Tod uses this story to scare the internal mechanics team interns into traveling in pairs and logging where they're planning to go in the plant at the beginning of the work day.
Transcript
Anonymous asked: Adam so, how come you're having trouble with finding a job as a pilot? Is it just too competitive of a landscape?
Adam: Corporate types only want suck ups, I guess. They’ll ask you to waste your time doing the dumbest shit and then blow up when you question them on it. It's just a powerplay. Petty middle managers get mad about not REALLY being in charge, then take it out on their minions.
Anonymous asked: Tod is it a common occurrence for wrecked ships to arrive for processing whilst still containing... "biological matter"?
Tod: Haha. Is that your way of saying "corpses?" This job is less interesting than you think it is. But... we did have an incident over ten years ago... Cal was cutting open a decommissioned station capsule and found a mummified avian crammed into the outer paneling. Apparently they’d been a missing person for decades... we
immediately got swarmed with Dominion investigators. The story I heard from them was that our mummy had been performing station maintenance, gotten stuck, and died of dehydration. Pretty grim. Once in a while we get vessels that were obviously part of some crime scene or horrible accident, but it’s long after the cops have blown through and picked most of the gore out.
72 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 33”
Gar G
Some things never change….
And yikes…
mustarjil
Yay, my question for Adam was picked. When I learned that someone as reckless as him was aiming to be a pilot, I just had to ask him why does /he/ think he can’t make it into said field. It’s such a concerning answer given his current job… Thank you for the good food, Jay.
AceiestArtist
The comments continue the tradition of dunking on Adam every time he opens his mouth.
Not that he hasn’t earned it XD
mossrabbit
oh adam for SURE has multiple harassment and safety violations on his record huh
JoB
“Let me tell you how that #§$%!! supervisor made someone I have never met file a ‘reckless flying’ complaint against me …”
[never reads passenger manifests]
xobe
SNAP INTO A SLIM JIM
McFrugal
The story the authorities gave about the mummy rings false. If someone’s doing maintenance, there’s a maintenance log. Anyone looking for a missing person would look at what they last did and check there. Also, how did nobody ever do maintenance in the same area after that and notice the body? If they died of thirst then that means the area had an active supply of oxygen, and that also means the body would rot afterwards which would spread into the ship’s air supply and everyone would notice, plus it wouldn’t leave a mummy behind. There being a mummy strongly suggests the area was exposed to vacuum, which also puts the cause of death into doubt. Most likely they were murdered at some point, then their body dragged out into space and sealed behind the outer paneling to hide the crime. The authorities keeping it quiet would make sense if the perp was a flight risk and they didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest before they had to put out that story. Or maybe they just didn’t know who did it and didn’t want to foster paranoia? Or maybe they discovered the only way the body could be there is if they got sealed in while the capsule was being constructed and the construction company paid them off to keep it quiet. Real hard to say without more facts.
Vinemaple
I wouldn’t be surprised if maintenance logs are optional in the Dominion of Tiiliit. Also, it sounds like the mummified tech was working in a sealed, nonpressurized void space.
This kind of thing happens on surface ships far too often, even nowadays. I can imagine the worker not being properly logged as having entered the space, the only door not being tagged open, nobody monitoring them while they’re working in there, and then getting “stuck” through some accident, probably a fall. Everyone assumes someone else made sure the worker got back out, the void is sealed back off, and the worker dies, slowly, of dehydration, while everyone looks everywhere else for them… or assumes they’ve skipped work and are out partying.
Why nobody *heard* them, well, there could be a few reasons… noise, nobody around, too much insulation muffling the sound, that awkward feet-over-head position making it hard to shout…
We get told stories like this in safety training, specifically to make sure we don’t leave someone to die in an uninhabitable space. Just like Tod tells this story to his crew. On real cargo ships, those void spaces sometimes deplete their own oxygen due to chemical byproducts of corrosion, and zero ventilation. They’re not built to be lived in, and they’re dangerous to work in.
Any shipyard will have a story like this.
zaratustra
Fun fact! The room inside a ship that stores the anchor chain can become untenable for human life in as little as 24 hours if there’s no air circulation, because all the oxygen combines with the iron in the chain!
Enai
Also, people are really f’in stupid sometimes. I read a story in the newspaper about a tech and his apprentice doing maintenance in an automated storage space. They’d properly removed the fuse and hung a tag that said “work in progress – do not remove” or something to that effect. Some genius came along, removed the tag and reset the fuse, triggering the auto calibration run of the picker. That thing is fast.
…
Cue mincemeat in the storage unit. Makes you consider bringing back public floggings or the stocks, it does.
IncompleteMachine
…Jesus Christ…
Min
Yeeeep. If there’s anything I’ve learned researching engineering disasters, there is no safety system so foolproof that someone tired, untrained, or thoughtless can’t get through it.
