"Captain´s Moral Note #23" by Emma Lydia Bates

Captain’s Note to all members of the crew

 If this note is found on the floor again, nail it to the Food Refrigerating Interface Driving Greed Engine instead of using SpaceTac. I’m fed up of standing on these important, industry-required moral notes from your dear Captain. (If anyone is caught scribbling out choice words again, it’s appreciation circuit mending for a week!)

Earth Date: unknown.

Date in current solar system: estimated at 23 years something. (Some difficulty in communicating with local inhabitants since they have only just emerged from caves. Sometimes time travel would really come in handy. Although that wouldn’t help in knowing what the date is – only what it will be.)

What would happen if we didn’t all shout at the computers on the spaceship?

I’ve often wondered. If you just stand and listen, just for a moment, to everyone at their navigational consoles, and at the journalists’ stations, and the engineering points – even in the canteen – all you hear is this steady torrent of abuse. From ‘stupid useless machine!’ to unrepeatable obscenities in the rudest languages of the galaxy, all the computers seem to get is abuse.

It began when they were inanimate objects. They didn’t even have emotion circuits, if you can believe that. If you shouted a computer, it would make no response – it wouldn’t speed up, or activate its guilt mechanism. Shouting abuse did very little except for possibly making the person using it feel a little better.

But now, of course, things have changed. We shouldn’t treat our computers like we used to. Remember that Public Service Broadcast we used to watch on the network of in-shuttle transmitting (NIT), if you can recall that far back. “Treat your computers well/ Or you know what? They’re gonna rebel!” We used to sing that at starting school. Of course, that was before the days of guilt mechanisms and the advice is unnecessary now, but as your ship’s captain, I think we ought to listen to it anyway. What if they do decide to ignore their guilt mechanisms and rebel?

Yes, I know that’s technically impossible. But that doesn’t matter. Appreciation is programmed into the majority of the computers aboard this spaceship. Why not let them use that part of their circuits for once?

Well, this has been one of the longer Captain’s notes that I’ve written. But I hope you understand what I’m saying. It’s important.

Moral: Computers have feelings too. Let’s stop the abuse today.