Ask Me Anything 9 -- Tal Smithson

Have you heard of the magical girl genre?

Fuck yes, have you read Sailor Nothing? World-changing. Preneek. Literature. I mean we only have two thirds of it but they were a great two thirds.

If you had awoken in Captain Aspen’s situation, would you have waited as long to wake others up?

I wouldn’t have woken anyone up. I don’t think it would even have occurred to me.

Do you feel more lucky or guilty that you’re the only one to survive your Ring’s ejection? Sorry if this one is too personal.

Why would I feel guilty? I was asleep.

If this is not too rude to ask, could you tell me a little about the Brennan gender identity, and grammar around pronouns?

I don’t know what you’re asking. It’s just a gender. Some people are men and some people are women and some people are brennan. And some people are something else I guess, like Aspen or the Friend.

Did you have any pets, or tend to animals growing up?

I had a pet monitor lizard named Cthulhu.

Have you done any work salvaging preneek data?

Yeah I used to be involved in tracking down and scraping old hard drives and servers for any possible recoverable data. Fillmore! Episode 5, Red Robins Don’t Fly? That was me. I found AND recovered that. You’re welcome.

Would you download a car?

I did once but the machine shop wouldn’t build me anything from unverified files. Also I don’t drive, obviously. Also I have nowhere to put a car.

What is Neocambrian meme culture like?

What’s meme culture?

Do you think the developments with Amy are as wild as I do?

Amy makes no fucking sense, my entire life since waking up on this ship has been a fever dream. In fact I’m not entirely convinced it isn’t a fever dream. Possibly I went to sleep and the neurostimulator started making me dream to preserve my brain on the trip and that’s what’s still happening right now. We’ll all wake up at Hylara super disoriented and filled with years’ worth of false memories.

What do you think should be done with the colonists that are too affected by Amy when the ship reaches Hylara?

It’s hardly up to me, is it? They’re going to die. I’m not a necromancer.

Do you ever worry you are in some sort of preneek science fiction novel, or movie?

What kind of weirdo would write something like this?

You are good at being a cybercriminal, how did you get caught?

The police, as it turns out, are also good at catching a cybercriminal.

If you could bring sometimes from earth with you, what would you pick?

Reget Bryce. Fucking arsehole. I hate that guy. He should have to be on this ship.

Do you want to give some of your dreams to Amy?

No, I’m very glad to have woken up before that could happen. Although maybe if she had a brain that knew literally anything about computers she wouldn’t be such a fucking mess in there.

What you hate the most?

People who think Star Trek and Star Wars were alternate names for the same franchise and totally fuck up our databases through unnecessary combinations. No Spock wasn’t a Force user. That took so many months to fix.

Are you scared of being made into a slave when you land?

I honestly don’t see how things are going to be significantly different to our current situation, except that we will be on the ground and presumably have less gaming time.

Kill someone innocent or be killed? Choose one.

We’ve got like four thousand spare innocent lives on hand, it’s not like it’s a limited resource. I probably will end up fucking up and killing at least one of them anyway. Just based on probability and this fucking nightmare of an AI.

Have you even be out of Texas?

Yeah I went on this submarine trip once to follow an old internet cable we discovered in the hopes that it would lead to some interesting server with some interesting information. It didn’t. It just lead to a small bunker from the time of the collapse, a seal had been breached and the entire thing was flooded. Nothing electronic was recoverable. There were some cool skeletons in there though.