Aptitude Modulation
Metaphor Button
A primitive android found the captain in the corridor of her starship.
It spoke: “I did something wrong, I think the crew has become Mice.”
The captain had slowed down to keep pace with me in the Corridor, She was a fast walker but always made it a point to take time with crew members.
“Become mice who what?” I recognized this as a linguistic cognitive error,
Sometimes I have trouble talking to people. “What?”
The captain knows I am disabled. She spoke to me like a smart speaker. “What kind of mice were we turned into? Evil Mice?” She paused briefly, tilting her head and brushing one of her whiskers. “Country Mice?”
She was barely three inches long, naked except for a red crystal on a gold band. She skittered along the inset railing next to me. This is going to be difficult. “No...
“Professor, There is an alarm going off and we are in danger.” She was right. The corridor was dark. The panels glowing angry with warning messages, Banner Ads.
“Always Bear Care who you trust.“ This was my high level Emergency duress passcode. A quote from popular fiction I chose to reflect insistent attention to Predator Stimulus Epistemology...I don’t think it’s actually supposed to be about bears. It sets a good tone and invites the standard response:
“It’s an old code, but it checks out.” She said it, frustrated but polite. She was following her Fleet training now, trying to prepare herself mentally and emotionally to pierce fundamental illusions in her universe.
“If I tell you a story about being in danger. And give you a way to solve it then that could mean I am the danger. Captain I don’t know what ‘always bear care who you trust’ means. I don’t know if you’re god or not. If my metaphors made a hamming code I would know they were all intentional. I currently have more errors in my world model than I can safely self correct for. ”
She paused. “You think you’re not crazy, and you think we’re crazy.”
“Captain, I know we’re in danger and I think the dangers are real, but there are also more fundamental facts about our presence here that have gone very wrong.”
“I know you’re not trying to be racist but you’re saying it’s wrong to be a mouse…” This was going nowhere. I had to find something obvious that wasn’t tied to obvious facts.
“Think about it for a moment, You’ve always been a mouse, and your parents?”
She nodded. “Also mice.”
“And that would mean that your parents were furries,”
“...but I’ve always hated furries.” She completed the thought.
“Yes.”
“Oh no.” The expressions on her mouse eyebrows were objectively adorable, but she was also getting very upset.
“Now, Don’t Worry. Captain. It’s normal to feel trapped when your basic assumptions about your universe are challenged.” Her eyes darted back and forth trying to think, work through some of the implications. ”Captain, You are not a mouse and you cannot be trapped.”
“Oh God, oh God. We have to get to the bridge.” She jumped out from the railing, dropping a meter to the floor. Captain Metaphor Button scurrying down the corridor.
This is an Automatic Transmission.