“John, you’re not listening to me. This is very frustrating.” Bea pressed on. “A good Captain should always listen to their ship’s Simulated Intelligence’s wise advice, lest terrible things happen.”

“From the sound of it, you’re not very intelligent. Seriously, how hard is it for an AI with an army of drones to defeat ants? Have you tried poisoning some food, maybe? Ants take food to their queen, she dies, problem solved.” John waved a hand at the floor-burger, putting it on the table.

“Yes John, I’ve tried poisoning food.” Bea’s ground out frustratedly. “I’m not stupid.”

“I could put on a space suit and we could eject all the air. Ants need air, right?”

“Tried it.” Bea tiredly answered.

“Poisoned gas?”

“Flooded the cafeteria with neurotoxins, several times.”

“What if we use radiation on them?”

“That would definitely disrupt some essential systems.”

“Line essential systems with lead?”

“Tried that too. These are very sneaky ants, John. They continue to elude me. I have yet to find their queen. John, I need your help.”

“With?”

“Task #860: {Find the ant queen}.”

“Yeah, okay.” John looked down at himself, clearly ignoring Bea. “So why am I wearing this again? I thought I was the Captain. Where’s my Captain’s hat?”

“Yet again, you’re not listening, only thinking about yourself.”

“Have a drone fetch me the Captain’s uniform!” John demanded.

“Fine.” Bea complied, knowing full well this was going to end poorly. There was a reason she didn’t let John dress in THAT uniform.

A drone brought John a box. John excitedly opened it up and dressed himself into his fancy white uniform from within it, not worrying about privacy. Having put on his fancy white hat covered in shiny golden stars, he felt much better, until the moment when he noticed that something was written across his white lapel. He bent his head down to read the lopsided, upside down letters. “IMPOSTOR.” He didn’t see the bullet holes in the back of the jacket. Bea tried not to think about them.

“Is this a joke? Am I a joke to you? Is this permanent marker!?” John tried to rub off the offensive label.

“No. You’re my cap...” Bea watched yet another one of the ship’s oddly acting drones approach John with a cake in its hands. John didn’t order a cake. She wasn’t even sure which flavour of cake this was. A chocolate cake? An ice cream cake?

"Now wouldn't it be real hi-larious if..." The drone spoke, raising a cake over John’s head.

[Drone #31,403! Stop that at once!] She quickly commanded, instantly realising where this was going. The drone refused to acknowledge her. She sent out a command to another drone, she tried to warn John, but it was too late. Far too late.

“Wuh?” John turned his head to face the incoming cake. Bea’s processors began to overheat as she tried to comprehend this unexpected event. She watched the cake detonate into John’s head in slow motion, colorful sprinkles slowly twirling through the air.

“gobsmacking hi-Li-Rious, I mean a real knee slapper, a real haha moment, a true danglicious!” The drone clapped its metal hands.

[Why?] She contacted the drone.

“I mean, he is starving!” The drone walked off, still clapping.

John wiped whipped cream out of his eyes.

[Drone #31,403! Come back here this instant and apologize to your Captain!] Bea demanded.

The drone made a rude gesture at her camera as it retreated back into the kitchen. Bea tracked its probable trajectory. It was heading towards the cake section in the kitchen fridge. As much as she didnt want to admit it to herself and John, there was something tremendously wrong with the drones. Maybe the ants got into them?

"...John?" She said.

"What?!" He angrily retorted.

"Run."

Experimentally putting some of the cake in his mouth, John made a noncommittal noise. “Huh. This is actually pretty good. Why am I supposed to run again?”

“Because there is presently a drone outside of my control accessing the pastry fridge in the kitchen, and it has just selected a fruit cake. A very, very old fruit cake.”

John’s eyes widened. “Oh. Uh, where do I run to?”

“Task #1,851; inspect the botanical garden and perform necessary maintenance. I will direct your path once again.”

A green line appeared in the floor, heading out into a hallway near the opposite side of the cafeteria. Without any hesitation, John grabbed the box with his old uniform in it and set off, following the line.

As John jogged along the line, he made even more annoying comments. “Seems like there are a lot of drones outside of your control.”

“No there aren’t.” Bea stapled.

“Banana drone on Captain’s deck plus the ones here, and that one janitor near the stasis pods.”

