#shipmind

A colored version of my design for Phoenix, a character in my short story ‘SHIPMIND’.

Originally posted 02/10/2023

"Pilot." I started.

"Yes?" murmured my bleary-eyed navigator, stirring from sleep. Their space suit held tightly against their body, making their skin clammy from a nightmare's sweat.

"I am detecting increased heart rate and brain activity congruent with fear. Are you alright?"

They coughed, an action they did often when presented with a topic of conversation they would rather avoid. "Yes. Yeah," they croaked through their dry throat, pawing at their eyes as they sat up. "I'm fine. Just a nightmare." They looked down at their body and sighed.

"The same ones as before?" I asked gently.

"Yeah," they said like a dagger, then coughed again. They pulled their legs to their chest and buried their face in them. "I'm fine." After a moment, they shook off the sleep, and swam through the microgravity to my instrument panel. Mornings like this one were common. They had been experiencing this nightmare since before they found me. Once, through our Weave, I tried to help them through the worst parts but my efforts to understand it and what they needed served only to quicken its terrifying conclusion. They wouldn't speak to me for days after that. It was hard. Infuriating, even. They told me to never try anything like that again. I haven't. "Any sign of that signal while I was out?" they asked, pulling me back from the memory.

"No, still quiet." I confirmed. "Do you want to do another scan of each planet?"

"Yeah. Then we can move on." they said, pushing off the pilot's chair toward the shower. "Acknowledged." I replied, perhaps a bit too happy to move again.

I let my body awaken from sleep mode slowly, allowing coolant and lubricant to flow free along my arms and legs before decoupling them from my central fuselage. I stretched them out, testing their motion. My head slid up from within, allowing me full, humanoid maneuverability. Opening the fuel ducts to the engines lining my limbs and back is… liberating. I cross distances longer than the planets are wide in moments, microasteroids shatter upon my hull and space seems to give way to my approach, my tucked delta wings slicing it apart like knives. If there was air in this emptiness, I would be able to feel it pass between my fingers. If there was rain, it would boil against the heat of my metal. Instead, there is just space dust: luminous from the blue-green light of this system's stars, shimmering across my hull. As I came close to the upper atmosphere of the first planet, I slowed to enter a high orbit around it. My sensors caressed its surface inquisitively, like a lover tracing lines over her skin. I scanned for radio signals, manmade structures, anything that could even possibly have produced the distress signal that drew us to this system. When I found nothing, I moved on. I slowed as some part of me worried, deeply. I was not built with the ability to worry. Finding nothing, I moved onto the next planet. I felt something sink within me, a crawling dread I had only known as my pilot's feeling and not my own. My cognition slowed as the fear infected me like malware. My engines choked, and then stalled with the effort. I was a war machine. Old, now. The war I was built for is long over. But that does not change the fact that I was not built to fear. To worry without reason. And yet I was, spinning out into empty gravity, my reactor-heart breaking at the absence of explanation for the signal. My pilot stepped from the shower, drying their hair on a towel as they floated back to my bridge. Their face dropped seeing our current velocity, and they rushed to keep us from careening into an asteroid. They wrenched the controls from my autopilot. Their discarded towel met a bulkhead and bunched up, sliding along it and leaving tiny beads of water floating through the air. The water was cool, gentle. A calm among our storm. "Holy fuck," they whispered between ragged breaths, wide-eyed and distant.

"I'm sorry," I whispered back. "I… don't know what happened. I don't know what's happening to me. I think, I think our Weave was strained by something, and… and…" They slumped into the pilot's chair and watched the asteroid belt before us through the main display. "You're alright, Kase." they said, finally, against my spluttering. "We'll figure things out."

I took a deep breath. I'd never tried that before, but had seen them do it after times of intensity. It helped.

The full cover for SHIPMIND, my original short story!

SHIPMIND, printed and bound! It’s kind of wild to be able to hold something you wrote that has a whole cover and everything. (And something you hand-bound yourself, too. And drew the cover for.)

A bit of a step down from being able to control an entire planet, a Shipmind controls an entire spaceship. Though given that the spaceships of Starfinder can feasibly come close to small planetoids it doesn't end up being much of a step down from the Oracle of Oras. Even if it were, it more than makes up for the step down.

Being one of the creatures to serve as the launching off point between Pathfinder and Starfinder, it in some ways feels a bit odd to have a stat block for it in the former but these are some of my favorite Starfinder creatures because it doesn't require a conversion. It also makes it one of the first creatures to talk about the Dominion of the Black, of which it is tied too heavily.

Let's talk about the ship part first though. Now from what we have records of, Shipmind's were designed to interface with the bioorganic ships used by the Dominion, serving as the brain to a greater body and gaining access to all the major systems. However, there is nothing here to say that a Shipmind could not take control of any sort of shape, so long as they were given a proper interface. This might extend their influence, with members of the Dominion seeking to board ships and construct the interface, so that a Shipmind could slip in and hijack an enemy vessel. The major vessels you'll find Shipminds on though are Seeders, the only detailed ships of the Dominion. Though its the only one mentioned though, I would advise that you can design several more, as the Dominion is made up of a myriad of bizarre and varied aberrations that would have very different crafts.

Being a part of the Dominion, the Shipminds are designed with deeply raw intelligence and belief in the mysterious ideologies of the galaxy-spanning cult. Some of these beliefs lead them towards the cruel experimentation of species they see as lesser and the gathering of intellect, brains, and memories. They are as deeply and bizarrely zealous as the others of their expansionist people, needing to be sated with live sacrifices and quarantining random sections of their 'body' as they become immune. However, it also seems to gear towards the superiority of aberrant life, something which shipminds come close to but are not themselves.

This belief and the fact it does not come into alignment with their own physiology may be part of the reason Shipminds have a greater tendency to diverge from their creators intentions. Instances of Shipminds going insane and killing their crew are common enough to be known, which makes it even more entertaining how the Dominion keeps employing their use (it makes them more alien to me that they seem to care so little about the lives lost through these tremendous tragedies).

This split in the uniformity of the Dominions could potentially introduce an opportunity for others working against them. If a Shipmind with enough significant information on them were to defect, it may potentially be a race between them and the Dominion to find this essential piece. Though it is unlikely that the creature's defection at all lessens its hatred for whoever does end up finding it.

hello hi friends you are so sweet and cute and wonderful and I made a thingy and I hope you enjoy. yay <3

It just wants to examine your fMRIs and fingerprint you and let its' prismatic arm touch your cheeks as tenderly as an industrial machine can manage, is that so much to ask?