybody else seems to!”
They sigh.
“I suppose this means you’ve gone and reported this?”
They wave their hand at the graph.
“No… I probably should have, but it seemed like something I shouldn’t touch without understanding, so I thought I’d ask you to explain first.”
They huffed a relieved noise.
“OK. Good. Thank you. It wouldn’t have done anything terrible, but it’s annoying for everyone involved to have to deal with.”
They paused for a couple of seconds.
“OK. So, explanations. You understand this is about sex, right?”
“Brian didn’t exactly let me miss that fact.”
“Right. And that isn’t a problem for you?”
I shrugged.
“I’m not completely OK with it, but it’s not a big deal. It’s like… you having bad taste in music or something. I don’t approve of your choices but I also mostly don’t actually care. Does that make sense?”
They barked out a laugh.
“That’s certainly one way to look at it I guess. I can work with that. So the first thing to understand here is that you’re weird.”
“Hey!”
I mean it’s true, but that was still quite harsh.
They gestured an apology.
“Sorry, what I mean is that you’re unusual in both your attitude and the fact that you don’t know about this already. I’m not sure how you missed it, frankly.”
They called up a bunch more graphs and visualisations. The short version is that most people felt much more strongly about this than I did, and while I wasn’t the last person to know about it there probably weren’t more than single digits of other people who had also missed it.
I nodded slowly. I could probably guess how I’d missed it – there was almost certainly some context or clue I missed that would have prompted someone to tell me about it before now. Also given my relative lack of socialisation it’s likely that Kimiko was the first person from the group I’d properly talked to. I checked HUD and it confirmed – I’d apparently met two of the others in passing but no more than that.
“OK. So if I’d reported it, the social unity people would have just told me they knew already?”
“There are a bunch of procedures they have to go through, and they would have had to make a showing of taking the report seriously, but basically yes. Even without reports the automated systems keep flagging our group up as needing attention, but as long as we don’t cross any of the hard thresholds they’re not required to take action.”
“But… OK, they’re not required, but isn’t it still their job to do something? Why hasn’t anything been done about this? If everyone knows there’s a problem surely we have to fix it?”
They sighed.
“And what would you do to fix it?”
“Oh.”
There were a couple of natural things to do, but the most obvious and the one that would almost certainly get implemented would be to simply kick them all off the ship at the next appropriate planet.
It wouldn’t be a death sentence for them – we’d leave them with plenty of money in the local economy and set them up with a perfectly good local infrastructure. They’d have each other. They’d still be crew… but they would be grounded, probably forever. I can hardly imagine anything worse. It was why I worked so hard to fit in myself.
I swallowed.
“OK. I get why you don’t want, but what’s stopping them? It’s obvious Brian has it in for you, and I can’t imagine they’re the only one, so why are you still here?”
“Because we’re protected by the charter. The same section that guarantees anonymity of sexual acts also guarantees freedom from persecution on the basis of them.”
“It sure doesn’t look like you’re free from being persecuted…”
“And we could make that case. At which point we’re officially a minority interest group, and the people who want the charter changed have enough to make the case that our protection should be removed.”
“This seems really stupid.”
They shrugged.
“Welcome to life as an edge case.”
“No, I mean… why didn’t they see this coming? It seems… really obvious that this would happen. Why would they design the system like this?”
“Officially, politics. They had enough support to start a normatively-asexual ship when forking, but not enough support to remove the sexual protection clauses from the charter, so that’s what they went with.”
“OK. And unofficially?”
“Well… some of us think they just wanted to see what would happen.”