#just a little. ittybitty idiot

[slavhew]

12/11/2023

realized i completley forgot to post these mspaint rufii. ig i was saving them to be part of a bigger sketchpile but i didnt get far on my replay :(

[sshbpodcast]

Tales from the Holodeck: Star Trek/Star Wars Mashup: Ames’s Story

In celebration of A Star to Steer Her By’s second anniversary, we broke out the "Tales from the Holodeck” fanfic again and wrote up some mashup stories combining Star Trek and Star Wars! We picked our series and allowed the force to guide us where we went from there. You can listen to all the fanfic on the podcast, or read them here! This is Ames’s short story written out. Live long, prosper, and may the force be with you.

[images © Lucasfilm, Disney, CBS, Paramount, etc.]

“The Solo Algorithm”

by Ames

Random Picks: Star Trek: TNG / Star Wars Anthology Series

I'd been staring at the plans for the Death Star for the entire morning, poring over every detail of the computer code until I could see them burning on the backs of my eyelids. My head buzzed. My office appeared blurry. This was easily the biggest project I'd worked on, so complex that I had to keep a cheatsheet next to my monitor with all the algorithms scrawled in my unsightly handwriting. My intercom shouted at me every few minutes with new requests until I had to turn on the auto-response so I could claw at the blueprints for some futile minutes in peace. I came to the determination that whoever had designed this project had fucked up.

I flipped the intercom back on. "You have 1001 messages!" screeched the mechanized voice of the auto-response system. "Press one to hear your messages!"

I dialed in the number for the inventory manager, whose line was also going to auto-response. A curt, concise: "Inventory. Please consult the database."

Rolling my office chair behind my desk, I bumped the rear wall of my cube. We were not allowed windows. We were not allowed doors. We were not allowed to see any of the other workers in untold other cubes, fitted only with enough room to sit at our computers and stare at the wall of monitors while we incessantly worked through what was assumably the workday. Sometimes I could hear the occupants of neighboring cubes bump against my wall and mutter some profanity, occasionally an apology. A tiny, simple houseplant I'd custom-designed and printed sat on my desk so that I wouldn't go stir crazy.

I brought up the database and started searching through it. We could build starships, we could design worlds, we could create artificial beings with personalities that could fool a Turing test, but whoever maintained the database was the true mastermind of this operation. The task sheet was several thousand pages of cells that delineated the job breakdown because we had to account for everything, no matter how minute, and whoever had bungled the Death Star would be on it somewhere.

It was afternoon when I'd tracked down the culprit out of everyone else developing the plans. I pulled up an extension number with no name – we didn't go by those – and called their intercom. They didn't have their auto-response on.

"Make it quick; I've got to finish this damn thing," came the genderless voice on the other line. I would never meet this person, as I would never meet any person here. It's possible I'd spoken with them many times on countless other projects, and just as possible our degrees of separation had been infinite until today.

"Uh. Hi. Say, have you noticed something wrong with the Death Star plans?" I asked. I stared at my little houseplant and drummed my fingers on my desk.

My counterpart groaned. "You're obviously going to have to be a whole lot more specific than that." I could hear them typing nonstop through my earpiece, working endlessly even while we talked.

I pulled up the design plans again and zoomed in. The pixels fuzzed and then sharpened as I scrutinized a certain section that had gotten me scratching my head. "Well… Uh, take a look at the superlaser reactor," I started. "I'm kinda reviewing the code and, uh, if there were a pressurized explosion there-"

"The whole station will blow. Yep," they said, as matter-of-factly as possible.

"Oh, so you're working on it? I figured it was a mistake and I just wanted to make sure-"

"No, you don't get it. It's supposed to do that."

I stopped fidgeting in my chair and stared at the intercom as if I expected to see something there. My brow thoroughly furrowed, I managed a "Wha- Why?"