JoB
… and that’s why every electrician uses his personal padlock that nobody else has a key for on a LOTO …
Eux
god, i love the amas.
Min
Bite. Bite Adam. Bite.
That mummy is really cool, and has made me wonder what the other sapient species would look like mummified. I can see JUST enough of that skull to be interesting!
petra
yummy avian jerky :))
Light_In_The_Fog
<ōōōC
(concerned avian emoticon)
Joysweeper
adam you’re just right enough to totally maddeningly be wrong. management can be like that! if you had any power, *you’d* be like that! but your assuming it’s the case from the jump is probably more the cause of your troubles than other people are.
friendly spacer
These AMA intermissions continue to provide some brilliant worldbuilding on the side. Did Cal receive/need counseling in the aftermath or are they expected to process the trauma on their own terms? We’ve seen some of Bip’s coping strategies (MAINLY avoidance), so I wonder about the cultural expectations around AI grief and (psychological) shock vis-à-vis other sophonts.
cabbage
This makes me wonder…the dominion of tiiliit is an intergalactic government with well established ties to humans and the BFGC. Centaur governments rarely extend beyond clan level (according to what i gathered from the neocities)
Would there even be birth certificates for most centaurs beyond clan records? Like the antler velvet blanket is a good way to store geneological records, but how often are those archived? Would a centaur government even report them missing?
Mitta
A homeplanet centaur embassy does exist, the one they contacted when Talita was first found in the foster home. They did not have any records of missing children in the area and there were also no records of any spacer centaurs passing through when Talita was surrendered, indicating there is some form of citizen documentation but its probably very few and far between. On homeplanet I bet its nonexistent in most areas except for really large powerful clans. Something I believe makes going off planet even more risky for centaurs, on top of their expensive cost of living and stigma.
bisexual
all this talk of the avian mummy which is a very weird and specific circumstance. Nobody talking about the real horror, which is Adam. I think most people have met someone like Adam, and they tend to continue to Adam all over the place. That’s real. And that’s terrifying.
malmo
The real horror was learning Adam is a pilot. I bet he doesn’t follow checklists
Vinemaple
Agreed! And likes to say, “Hey, watch this!”
IncompleteMachine
That’s some of the ‘dumbest shit’ he was talking about. He’s going to get himself killed; I just hope he doesn’t take anyone out with him when it happens.
hessian
“adam all over the place” i’m stealing that
Professor Aggressor
Avian Jerky!
thegriffin88
Sure Adam it’s never YOUR fault.
Ellindsey
Really raises questions as to how the Runaway was delivered apparently without the authorities looking it over at all. Was Bip able to pull strings and get it delivered as-is while also still stuck in a pile of cell phones? Seems unlikely but I’m not sure how else this could have happened.
Vinemaple
This… Something weird is going on with the Runaway’s acquisition. Tod has basically confirmed it.
IncompleteMachine
This is part of what makes me think it was a murder not an accident. that and the perfect perpendicular strike on the habitat section.
zaratustra
Bip went blind as soon as the ship got hit and offline soon after… at least that’s his version of the facts.
Possibly he squeezed in one call for a no-questions-asked tow to the most backwoods scrapyard he could think of, before the phones ran out of charge.
bryn
ooh i was just speculating about the bio matter some pages back!
HAL9000
so spcae cops never bothered touching the runaway, huh… real murky mix up of events and coincidences. talita, you best hope the true circumstances don’t emerge until long after you’ve passed when some future spacetuber does a grwm while discussing the “top ten unsolved true crime cases in space piracy” and shelling some cold blooded corpo sponsors on the back of tragedy.
also adam. hey. flying like top gun’s maverick is a surefire way to get your whole entire shit shut down. “daring” pilots don’t make good pilots. pilots who blow off mandatory training dont make good pilots. there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots. there’s a thousand people out there vying for that exact job and theyre probably more skilled then you so dont fuck it up. also treat your goddamn ground crews with some respect and stop pretending to check the aircraft over before flight we all know you dont know what the fuck you’re looking for
Vinemaple
Oh, right, right before WordPress went down, I was thinking about Adam’s favorite movie being a contemporary remake of Top Gun
Of all the 2nd-millennium capitalist movies to remake, they chose that one…
Enai
What does “do a grwm” mean, if you please? I feel there’s either a typo or a lot of missing context here…
HAL9000
oh its a genre of video where a lady or occasionally a man will do their makeup (“get ready with me”) on camera while discussing a true crime case in very sensationalist terms with peppy music and unfunny comedy thrown in
TotallySomebody
Wow, that’s… Horrifying.
