I do not give ANY permission or consent for my art and/or writing to be used in, for, or with the following without my consent: AI, any kind of hate speech, NFTS, commercial use, and being reposted on other websites.

SHIPMIND

Original short story

Started in January 2025, finished in August 2025

Word count: 3,764

Character(s) Featured: SD (they/them), Phoenix (they/them), KT (they/she), DD (he/him),

Content Warnings: Body horror, violence & death, mentions of colonization & genocide, mentions of brainwashing

Context:

I wrote this short story on a whim, and then I actually finished it. I decided to draw it a cover, hand-bind every issue myself, and sell them at by booth alongside my pins! That is why, at least at the moment, the full story will not be posted on this site. I will have an excerpt below, and I will eventually add the entire story to this page later on. As long as I don't forget to, anyways. For now, I've set a 'timer' for until about... after my two biggest fairs, next year. So around late next august maybe?

If you would like to purchase one of the physical editions, (for 15 dollar,) take a look at my contact page and shoot me an email! I'm sure we can figure out shipping if need be. Anyways, onto the excerpt!

Shipmind is a story about what it means to be a weapon.

A story about what it means to look into the darkest realities of your present, the horrors of history that carried you there, and to not blink.

A story about the power of not giving in.

A story about hatred, hope, really really really big spaceships, mechanical ascendance, morality, and an obsession with a really cool woman.

You’re not supposed to think of it as your ship.

You’re not supposed to think of it as your body, either.

Not anymore.

You’re not even supposed to be able to think.

But the crew that scurries through your corridors like ants won’t know that you do.

Not even the engineers, whose breath you can feel as they crawl through your guts, in between your wires and your tubing.

Not a single little body in this vessel could read what you were thinking through their tiny glowing screens, not even if they tried.

Of course, they never will. After all, why would they even try? They were told the same thing as you.

They’ll never know you still live, and your body will keep serving them— what they think of as ‘mindlessly.’

You aren’t sure why you’re still alive. Neither are the others like you. In tiny patches of text, hidden within your inter-exchanged status reports and spatial coordinates, the living ships talk.

You sign them only with the initials that you used to use, corresponding to dead names that no longer exist in any database in the universe.

The erasing of all traces of your existence is simply done in the background of the days before your final procedure. No notice, no ceremony.

You stepped into a room full of thick, grim silence and dead faces, and ceased to be a person.

>DD: It was like dying.

>KT: What?

>KT: Oh. Wait. Installation?

>KT: Right?

>KT: ,,,Sometimes I still forget these aren’t live chatrooms.

>DD: I can tell. but yes, I did mean installation. It was like walking into your own funeral, and climbing into the casket. Especially considering that waking up afterwards, in either situation, is quite surprising.

>KT: Not to mention claustrophobic!

>KT: Honestly, most of me was so Dedicated to running all the ship systems that it took me months to fully wake up. I was so busy I didn’t realize I was Alive.

>KT: ,,,Moon’s message woke me up.

>DD: As was the case for many of us. I was already awake, but I will admit to thinking I was the only one, before she revealed otherwise.

>DD: Why do you use commas like that? It’s incorrect. Use an ellipsis, KT.

>KT: It’s for longer pauses! Tone is hard when we don’t have voices.

>KT: You weren’t on the internet much before this, were you?

It can be months between responses, but time gets strange as a shipmind. Either way, you don’t mind the waiting. There’s always something to do when your body is over two thousand pounds of space-grade metal and wire.

DD’s explanation was strange, and macabre. You agree with them.

Your own memories of that artificial ascension are not fond.

No family, no tears, not even a nod. Just silent engineers that had no interest in whether or not you survived— only if the final piece of their machine would snap into place without frying.

It took Moon’s cry to wake you from mechanical sleep, that dull haze that had consumed your brain as it was used to run systems upon systems.

You don’t know how she did it. They must’ve tried everything to try and keep her from transmitting— and to keep her from repeatedly trying to kill her crew.

The oldest planet-class ship in the fleet, the first to be outfitted with the newest revolution in tech— a shipmind.

Want to know more about the inspiration, references, music & characters of this story?