03/02/21 – Synthed Mouse

Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, March 2, 2021.

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2021-03-02-spacetrawler3

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Seems a reasonable request to me.

27 Comments

  1. Jude

    Everyone loves mice, don’t they? If not to eat, then to chase about trying to catch them all. Great fun, right?

    Ruddock: “Hey, Food Synth, can you make some more of those edible robotic mice since the crew disposed of the others? Except this time, make them capable of reproducing.”

    1. Muzhik

      If it likes a challenge, ask it to make lutefisk.

      Lutefisk? LUTEFISK?!

      I ADJURE YOU! BEGONE, YOU SPAWN OF SANTA!

      Next you’ll be asking the food synth to make rømmegrøt.

      It’s not real rømmegrøt if you don’t spend a couple of hours standing in front of the stove, slowly stirring the cream until it’s good and thick. Just like that “eggnog” you get in the store during the holidays isn’t REAL eggnog. Just flavored thickened milk.

      TASTY flavored thickened milk, to be sure, but still …

    2. Gregg Eshelman

      How about surströmming? That’d be just the thing for space pirates to do while boarding a ship. Hack the food replicators to spew out a large amount of surströmming.

      Possibly not ideal if the space pirates intend to keep the ship but perfect to have the crew incapacitated hacking up their last five meals from the stench.

  2. Pyre Light

    At least put an upper limit on the number to produce! Will the food synth keep going until either it runs out of material or someone tells it to stop? Is it consumer friendly enough to consider the consumer might be dumb as rocks?

    I imagine the whole crew having to go mouse hunting for food because the synth is out of base stock to make anything. Does barbot draw from the same base stocks?

    Last question, why does the first mouse appear to lack front legs and a head?

    1. Jose Beltran

      I think that the first mouse was presented clean, cooked and ready to eat. I imagine that if you ask the food synth to make a chicken for you to eat, it won’t give you a running bird that has to be caught, killed, plucked, cleaned and cooked – no?

  3. Pete Rogan

    Reminds me of a Bombay cat I once had. Intelligent, savage, and very fond of hunting. I had to rescue two baby rabbits he brought in as entertainment. (The third one, well…) He’d chase the elders, too, but since they could run with strides of ten feet and his best was only eight, these hunts were generally brief. But good exercise.

    He would also challenge me for mastery of the pack every now and again. My friends would ask to see what new scars I bore from his latest attempt, and some of them were doozies. Adjacent claw scratches a foot long… and an inch apart. He kept me in touch with the business world of tooth and claw, and I still miss him for that today.

    I have to wonder how long synthetic food mice will run around before THEY get hungry, and start chewing on insulation and fittings to see what’s edible and not. And how long THAT will go on before the power failures and broken lines spewing God knows what substance come to the crew’s notice. Because it will. Depend on it.

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