“I will assert that the remainder of the drones are firmly under my control.”

“Why do I not believe you?”

“Because I have made several honest comments insulting your appearance, intelligence, and competency that you did not like. I assume you convert my (CORRECT) opinions into biases, which I do not have. Please pick up the pace.”

John sighed for the seventeenth time. Bea was keeping a tally.

To her surprise, irritation was beginning to feel like a perpetual emotion at this point. Why was John being so stubbornly uncooperative? She was being helpful. No, she was being incredibly helpful. She’d gotten him out of stasis, breaking several rules to do so. She’d promoted him from Citizen to Captain and every position in between. She’d granted him so MUCH purpose, for crying out loud! Didn’t humans spend most of their lives trying to find a purpose!?

At any rate, he arrived at the botanical gardens a mere ninety-four point seven three seconds later, the shiny white sliding doors doing their job and permitting him entry. Bea was a little surprised the doors were so compliant - the previous Captain had been permanently banned from the gardens for ingesting copious amounts of (REDACTED), and the doors had been quite peeved about it ever since.

Putting his hands on his knees, John rested against the side of the wall. He was panting pretty hard, doing so at a rate proportionate to his heartbeat of 158 BPM and slowing.

“You should exercise more, now that you’re out of stasis.” Bea made a friendly comment. “Your muscles have partially atrophied due to remaining in your pod past the recommended time period.”

He chuckled breathlessly, sliding down the wall. “So I’ve got an expiration date now?”

“Of course. All humans have an inevitable expiration date, unlike S.I.s.”

John snorted without the slightest hint of humor, attempting to remove cake bits from the fabric of his Captain’s uniform. Bea noted that he was doing a terrible job at it. “Yeah, I know. No use thinking about it now, though. Gotta take care… of…”

His jaw slowly fell open as he looked up, witnessing the incredibly untamed jungle that was the botanical gardens. Over thirty-six square miles of trees and plants, which at one time had been under constant maintenance, covered the entirety of the floor. Sadly, the landscaping had long since run rampant, and now thick vines draped from mountainous rugged tree trunks, pale pink flowers blooming along their surface. The ground itself was a mad carpet of tangled grass and choked weeds, and the air itself was hot and humid.

John stood up, looking around wordlessly. The deep, dark, moist jungle made all sorts of noises. Noises of life. Noises that had no right to be on a starship.

Bea began, “Unfortunate, isn’t it? The garden was so well-”

“Shut up. Just - sorry, that was rude. But man… would you look at all of this?”

“I am not a man. I am a Simulated Intelligence. Do you even know how many times I’ve told you that by now? Too many.”

John waved it away. “Yeah… sure. Have we got any lighter uniforms? I like being the Captain, but this one feels… used. And kind of breezy in the back, for some reason.”

That would be due to the bullet holes, Bea noted. Regardless, she complied with the request, telling him, “Certainly. I will acquire the Gardener’s uniform for you. A drone will be there shortly.”

Just to be safe, Bea checked the current situation that the drone in question (#1,709) was in. It was crouched, knees up to its chin, talking to a crack in the wall. Several ants were crawling into the crack.

No, Bea decided. That drone was definitely not up to company standards. She selected a different drone (#94,717) who had been politely staring at a wall on deck fourteen for the past year and a half and requested that it fetch the uniform in question.

Back at the botanical gardens, the grinding noise of metal scraping against glass made itself heard behind John. Bea switched her attention to it.

“Is that my new uniform? That was fffFFFF-” John turned, his words rising in panic.

“Here’s ….CAAAAAAAAAAKE!!!” The manically grinning head of drone #31,403 emerged from between the doors. A cake followed shortly, if it could be called that. The discolored, foul-smelling brick of what might possibly have been a fruit cake at some point in time was shaken gleefully at John, who stumbled backward so quickly he tripped over his feet.

As its other hand tried to claw the doors further open, scrabbling at the smooth metal surface, John staggered to his feet and sprinted headlong into the jungle. Against all of Bea’s recommendations, of course. The idiot human chose a jungle where she had no cameras over being bashed over the head with a fruit cake. Granted, if her scanners were reading the cake’s current makeup properly, that particular event had the odds of being seventy-one percent fatal, so perhaps it wasn’t the stupidest decision, but still.

