My Other Best Friend is a Submarine

Knowing my interest in sentient vehicles and the relationships people have with them, and also my love of the ocean, someone recommended I read Katya's World.

Aside from going in expecting more sentient submarines than what I got (I was promised "it has the spaceship human merge thing" which it definitely did have), I'd say it wasn't a bad book, but not so massively good that it left me a husk of despair over my own failings. And it certainly was chock full of submarines which delighted me endlessly because submarine battles are far more interesting than space battles. I feel like they're a very well-kept secret, out of reach of the SFF crowd. The rules are strange, the atmosphere is tense, and nobody ever writes it despite the hard SF crowd bleating on and on about realism and science, which will boring up almost any space battle. Meanwhile, real submarine battles are all kinds of fantastic and even more alien than most space battles I've read.

But I went in expecting more about the human-spaceship merge thing, even though I wasn't promised a book about people and their living submarine buddies. I wanted it and to be fair, those moments shone. Those few pages of body horror were perfect.

Even before I'd finished the book I sat curling my toes, singing with tension. I want more! I need more about the horrors of merging with a machine! Except not in an instance where you're subsumed by the machine because that's not merging, dammit, the living machine can't just pick you up, suck you dry, and continue on its merry way!

This was an itch Space Noir will not scratch, for all its non-consensual mental hijinks, because it's still ultimately about two people who have alien sensibilities thrust upon them. Also, more spaceship romance than I think works for the concept. So the niggling need to do something passed.

I woke up intending to write some arctic fantasy, inspired by the waterworld thing, but before I knew it, I was 3,000 words deep in a world full of living submarines and the strange people mentally linked to them. A world where humans don't bond with these machine-beasts, until (obviously) one easily exasperated teenager does in the midst of it trying to kill her. It's okay, xe got better after that.

Xe calls xirself Trinket.

Trinket must be kept a secret from the government.

So of course Trinket goes around on gaming forums calling xirself Shiny_Trinket.

"You can't be on the internet!"
"Obviously I can."
"You're a living submarine YOU CANNOT BE ON THE INTERNET."
"Then why did God give me a wireless connection."
"Not to play Guardians of Eterna! That is *my* game!"
"It's my favorite game too."
"Find another game!"
"You're just mad I'm better at it than you are."
~Later, looking up scores~
"Slap me thrice, xe's right. D:"

I think I wrote less "horrible mind-meld with a biological artificial intelligence" and more "Socorro 2: set on a water world and starring teenagers."

...So if you wanted more Socorro, uhm... yeah? Watch this space.