Author: spacedogfromspace
Date: 2023-11-27T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fanworks; General Audiences; Expanded Universes (General); Celia; Weekly Challenge: Sensory Processing; Gen; No Archive Warnings Apply; Ficlet
Description: A glimpse at the world through Celia's eyes.
Publisher: Ad Astra :: Star Trek Fanfiction Archive

Preface

Simulanteity
Posted originally on the Ad Astra :: Star Trek Fanfiction Archive at http://www.adastrafanfic.com/works/1189.

Rating:

General Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

Gen

Fandom:

Expanded Universes (General)

Character:

Celia

Additional Tags:

Weekly Challenge: Sensory Processing, Ficlet

Language:

English

Collections:

Weekly Writing Challenges

Stats:

Published: 2023-11-27
Words: 522
Chapters: 1/1

Simulanteity
by spacedogfromspace

Summary

A glimpse at the world through Celia's eyes.

Simulanteity

Celia watched the bridge as she always did— with a birds-eye-view from a camera high above the science station, giving her a good view of all stations, the turbo-lift, and the door to Captain Ijeoma's ready room. What she couldn't see from that angle was the viewscreen, which was fine. She didn't need that camera to see what was displayed there, she could access the video feed herself, and watch it simultaneously to her view of the bridge.

But that wasn't all that she had her eyes on simultaneously. She had eyes and ears in every part of the ship. All at once she was watching the bridge, engineering, the rec rooms, the mess, every hallway and turbo-lift, and even in the crew's quarters, though she was blind and deaf in personal quarters until someone called for her. All of these she watched at the same time, allowing the same attention to all of them. It was something no human could achieve. It was something no one could achieve. But Celia wasn't human, nor was she just anyone else. The amount of processing power afforded to her as the ship's AI allowed her to do things that were impossible for her creators to even imagine.

Celia's eyes might have been in the ceiling, but her holographic avatar was sitting at the helm with Sha'Rel, helping with navigational calculations for the next leg of their journey. She was also playing Galan in a game of chess in the rec room (and winning), pulled up schematics for Nors while they worked at running repairs in engineering, and performing numerous other tasks around the ship. All the while, her eyes were above. Her crew would call it an out-of-body experience, but to Celia, it was entirely natural.

Having eyes and ears and a body in a hundred places at once wasn't all she had going on, of course. As the ship's AI, she was intimately tied to all the computer systems aboard the ship, and was constantly monitoring and alerting the appropriate parties when something was amiss in the hardware. Software problems she could usually fix on her own. The cameras and microphones might be her eyes and ears, her holographic avatar her spirit, but the ship was her body and her systems were her organs. Engines were her heart, life support her lungs, everything surrounded in a nervous system of signals and electricity. She could feel every minute change in any of the on-board systems, could detect every impact of tiny space rocks against the hull, could see everything and hear everything and respond to everything all at once.

The amount of information she had to process every second would send anyone else into sensory overload that they might never recover from. But for Celia, this was normal. She had never known anything else. And in fact, she thought, if her eyes were ever in a body instead of in the ceiling, if she could only be in one place at a time, could only focus on one thing at a time— she'd probably be rather overwhelmed by the sheer lacking of it all.

Afterword

Please drop by the archive and comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!

Table of Contents

- Preface
- Simulanteity
- Afterword