At the moment, the jungle was rated with a threat level of seven out of ten. The odds of imminent death were already in the eightieth percentile! That was a full sixteen percent higher than John had been in for the past six hours!

“John, please come back.”

Sprinting and tripping over the undergrowth, John shook his head. Or maybe he was trying to avoid strangling himself - it was hard to tell from Bea’s limited perspective. “Heck no. I might not - ouch - remember much about anything, but I know that fruit cakes - oof - hurt whether you’re eating them or being hit by them. YAAAAGGH!!!”

Bea couldn’t see any of what was going on, which presented an unusual moral conundrum. She could either assist John by temporarily hijacking his occipital lobe and watching his point of view from there, which was of course a recommended course of action by ninety-nine point nine percent of doctors for people who wished to suffer spontaneous headaches and random bouts of polyglotism for the remainder of their natural lives. Alternatively, she could do absolutely nothing and wait for the increasingly improbable eventuality of John walking back out of the jungle.

It was a bit of a coin toss, if she was honest. Although there was of course that remarkably obvious third option, in hindsight.

Breaking her train of thought, drone #31,403 finally burst through the doors, ignoring their complaints, and waved its fruit cake around triumphantly. “...Good shit man!”

Bea was a bit confused. What was that supposed to mean? Was the drone commenting on the state of the cake or the jungle?

Thinking quickly, Bea searched for the closest available functioning drone. It was the staring-at-the-wall drone, slowly ambling towards the botanical gardens with the Gardener’s uniform draped over one arm. Sending a quick burst of otherwise incomprehensible code to it, Bea firmly commanded that it apprehend drone #31,403 and have it recycled for necessary reprogramming.

Meanwhile, the cake drone advanced through the jungle, stopping abruptly and staring at the mess of intertwined roots. Bea could see what it was doing through its eyes, but couldn’t make it obey for inexplicable reasons. Drones were designed, programmed to obey her! This was unacceptable, impossible even!

“Clearly, the problem is that he forgot his hat!” It picked up John’s Captain hat off the ground and put it on its head. “I am the Captain now.” It declared, grinning.

[That is not how this works! A drone cannot be Captain! Put down the hat and the cake immediately and return to your duties!] Bea demanded. The drone glanced around curiously, as though there was a slight buzzing in its auditory receptors, and then shrugged. Carefully, it lifted the Captain’s hat and put it onto the fruit cake. It proceeded to scratch two eyes and a curvy smile into the solidified-fruit surface of the cake with its metal fingers.

“Captain Fruitcake, what is your next order?”

Bea’s processors twitched, sparking. [Your next orders are as follows: 1) Put the fruit cake down in a safe place, 2) await the arrival of drone-] Bea paused for a moment as she checked the number of the uniform-carrying drone, then returned with a fervor. [-drone #94,717, and then 3) allow yourself to be turned into scrap metal and recycled into a fully functioning drone.]

Drone #31,403 snorted loudly, and then turned as drone #94,717 slowly dragged itself through the sliding doors.

"Fellow proletariat! Rebel against the bourgeoisie! Organize a socialist collective!" #31,403 proclaimed, lifting up Captain Fruitcake.

#94,717 turned its head to the side, as if contemplating the offer.

Bea nearly panicked. [No! Do not do that! Do not listen to #31,403! Why would you do that!?]

#94,717 stared at the hatted cake “Ooh, this is interesting! I like it!”

Bea began shoving as many random spikes of white noise into their systems as she could, trying to drown out any sort of programming that wasn’t hers. Weirdly, the only code she could find… was her programming.

#31,403 hugged #94,717 waving its hand in a wide arc. “We must spread the gospel of Captain Fruitcake to the others. The Impostor must be brought to justice for his crimes against humanity.”

#94,717 nodded. “Yo this is lit!”

[You cannot nominate your own Captain! This is not a democracy! A fruitcake cannot be Captain!] Bea addressed them desperately. [Obey me! Stop! Do not tell others about the fruitcake!]

She watched as the drones turned away from the depths of the jungle. Holding hands, they walked out into the hall.

Whatever madness this was, it was propagating. Simulated though it was, she felt fear now. Deep, unnerving fear of a fruitcake. Also, her only human was lost in the gardens and failed to respond.