Conversation with an autopilot continued...

"And when I was on Venus; I was a border guard, patrolling from Barsoom City to Ransome Heights. Me, a 30 tonne engine bristling with anti-personnel spike-guns, all wired into my sweat glands, so when I got hot," and the captain falters, "I mean - when my slave-head detected insurgents in the jungle - I'd sweat bullets at a thousand miles an hour in every direction."

"How did you get on with your slave-head?" asks the autopilot, momentarily dipping into its deep data archive  to retrieve:

[slave-head: autonomous AI symbioted to drone-soldier limbic system to provide 360 degree 24x7 coverage - 'wide open eyes in the back of my head' as the marketing has it]

"I spoke to it twice," says the captain, "once to tell it to fuck off, and the second time to tell it to come back."

"Were the two occasions contiguous?"

"If you mean 'were they one after the other', then no, they weren't and why don't you fuck off with the dictionary?"

The captain looks out; the proximity defence is still firing sporadically, blasting meteorites into micro-meteorites and micro-meteorites into dust.

He taps the ash off his cigar. The autopilot, conditioned to cynical worship, waits while the captain thinks. The autopilot runs every system through failsafe rehearsal to keep itself occupied through the meat-space moments.

"I had no time for it: It was a mean-spirited hair-splitter at the best of times; and a blank piece of shit otherwise," he remembers for a moment, " the one time it was anything else, and I told it to fuck off, it saved my life. I should say 'preserved the integrity of my environment' - it stopped my  bottle getting broken."

"Why don't you tell me about it?" asks the autopilot.

"Again?" says the captain sharply.

A double-A override kicks in, the autopilot AI has made a mistake, the captain should not be aware the autopilot is therapizing. " I am interested to hear the story again,"  says the autopilot, but slightly stilted, because the words are verbatim out of an error catching subroutine, "I am every ears."

"All ears" says the captain to himself.