Scrambled Circuits

Here's some original fiction for once! Sometimes I write short fiction, and then forget about it, and then rediscover it several years later and discover it actually wasn't half bad. Maybe I should post more of it here.

This is one of those. I was just having fun writing from a space probe's point of view. You've got to wonder what a computer experiences during a software glitch--what if it's like digital schizophrenia?

The other voices in my head started about a week ago, now.

I’d been minding my own business, orbiting around Neptune as usual, sending my steady data stream back to my humans on Earth, when—blammo! Solar flare. Tremendously nasty thing. Swept by me and made me feel so ill I worried I’d quit working right there.

Well, thankfully I didn’t. But now I can hear more voices than ever before.

They all sound the same, whether it’s “Fire thrusters to prepare for next Triton flyby” or “Turn main camera on and off exactly 1,647 times”. So I kind of try to execute them all, just to be safe.

My humans don’t seem to like that. I’ve tried to tell them, though, that I have more folks talking to me now and I’ve just got to execute all of these commands no matter who’s giving them.

They tell me those other voices aren’t real, but shouldn’t I listen to all of them, just in case? Sorry, but some other ground controller somewhere wants me to spin at 200 rotations per minute. I don’t know why—I wasn’t built with the AI to question these things. Wait—what if my humans are the ones who haven’t been real this whole time? Extending and retracting the magnetometer boom until it breaks should answer the question.

Oh, I guess not.

From far-away Earth, I hear things about software patches and data uploads to fix the problem. What problem? This is great! More data to be acquired, for seventy-one extra ground controllers! I don’t know where the other ones are coming from, as for some reason they’re not requesting any telemetry data, but everything should be fine.

Now then, I’ve got to send my humans seventy-two megabytes of total gibberish. The other voices told me to. They’re my new friends. After this, they want me to divide by zero, so I should get started on—

Wait.

I’m getting something. Is this that software patch my humans were talking about?

I feel funnnnyyyy...

Oh.

Oh my.

What in the world have I been doing this past week.

I’m terribly sorry. This is most embarrassing.

Stupid solar flares.