by MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD, Alternate Reality News Service War Writer
Two ships lie less than 1,000 kilometres apart in an especially empty area of deep space. One looks like a teacup that some deity set spinning, forgetting to explain that the solar winds would slow it down and eventually make it stop. The other is a bloated potato with spiky bits sticking out at odd angles. They both look like middle fingers to aerodynamically sound design.
The two ships have been at war for over a thousand years, although there is no evidence that either has fired a shot.
The vertigo-immune teacup, the name of which is PVC Drinking From the Firehose of Experience, is a battleship of the Pyn-Chon fleet. The child's vegetable science fair experiment run amok hanging in space (named: the Right Honourable Rum'rumtum'rumtumtig) is an exalted war cruiser (a battleship belonging to a race of very insecure warriors) of the Gar'begar'begarrah armada. The only crew on either ship is an artificial intelligence, each of which is plotting moves, and countermoves, and counter-countermoves, and counter-counter-countermoves, and counternmoves, trying to find the one set of actions that will give it a victory over the other.
"That makes no sense," said Arturo Aus-Ten, Pyn-Chon ambassador to the United Confederation of Planets. "The war with the Gar'begar'begarrah ended over eight hundred years ago!"
When I messaged an image of the ships to his electronic pineapple, Ambassador Aus-Ten's face reddened considerably. "Oh, dear," he said. "This is most embarrassing."
The response from Flur'flurta'flurtaguff Madeira, the Gar'begar'begarrah ambassador to the Confederation, was more or less the same, only far less polite.
The two races tried to convince the ships to stand down, but neither budged. "It didn't help that nobody could remember what the war had been about," Ambassador Aus-Ten allowed. "Most of the records have been lost, and our historians refer to that period as 'The war that had something to do with sand or something.' Under the circumstances, we obviously didn't make a compelling argument..."
"Forgot about ship, we did," Ambassador Flur'flurta'flurtaguff growled. "Very stubborn, it is. Come home so that decommission it we might, it won't!"
Not knowing what else to do, the two principle races asked the Confederation for help in ending the standoff. It sent the UCS Star Blap, the most sophisticated ship in the Star Armada, to negotiate some kind of peace between the warring ships.
That worked out about as well as a Galarian Spider Rhino trying to lead a tango.
"They fired on my boat!" exclaimed James B. Pompous, Captain of the Star Blap. "They fired! On! My! Boat! Granted our deflector shields laughed at their primitive atomic weapons, but it's the principle of the thing. The principle. Of. The. Thing."
Why would the ships fire on a third party when they had spent so long deliberating on firing on each other? "It would appear that they are consumed by the battle between them," explained Schmeer Tresseloon, Vice Captain of the Star Blap. "They will not allow anybody to -"
"My! Boat!" Captain Pompous moaned in the background. "They fired! On! My! Boat! How could they? Do? Such a thing?"
"Interfere," Vice Captain Tresseloon completed his thought.
A junior officer (who was wearing a red shirt - the Star Armada doesn't get too attached to them by recognizing their names, for obvious reasons) suggested that the Star Blap's computers contact the warring ships and try to talk sense into them, AI to AI. Captain Pompous initially agreed to this plan (although it may have been because he was anxious to get back to his quarters to view travel videos which prominently featured Rijellyan dancing maidens). Then, Vice Captain Tresseloon pointed out that if they did that, they ran the risk of the ship's computers joining in the battle, going so far as to divert computing cycles away from what it deemed unnecessary ship functions (like artificial gravity or life support).
"Well, let's not do that, then," Captain Pompous grumped.
Having failed to resolve the conflict peacefully, and recognizing that, as long as the AIs were calculating moves, counter-moves, counter-counter-moves and etc., they were no threat to anybody, the Confederation declared a sphere a light second (also known as a light light year) in diameter with the ships at its centre off limits to interstellar space traffic. The Confederation pledged to continue to search for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, and to monitor that region of space and act if it appeared that anything untoward began happening.
"What could possibly go wrong?" Ambassador Aus-Ten tempted the fates (except for Lachesis, who didn't have time for such frivolity).