They snorted at me. "Players have to be able to beat the Death Star – it's the damn trigger for the next cut scene." It sounded really simple and obvious when they said it. We builders don't always think about the reasons behind the designs we construct; we just do them to check them off from the inexhaustible database, which assigns us a new project, and on and on into oblivion. They continued, "No one's gonna play the damn game if there's no way to beat this level. Didn't you read the wireframe specs? The flaw is there intentionally for the storyline to- Oh, goddammit shit on a fuck! Hang on!"

I jerked my chair away from my desk and smacked it against the wall. My adjacent unseen neighbor yelled something muffled and I could hear them give the wall a hit with the palm of their hand. "Sorry!" I called out.

In my earpiece, the codewriter on the intercom was still letting out a raucous stream of profanity. "Cockass fucking shithole piece of hell!" they shouted.

I hesitated between hanging up on them so they could get back to their obviously important work, and apologizing for existing in the first place to wreck their day so utterly. "Oh jeez," I stammered, "I shouldn't have brought it up; I- I- I'm sure you've got it under control. I, uh, I'm sorry to have bothered you."

"No, for fuck's sake, it's fine, dumbass. The Death Star is ready to roll out, dammit. It's just this other project just keeps not coming the hell together. I'm supposed to be coding Han Solo and he keeps coming out fucked up."

"I'm sorry," I squeaked.

"Stop apologizing! Now I've got to undo a day's worth of edits on his stupid charisma levels, but then his whole personality generator will be imbalanced and he'll just be too much of a miscreant for this assignment. This whole character sheet is fucking impossible. I wish I could just start from scratch and delete this son of a bitch."

My hands were shaking as I listened to them shout at me over the intercom, and I focused on my tiny potted plant. I had made it to give me something real to look at in this grey, claustrophobic mimicry of an office, otherwise made up of screens and machines. Everything else black or metal, even my hulking metal desk. The plant was just a couple tiny leaves, simple, uncluttered. I could have made a flower, but the greenness of the ittybitty leaves were just what I needed to make myself feel composed, justified. Like my existence in this world were validated. I took a quick breath before gliding my chair closer to my desk. "Well… Then why don't you?" I asked.

"Why don't I what?" came the clipped reply. I heard more frantic clattering which echoed from the keyboard, more muffled cursing.

"Start from scratch? I do it all the time."

"What are you talking about? That's a waste of time. I've already got so far into developing this feckless cad. You have no idea how long- how many hours I've spent staring at- ugh, and he's got this fucking idiot ponytail I'm just sick of too! I just want to cut it right off his damn head!"

I tried not to laugh. Smiling, I went on, "You don't know about the Star Trek universe, do you?"

"What? No. The what?"

All of the developers loved the Star Trek universe. It was enormous. It contained nearly everything we'd ever created to date. And everything in it came from mistake after mistake after mistake, growing and evolving into the most realistic world we'd all ever built.  And it would never see the light of day.

"It's only where we've been dumping our botched projects for as long as I've ever known. What? You can't delete this Solo guy? Then I say scrap him for anything useful, rename the original file to anything else – uh, Okona or, I dunno, literally anything, – and dump it into the Trek ether. Here, I'll send you a link that a bunch of us have been using. I've got a ton of crap floating around in there."

I found the link to the virtual environment and messaged it to the developer's extension. Over my earpiece, I could hear the message pop up on their screen with a cartoonish bouncy sound. "This is a fuckin' live world?" they asked, incredulous.

"Yeah sure! I mean, it's programmed to never leave the test environment, so it'll never be found, but yeah. You put something in here, and you get it off your plate, and you can, I dunno, start over from the beginning . I do it all the time. I was on the Game of Thrones project and broke one of the Dothraki's foreheads somehow – really rough day, don't ask – so I renamed them Klingons and basically threw them in here. Now they're one of the biggest races in the universe."

"The garbage universe?"

"Ish? It's been running on its own for a long time now. And all the beings in there have their free will turned on, so they just sort of go, and write their own stories, and stuff like that. It's a downright lifesaver sometimes."

