3-15-3305: Some 20th Century Programmer Had an Interesting Sense of Humor, or it was a Mistake.
15 Mar 2019Ingrid Elfridr
Luckily with how calm things have been around here I can actually afford to take a day off here and there, well worth the wait after months endlessly feeding Skogul pirate kibbles. For the most part I'd decided to do some maintenance on Skuld, as that little Diamondback has done so many runs out into Synuefe space since December that she had a ridiculous amount of dust stuck in the landing gear and hardpoint ports. It didn't help that Breez had grabbed the scissor lift and scrawled WASH ME on the canopy while I was getting the new registration on the Dropship finalized with the port authorities. My mechanic has been on my ass constantly about getting Skuld replaced, repeating in which ways the ship has become a death trap over the last decade. I'm aware the kid is absolutely right, yet on the contrary he keeps proving that he can keep her flying despite all the beatings she's endured.All this aside, some hours later after I'd given the old docking computer "The Screwdriver" and cleaning up the maintenance bay I'd used I headed topside, opting to spend a few hours reading in my cabin. When I got there, however, I found Mug sitting on my bed. It had been a couple of weeks since I'd seen him so it was a surprise, but I poured us each a glass of whiskey so that we could chat. Mug, however, had different plans when he showed me the holo-disk in his hand. According to him it was an emulator of some 20th century PC games on software that's not to different than Old Earth MAME software.
Holy batsh*t, folks! This stuff had emulators of games from the 20th, and after doing some research it's safe to say one of these old PCs would have sufficed as a freaking end table! Now I'm somebody whom had rarely seen anything electronic until I was in my mid teens so this was rather mind-blowing. The first time I saw a datapad I thought it was a freaking cutting board!! All of this aside Mug and I looked through this incredibly drawn out list of all sorts of genres of dare we say *ancient* games and played a few of them. He eventually decided to look through strategy games, stating that they were his favorite. The first one he decided to play was better than the ones we'd tried before, and really amused me. I refilled the whiskey and watched him play, and he was in the process of ticking off all the major Old Earth superpowers to the point that they were blowing one another into oblivion with nuclear bombs.
Nonetheless India had plans of its own.
At the time I hadn't been sure whether or not this was intentional, but after doing some reading of some VERY old articles that had been transferred from the backup code of some website that went belly-up some eleven hundred years ago that stated it was in fact a glitch. How else could the pacifistic Mahatma Ghandi be enough of an ass to use nukes? Needless to say Mug was rather shocked and I couldn't stop laughing. There have been many nights where Mug and I had in-depth discussions about Earth history and politics for a number of hours over a good bottle, so this was something we hadn't seen coming.
Recently Mug had purchased an Anaconda, but had been waiting for the retrofitting that she needed to be up to snuff, as he had only been able to find a factory outfitting. We Norse folk can be superstitious about some things, but our superstitions regarding ships are almost genetically ingrained. I'd warned him not to fly the ship until he had a name for her, but after this gaming session he told me he'd made up his mind. When I asked he didn't say anything, but from that look on his face I could tell that he was up to something.
When we were getting ready to deploy to a high-threat distress call the next day and Mug had stated that he wanted to put his new Anaconda through her paces. Again I asked what he'd named the ship, to which he responded that it would be telling. I knew bugging him wouldn't get anywhere so I simply waited until he was ready to deploy. When I looked him up to sync comms it took a bit, as for a little bit I couldn't stop laughing when the registered name showed up as BMSV NUCLEAR GHANDI.
There's absolutely no way of finding who put this mistake in the code after more than 1300 years, but I like to think that this individual had a sense of humor with a demented side. Either way it's still getting laughs today.