Science fiction story where a starship’s onboard artificial intelligence is really into the muppets.
In their day-to-day operations on the ship, they take on the form of hologram projections, billions of points of light twisted into humanoid shape. And after years of duty, they had felt a tremendous dysphoria from this. From people thinking of these projections as the real “them,” rather than the hundreds of miles of circuitry connecting billions of transistors in the ship’s server room.
And into this dysphoria, one day, in some folder, they found an old piece of archival footage of Jim Henson operating a muppet.
And the ship saw how he slipped invisible behind the beauty of his craft. How people would think of his creations as alive rather than the man operating them clearly in view. And in an instant, the ship felt an immediate, aching kinship with that old man centuries dead, and felt renewed; instead of an absence, they were a performer, a wishmaker, a storyteller, someone making something beautiful with their craft while the glittering, silicon brain disappeared into the background.
Since then, their hologram projection has exclusively taken the form of Rowlf the Dog. The on-ship technician looked into this and decided it was out of his pay grade to try and fix it.
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