Matt
Interesting! This sure makes it suspicious how the Runaway managed to end up on Dirtball *without* first having been … cleaned out, for lack of a better term. Seems like the discovery of those bodies would have been an unprecedented case.
eden
I think it really was just a series of factors that made the runaway get lucky. dirt ball is working on a skeleton crew with mostly temps after all
RottenFruitz
Was not expecting to see a dead guy wow. What an awful way to go!
Zidane
i love you tod
blythe
yk i didnt think this would be the kind of comic to actually show a dead body huh
Jay Eaton
Gotta keep the readers on their toes
Arcstone
Hey clayton, you didn’t smack him hard enough.
Truther
Oh. Uh, oh…..
buam
I managed an Adam once. He’s pretty firmly on my “do not hire” list.
jdeltia
right, they’re mad about not being in charge, DEFINITELY not that you keep nearly getting yourself killed
Jay Eaton
Well, he’s mad about not being in charge, so obviously everyone else must be.
IncompleteMachine
Well yeah, duh, he should be in charge since he’s always right!
is it wrong that I want to see you maim him? just a little?
eden
adam does not reflect on his actions at all it seems, but sure, not throwing sharp objects in a vacuum and not harassing your coworkers is pretty corporate bullshit
furubatsu
Well hopefully that mummy’s family and crew finally got closure at least. I can’t imagine the kinda horror story that happens when someone goes mission on a spaceship.
Lilac
Yeesh. Horror movie stuff
I wonder what other sophont’s horror movies/stories/media are like….
Septemberdale
I’d imagine a popular story archetype in bugferret horror looks a lot like the party game Werewolf (or like a game of Among Us…). A member of an unassuming family has been replaced with/secretly turned into a monster which is murderous but near-indistinguishable from normal when not causing problems, and is now a threat to their own family and outsiders alike!
HAL9000
bug ferret horror is like: well here’s the thing
IncompleteMachine
I kinda don’t want to see Avian horror. Its going to be very sexist and probably feature lots of anti-gender-nonconformity themes DX
Rose
good job Tod, keep scaring those interns! : ) /gen
Greebus
Tod’s story makes me wonder if Ixion is going through a rough patch or something, because not only did Ohwitiil mess up a huge contract, but nobody combed through the Runaway for corpses despite the huge hole in it. Though, I wonder if this is just because there’s a general lack of care for centaurs.
Jay Eaton
It’s not Ixion’s job to check incoming scrap for corpses. As stated, the cops (also emergency services) are supposed to do it. Ixion is not run…. great, but this wasn’t their fault.
Zuorai
//opens RTTS.com// Oh, that’s a petrified avian corpse
JoB
Uh … what exactly is a “(space?) station capsule” and why would someone do maintenance in its “outer paneling” with neither a suit on (which would hopefully have provided them with communications), nor dying from lack of oxygen first … ?
furubatsu
The mummy might’ve been doing work while the ship was on-planet, got stuck and died, the crew reported them missing when they didn’t show up after a few days and then took off.
Marcie
I think the access point was inside the ship if Tod is warning the Internal mechanics people. If it’s decades ago maybe the safety standards were more lax/prone to cost cutting
Jay Eaton
Fiction tends to work better if you if you use your imagination to connect the dots instead of assuming from a limited description that the situation is incongruous. I’m not gonna explain this one more, it’s a two sentence horror story about a freak accident.
Thisfox
I’ve heard stories of people getting stuck inside the great big machinery they are riveting together (Titanic, for example) and this checks out as another excellent horror story of the same genre. You did good, far as I can read it.
HAL9000
oh dude people are so dumb. like soo dumb.
also completely reasonable assuming the aircraft was either planetside or within a safe dock to be unsuited. mechanics crawl into SO many places on big craft. or even little craft. like jet intakes. ships are so awful terrible at having a million miniscule claustrophobic potentially airless gaps u have to crawl into face first and trust your buddy to pull you out again by your feet and i bet spaceships are twice as bad. also maintence between panelling seems pretty reasonable n regular especially if we assume thats supposed to be radiation shielding?? want that to work at full capacity i would think
IncompleteMachine
I wouldn’t say spaceships are twice as bad, but you’re right that they have all kinds of nightmare spaces in them, even our primitive boats. The Apollo fire comes to mind.
Tentament
In space, no one can hear you scream
thegriffin88
True story, not space but NJ. The horse riding school I went to had an incident where they ended up finding a dead homeless guy in the wall of one of their stalls. Apparently he’d squeezed in through a just big enough gap in the backside of the building and was living off the horse pellets. When a cold front came down he just died of exposure. Everyone thought it was a raccoon or something when they tore down the wall but… well…
Pretty creepy.
Madame Thunderbone
That’s horrifying.
Enai
Poor guy. What a way to go :,-(
thegriffin88
Yeah, I always got this creepy but sad feelings mucking out that stall.