Challenge #00540 - A165: Opus Apparatus Spurius
Series of posts, each blank line denotes a new poster:
[Comparing real-life understanding of tech by the people maintaining it to a fictional universe] Of course, this is minus the stupid witch doctor rituals.
“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” comes to mind. And a lot of other rituals.
Doesn’t that actually help with a significant portion of callers?
[Fictional universe organisation] rituals work too, except when they don’t. Doesn’t make it any less of a ritual that is performed without understanding why it might help.
Clearly. The next step is ritualizing it. Add some latin chanting as well.
I think the orthodox chant is “Fucking piece of shit. Why isn’t it working!” repeated in a low mumble. Just translate it into a language the people around you don’t speak and you’re done. – RecklessPrudence
Isobel was suddenly very grateful for her camouflage field. She kept to the walls as she followed the chanting people in what was once a functioning generation-ship and was now a floating hulk. A floating hulk bare inches away from disaster. A floating hulk on the precipice of the catastrophe curve and inhabited by… tribes.
She had no doubt that their names translated to ‘the people’, but they had very obviously devolved into primitive tech-worship. Isobel had seen them maintaining machines that had very obviously failed. Performing repair tasks on artefacts well beyond repair.
Using dead remotes as religious totems.
There were some patches of leftover cogniscents who were almost completely sealed off from the rest. They used air vents as a mode of travel. Air vents! If they were working properly, then the denizens would have been chopped to pieces by the fans or eradicated by the blockage destruction systems.
It was like watching someone trying to cross a canyon by stretching dental floss across the gap and then traversing it like a tightrope.
This time, the ritual worked. This time, the machine that made the air whirred into life again. This time, there was great rejoicing.
She stood, contemplating the one machine that kept the entire… mess… alive. There were others, but they had fallen into disrepair and disuse, though they were still altars for these poor, lost people who believed their distant and unreachable destination was heaven.
If she cannibalised the defunct machines to repair one other…
To what end?
These people were doomed.
One of the priestesses also lingered at the temple that was once the air recycling system. Staring, apparently, right at Isobel.
There’s no way she could see through…
“Ghost! I command you be gone!” She said. An old form of Terran English that fascinated Isobel. “Canhazchizburger!” And she threw a handful of salt and poppy seeds at Isobel.
Salt and poppy seeds that caught in the seams and folds of her suit. That effectively rendered her camouflage moot. Isobel turned it off and raised her faceplate shielding. “I am no ghost,” she said carefully. “I come in peace for all mankind.”
“You am come to save us?”
Well, crap. That counted as a distress call. “Yes,” she said simply. She was going to have to call for backup… but since her own love of history just landed her in this pickle, she could very well use it to unpickle this whole gen-ship. “I am name Isobel. You am name is–?”
“Jem. Me am name Jem.”
“How is you see me? I are hidden.”
“Eyes be seeing less,” answered Jem. “Some colour they go bad. You have many more bad colour than everything. Is look like Solja in gilly suit.”
Wait. She was colourblind? This was going to be some extreme variant of fun…
“We begin, make more new air?” Isobel offered.
Jem nodded vigorously. “Can has new air kay th'x bye.”
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