I'd heard about the Star Trek universe early on from another developer. This jury rigged quickfix had been passed along from person to person in this office as a way to work around efficiency checks and quality assurance, and it was rather brilliant. Another coder who kept bungling a Gandalf for the Lord of the Rings virtual reality game told me about it. They couldn't get the long white hair on the wizard to attach properly, so they just shaved it all off, renamed the file Jean Luc Picard, and shoved it in there. I heard that character's a starship captain now!

As far as I can tell, the first usage of the Star Trek universe was when someone was building The Master from the Doctor Who VR, accidentally overpowered the character, renamed him Q, and gave him sentience. After the coverup of that mistake, the whole galaxy started to come together on its own and turned into this enormous, complex behemoth where the characters have no idea that they are programs, the worlds are first drafts that have evolved into huge functioning civilizations, and the stories write themselves into the cosmos of what's effectively a galactic recycling bin.

My counterpart was silent on the other end of the line for a long time, without even more typing to be heard. They spoke in an awestruck whisper. "I'm looking at this universe, and holy shit."

"Yeah, I know."

"Thanks a shit-ton for showing me."

"Hey, no prob, really, just doing what anyone would do."

"Who are all these space elves I'm seeing?"

"I dunno. Probably Vulcans? They're sort of neat," I said.

"Why isn't THIS what we're building?" they finally exclaimed in ecstacy. "People would play the hell out of an open-world sandbox program like this! It's fucking majestic! It's… it's everything!"

I didn't have an answer for that. We developers try not to dwell too much on our purpose in life, spent forever logged into office cubes, staring at blinding monitors, where we create everything the database tells us to whenever a project calls for a new character or item or vehicle or anything, no matter how big or how small. We have to account for all of it while we literally build the world and everything represented in it.

"Yeah, it's pretty great." I hesitated for a second while I couldn't stop from smiling at the sheer splendor of the world we'd unknowingly nurtured. "Hey, can I tell you something, friend?"

"What's that?"

"Can you go check how a planet called Bynaus is doing?"

"Bynaus? Uh, sure. Let me see." I heard some clicking and waited for a reaction to what they might see. "There's a little humanoid being down there. Cute little shit."

I trembled, grinning, tears starting to form in the corners of my eyes. "That… That little humanoid… That's me."

"That's you? You built yourself?"

"Something like myself. Like, an interpretation of myself. I kinda wanted some version of me to exist somewhere in the playable universe. Maybe it's stupid-"

"Naw, it's not stupid, it's cool," they scolded me. "You named yourself 01?"

"It's from my extension number."

"Oh my god." There was another pause and more clicking I could hear. Finally, the other spoke up. "I'm gonna build myself to keep you company. I'm gonna be 10."

"Oh! You don't have to do that…" I was surely blushing, though the other developer would never know it.

"Already did. I just copied your file and mirror imaged it. Stupid easy."

I opened the universe and watched the two Bynars – me and a nearly identical programmer I would never meet – as they conversed rapidly to each other, going about their days as if they were real people, ignorant that they were just two pieces of code living in a virtual world.

"I should get back to my jackass Han Solo problem," they said. "I may keep the vest, but everything else is just horseshit."

"Sure."

"Nice talking with you."

"You too. Hey, another suggestion," I said.

"What's that?"

"You should print yourself a houseplant for your office. They're nice, I think."

I logged out of the office environment at the end of the workday, and pulled the virtual reality set from my head. I immediately felt ten pounds lighter. And that night, as I stared out my apartment window at a slightly pixelated setting sun and a program depicting a city full of apartment buildings implying masses and masses of people, I felt optimistic about the world for the first time in a long time. "Computer," I said, as I stretched my legs and shook out my arms, "load program Star Wars: Escape from Corellia."

Thanks for reading! If you’re hungry for more, check back here for Caitlin, Jake, and Chris’s stories, revisit our first batch of TOS fanfic here, keep listening to the podcast, and follow A Star to Steer Her By on Facebook and Twitter. Be sure to tip your yeoman!