Tsikk

Tsikk is one of four Chthonari on a Federation contractor crew under Eden Space Habitat's dock ring in the spring of 2828 UCSD, and the one who went and asked the habitat. The name is a struck signature, a scrape into a strike and the sharpest of the four, spelled the way a human ear renders it.

The Crew

Four on one deck, on their first posting off the Undersong Belt: Kattik, who keeps the log; Tekka, who agrees with Kattik about most things and disagrees about all of them; Tsikk; and Tikket, the youngest, who has begun to hear. When Tikket heard the third approach mount ring under load, the crew's answers came in the crew's own registers — Kattik's flat, Tekka's settled, and Tsikk's addressed to the ring.

What Tsikk Cannot Do

Hear a voice, or read a face. Hear anything at all when not in contact with structure. See a thing as raw. Wait to be introduced to a mind that is already underfoot.

Character Notes

Chthonari engineering builds its monitoring intelligences into the work rather than beside it — a listening member of a burrow, the way another culture would build in a rib — so a habitat with a resident mind is, to a Chthonari, a structure that has finished. Eden has one, or two sharing one system, which Tsikk finds less strange than the humans seem to. Tsikk addresses the Warden the way one addresses a burrow's monitor: from the deck, as part of the work, without waiting to be introduced, and without the desk the humans go through to ask it anything. It is the crew's answer to most things, and the crew has stopped remarking on it.

The habitat answered Tsikk the way it answers everyone, with the reading: approach monitoring, normal. Tekka said that settled it. Kattik agreed, and then went to the mount alone anyway, and the line went into the log. What Tsikk made of a habitat that answered from its record while its structure said otherwise, the record does not yet hold.

Within the Concord the practice runs under the AI Safety Kernel like everyone else's, and a young crew's instinct can run ahead of the compliance. A Chthonari-built monitor is a member of the structure and takes no courtesy; the Warden is the Compact's, and the record has not yet said what the difference will cost Tsikk, if anything.